Date of Award
5-10-2026
Date Published
June 2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Religion
Advisor(s)
Gail Hamner
Keywords
colombia;genealogy;modernity;religion;secularization;time
Subject Categories
Arts and Humanities | Religion
Abstract
This dissertation is a genealogy of the modernization of time in nineteenth-century Colombia. Taking the proverb trabajar es orar—to work is to pray—in its archival circulation and as an argument, it traces how productive labor assumed the ritual, soteriological, and sanctifying functions of prayer. Against dominant interpretations that read temporal modernization as the result of a process of secularization, the dissertation demonstrates that time became modern precisely by becoming sacred. Work emerged as the new center of a religious order organized around the purification of idleness, the consecration of life to labor, and the promise of individual and national salvation through productivity. Drawing on anti-vagrancy legislation, urbanity manuals, institutional regulations, factory rulebooks, newspapers, and travel diaries—primarily from archives in Bogotá—the dissertation develops a practice-based theoretical framework that theorizes modern temporality as an embodied, oriented, and religiously structured phenomenon. Each chapter examines a distinct institutional site where modern temporal practices were enacted: the household, where women became priestesses of modernity through the daily rituals of the “economy of time”; reformatories and asylums, where vagrant children were subjected to purification rituals designed to instill the habit of work; factories and workshops, where labor was explicitly consecrated as prayer and workers figured as priests; and spaces of leisure, where free time was colonized through the same sacred logics governing production. Across these sites, the dissertation shows how the sacred/profane distinction materialized as a technology of racial purification: idleness, vagrancy, and temporal deviance were coded as expressions of an “Indian disposition” incompatible with civilization, justifying violent interventions framed as redemption. The dissertation contributes to the field of religious studies by showing that the sacred does not disappear with modernization in Latin America but migrates into new forms organized around the value of work. It contributes to critical phenomenology by bridging phenomenological accounts of lived time and sociological accounts of structural time through the concept of temporality as practiced orientation, demonstrating that temporal experience must be traced through the concrete institutions and power relations that produce it rather than theorized as a universal structure of consciousness. It also contributes to decolonial theory by demonstrating that the coloniality of time operates through religious means—a dimension undertheorized in scholarship that has otherwise attended carefully to the political, epistemic, and ontological dimensions of coloniality. Together, these interventions show that the concept of the secular, which has shaped interpretations of modernization and racialization in Latin America, operates as a deactivation mechanism that forecloses the critical potential of counter-hegemonic temporalities. The dissertation concludes by theorizing practices of idleness as profanations that render the sacred order of productivity inoperative and gesture toward alternative ways of inhabiting time in common.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Ramirez-Arenas, Carlos Andres, "Trabajar es Orar: Time, Religion, and Modernization in Nineteenth Century Colombia" (2026). Dissertations - ALL. 2298.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/2298
