UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation explores how an ethos of service informs the conditions of belonging for members of the Bolivian Coptic Orthodox Church. The presence of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Bolivia, and Latin America at large, is partly due to the migratory pathways of diasporic Copts. However, the Bolivian Coptic Orthodox Church is primarily comprised of Bolivians who have converted to the Coptic faith. I examine the ways that the Bolivian Coptic Orthodox Church as an institution and a community contends with the ethno-religious dimensions of belonging through practices of social service provision. I demonstrate how understandings of service within the Bolivian Coptic community encapsulate practices of place-making and care that prove essential to the formation of a Coptic identity outside of Egypt.

In understanding social welfare provision as a mode of being in the world, I examine how practices of care also exist as practices of place-making and participate in the production of place-worlds. Throughout this dissertation, I show how Bolivia exists as a third space, serving as a point of connection between Egypt and the Coptic diaspora in the West. As a Church historically rooted in Egypt, “place” is central to its identity. Service becomes a means by which clergy from Egypt, diasporic Copts from the Global North who come to serve in Bolivia, and Bolivian Copts themselves are socialized and come to belong to each other. However, this belonging is contingent upon producing, and continuing to reproduce, the place of Egypt in Bolivia. With this movement “out of place,” my research investigates how service becomes a way for both the Coptic Church and Bolivians to imagine belonging in the world, rooted in place.

This dissertation thus contributes to the anthropology of development and care and its intersections with scholarship on time, place, and memory. Additionally, it makes a key intervention within Coptic studies by examining the cultivation of Coptic subjectivity within transnational spaces and among non-Egyptian Copts. It ethnographically investigates the formation of Church history and explores how communal histories emerge from the interaction of people, places, and the material conditions of their lives.