Cosmology of Development

This chapter explores the historical and ideological relationships between missionary agencies and community development projects in the indigenous communities of the Argentine Chaco. The chapter aims to discuss humanitarianism as a moral narrative of modernity and how Christian missions and faith-based NGOs have built a “cosmology of development” on indigenous societies. This cosmology entangles discourses of culture, person, social rights and gender in cultural imagery about modernity, development and social change sustained in Christian values. Therefore, this analysis is located in the context of anthropological and historical studies on the discursive construction of the Chaco as a conceptual and visual geography of alterity. In this way, the work presents a relational analysis of the semantic and moral articulations between religion, modernity, and development in twentieth century Argentine indigenous Chaco.