Abstract
Based on a critical empirical application of Foucault’s concept of pastoralism and a genealogical research approach, this article suggests that the Catholic regime that operated in Costa Rica during the Spanish colonial period (16th to 19th centuries), developed an ensemble of distinctive ‘technologies of government’—charity, ceremonial strictness, bio-political control, geo-political rule, and administrative efficiency. Drawing on documentary and archival material, the analysis highlights both the governmental ‘logics’ and the governmental ‘techniques’ of the above technologies, as well as their complex centuries-long operation. The conclusions remark how such a complex ensemble of religious governmental technologies problematizes the synchronicistic and reductionist analyses of religion and politics; historical–institutionalist studies of colonial Catholicism in Latin America; and the compartmentalization of sovereignty, discipline, and apparatuses of security that Foucault originally proposed to account for the historical development of governmentality.
Highlights
Despite its geographical comparative relevance in fields such as welfare economics and democratic development, Costa Rica might not stand out as a salient case of (Catholic) religious government in Central America from a historical perspective.Firstly, Costa Rica was the last province the Spanish and the Catholic regimes colonized in this isthmian region (Gutierrez-Haces 1987; Pinto 1993)
The indigenous population that experienced first-hand the Spanish Catholic regime of evangelization–government, discussed below, was not in the hundreds of thousands as in the densely populated Mayan regions of Central America; some authors even claim that the Indigenous population in Costa Rica was “almost destroyed”2 by the end of the 16th century (Pinto 1993, p. 40)
Had Foucault studied the governmental discourses and practices implemented by the Catholic regime in colonial Latin American regions, such as Costa Rica’s, his theorizations on pastoralism and governmentality (Foucault 2007, 2011, 1983) would have likely developed in a different fashion
Summary
Despite its geographical comparative relevance in fields such as welfare economics and democratic development (cf. Gutierrez-Haces 1987; Booth et al 2010), Costa Rica might not stand out as a salient case of (Catholic) religious government in Central America from a historical perspective. A Foucauldian approach to religions requires the analyst to conceive of religions as sporadic and/or systematic interventions in the governmental (secular) apparatus of the state, but religions as an operational governmental structure per se—or, as I suggest in this paper, a complex ensemble of technologies of government, that cannot be reduced to the Church’s institutional policies. The case of colonial Costa Rica is highly suitable and significant to understand, precisely, the diachronic pervasiveness and centuries-lasting saliency of religions as meta-institutional technologies of government; technologies that, on the one hand, operate in association with religious institutions, yet on the other hand, develop and run largely through actions- and discourse-based societal and individual patterns with both a changing nature and a considerable ‘long-durée’. That Foucault originally proposed, to account for the historical development of governmentality
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