Be Careful, Ye Catholic: The Entanglement of Mormonism and Money in Peru

Globalization is not only the feverish insistence that land’s superfluity is increasing exponentially, but it is also the willful ignorance of the reality underlying that illusion: Distance has not been annihilated. Distance, and the land it spans, is more important than ever. Globalization imagines away the land’s importance because of whom it imagines to be “of the land”. This entity, indigeneity, threatens to expose the lie upon which globalization is founded. According to many people of the land surrounding the mid-Andean city of Arequipa, Peru, globalization’s promise of unidirectional wealth accumulation severs their connection to sustainable, terrestrial cyclicity. For some of these arequipeños, few institutions embody this existential disruption more menacingly than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mormonism, therefore, becomes a material and mythological threat to the lifeways of their land. This article grounds the fraught, mimetic relationship between globalization and land in Peru through the lens of anti-Mormonism.