From the ethnographic to the theological-political: Ecumenical research-action by La Rosca among protestant communities in Córdoba, Colombia

https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.41

Alfredo Ignacio Poggi
aip28@georgetown.edu
Georgetown University, USA

Abstract:

Through the analysis of archival documents, this article shows how ethnographic notes and sociological conceptualizations by Maria Cristina Salazar between 1972 and 1973 about a Pentecostal community in Córdoba, Colombia, were translated and adapted by La Rosca group to produce a graphic brochure with theological-political content, materializing what Orlando Fals Borda called action-research. This action-research project tried to foster ecumenical liberating praxis to involve evangelicals in peasant struggles and to overcome the positivist instrumentalization that objectified the communities studied. However, indirectly, it continued to reproduce subject-object asymmetry and to promote what was being criticized: a new dualistic mentality, this time of rich versus poor, a new fatalistic doctrine, in which individuals could not change until society is not transformed, and a new alienation, not religious, but partisan, which simplified reality and emptied it of its critical content.

Keywords: Action-research, La Rosca, peasant struggles, Christians, ethnography.