Modernité et sociétés paysannes

The author studies the conflicts fostered by Rural Catholic Action within the peasant communities of Guatemala and analyzes their consequences and the relations between religion and politics in this context. He also analyzes the elements of continuity and rupture in the social structure traditionally organized around the binomial "brotherhood-regeduria". In a second part, the author studies the structure of the movement at the national, regional and local levels, taking into account its strategies of conversion. On the one hand these strategies targeted the storekeepers, a social group hitherto marginal in the dominant agrarian social structure but for whose members the involvement in the movement was a way of transforming social relations and of occupying new positions of legitimacy and power. On the other hand, Catholic Action used the kin structures: the entire family would be tar geted for conversion, thereby the development of the organization would be strengthened through the system of alliance, since anyone who married a member of the movement had to join as well. The author claims that Catholic Action, as an organic and highly organized movement, has contributed to the disruption of the indegenous rural commu nities by fostering within them new forms of power, of social relations and conflict. According to him, this process of disruption and encounter with modernity explains, to a large extent, the tremendous movement of conversion to the Protestant sects and churches coming from North-America in Guatemala in the recent decades. This social dislocation has created a breaking up of the social groups and of the traditional forms of associations, generating "free protons" which, in turn, are looking for new articulations, new social connections, new points of identification

Agrarian society · Alliance · Geography · Legitimacy · Modernity · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Social movement · Sociology · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Gender Studies · Law

• Processus de conversion et modes d'identification à l'islam

  Open Access•Sarah Daynes•Social Compass•1999

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