Moral Therapeutics: Thrift and Temperance in Colombia's Fin-de-Siècle

Sunday, January 8, 2012: 11:20 AM
Wrigleyville Room (Chicago Marriott Downtown)
Franz Hensel Riveros, University of Texas at Austin
In 1915, the priest Carlos Alberto Lleras gave a conference in Ibague’s Cathedral, on the eastern slopes of the Andean “Cordillera Central.” The progressive and civilizing aim of the Catholic Church appeared as the key element of his speech, reprinted several times titled “Thrift.” This paper explores Lleras’s conference in a broader context: the centrality of discourses on thrift and temperance in the turn of the century Colombia.  Although several scholars have emphasized the role of physicians in regenerating bodies they saw as corrupted, the paper underscores the importance of moral technologies, especially those regarding the shaping of the moral self. The paper focuses on the moral discourses on thrift and temperance promoted by specific actors, among them the Catholic Church, as keystones of the envisioned (new) moral self. In addition, the paper insists on grasping these attempts within a Pan American framework. Shifting discourses and debates on moral regeneration were discussed in academic venues such as the Pan American scientific congress and authors like the Scottish Samuel Smiles were widely read in the Latin American fin de siècle. The first part will show how thrift and temperance were discussed in a hemispheric dialogue; while the second section will shed light on the way a wide range of actors in early twentieth-century Colombia, from economists and social reformers to priests and liberal intellectuals, appropriated those discourses in particular debates and contexts.