Molly Geidel
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816692217
- eISBN:
- 9781452952468
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816692217.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Politics, Social Movements and Social Change
Moving to a closer study of the 1960s Peace Corps’ on-the-ground impact, the last chapter chronicles the agency’s work in and expulsion from Bolivia. It surveys the network of military and civilian ...
More
Moving to a closer study of the 1960s Peace Corps’ on-the-ground impact, the last chapter chronicles the agency’s work in and expulsion from Bolivia. It surveys the network of military and civilian government agencies, religious missionaries, and other development workers that spread across Bolivia in the 1960s, and reveals how the Peace Corps came to symbolize in the Bolivian popular imagination all these modernization efforts. Geidel’s discussion of Bolivian responses to the Peace Corps culminates in an analysis of Jorge Sanjines’s 1969 neorealist film Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor), the film that directly incited the Peace Corps’ 1971 exit and spurred a cultural nationalist movement in Bolivia. This indigenous cultural nationalism became directed toward development discourse’s ideal of a masculine utopia whose construction would entail controlling women’s bodies. I conclude the book by showing how indigenous feminists have attempted in subsequent decades to re-theorize their own subjectivities, embracing neither Western individualism nor submission to cultural nationalist futures.Less
Moving to a closer study of the 1960s Peace Corps’ on-the-ground impact, the last chapter chronicles the agency’s work in and expulsion from Bolivia. It surveys the network of military and civilian government agencies, religious missionaries, and other development workers that spread across Bolivia in the 1960s, and reveals how the Peace Corps came to symbolize in the Bolivian popular imagination all these modernization efforts. Geidel’s discussion of Bolivian responses to the Peace Corps culminates in an analysis of Jorge Sanjines’s 1969 neorealist film Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor), the film that directly incited the Peace Corps’ 1971 exit and spurred a cultural nationalist movement in Bolivia. This indigenous cultural nationalism became directed toward development discourse’s ideal of a masculine utopia whose construction would entail controlling women’s bodies. I conclude the book by showing how indigenous feminists have attempted in subsequent decades to re-theorize their own subjectivities, embracing neither Western individualism nor submission to cultural nationalist futures.
Molly Geidel
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816692217
- eISBN:
- 9781452952468
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816692217.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Politics, Social Movements and Social Change
To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” In the United States’ popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless ...
More
To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” In the United States’ popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless altruism and the most successful program of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. But in her provocative new cultural history of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency’s representative development ventures also legitimated the violent exercise of American power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. In the 1960s, the practice of development work, embodied by iconic Peace Corps volunteers, allowed U.S. policy makers to manage global inequality while assuaging their own gendered anxieties about postwar affluence. Geidel traces how modernization theorists used the Peace Corps to craft the archetype of the heroic development worker: a ruggedly masculine figure who would inspire individuals and communities to abandon traditional lifestyles and seek integration into the global capitalist system. Drawing on original archival and ethnographic research, Geidel analyzes how Peace Corps volunteers struggled to apply these ideals. The book focuses on the case of Bolivia, where indigenous nationalist movements dramatically expelled the Peace Corps in 1971. She also shows how Peace Corps development ideology shaped domestic and transnational social protest, including U.S. civil rights, black nationalist, and antiwar movements.Less
To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” In the United States’ popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless altruism and the most successful program of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. But in her provocative new cultural history of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency’s representative development ventures also legitimated the violent exercise of American power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. In the 1960s, the practice of development work, embodied by iconic Peace Corps volunteers, allowed U.S. policy makers to manage global inequality while assuaging their own gendered anxieties about postwar affluence. Geidel traces how modernization theorists used the Peace Corps to craft the archetype of the heroic development worker: a ruggedly masculine figure who would inspire individuals and communities to abandon traditional lifestyles and seek integration into the global capitalist system. Drawing on original archival and ethnographic research, Geidel analyzes how Peace Corps volunteers struggled to apply these ideals. The book focuses on the case of Bolivia, where indigenous nationalist movements dramatically expelled the Peace Corps in 1971. She also shows how Peace Corps development ideology shaped domestic and transnational social protest, including U.S. civil rights, black nationalist, and antiwar movements.
