The Treinta Pueblos of Paraguay were established in an active frontier region where political delimitations were not clear. The area was part of the Spanish possessions according to the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), but was claimed by Portugal throughout the 18th century. Circa 1570 the Society of Jesus arrived in Spanish America and, coming later than other religious orders, they worked on frontiers ‘where hardly any other Europeans, clerical or lay, would care or dare to go’.6
Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, a missionary from Lima who had participated in the establishment of the missions at the beginning of the 17th century, estimated that no fewer than 95,000 natives were baptised in Paraguay between 1612 and 1626.7 Letters written by the Jesuits to their superiors in Europe describe the success of the conversions, providing a positive view upon which many subsequent interpretations have been based.8 These letters contributed, for instance, to the construction, in Europe, of the idea of the missions as places where indigenous populations lived in contented poverty, as suggested by the idyllic account of Ludovico Muratori in the first half of the 18th century, Il Cristianesimo felice nelle missione de padri della Compagnia de Gesú nel Paraguai.9
The positive views of the Jesuit work in the Treinta Pueblos conflicts with a more critical literature, which sees the mission as a project through which indigenous populations were alienated from their cultural origins, the latter being annihilated under the rule of the priests and the Spanish crown. We find, however, in the material culture of the missions grounds for a more
5 C. Gosden, ‘Social ontologies’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363 (2008): 2003–10.
6 P. Bakewell and J. Holler, A History of Latin America (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp.
319–20.
7 D. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1867F (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 173.
8 In the 18th century the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, an editorial enterprise created by the Jesuits to give an account of their missionary work, constituted, alongside a few travellers’
diaries, the main source for information about the life in the missions. Based on these letters, Muratori wrote his own interpretation of the missions, classifying them as an example of happy Christianity. For an interpretation of Muratori’s publications on the missions see R.
Morais, ‘L.A. Muratori e o cristianismo feliz na missão dos padres da Companhia de Jesus no Paraguai’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2006).
9 L. Muratori, Il Cristianesimo felice nelle missione de padri della Compagnia de Gesú nel Paraguai (Venice: Giambatista Pasquali, 1743).
complex interpretation of the encounter between the Guaraní and Europeans – one which perceives the phenomenon of the missions in Spanish America as a process of transculturation effected by both the Guaraní and the Jesuits, although not always equally – from which a new cultural complex emerged.
This is not a case of categorising the result of contact as a melting pot, but of acknowledging that colonial situations can easily be (and frequently are) reduced to simplistic and, in the case of the Jesuit experience in Latin America, misleading interpretations. As argued by P. Cornell and F. Fahlander,
‘the encounter is seldom a matter of simple processes of local acculturation or assimilation of the way of life in the core areas of an expanding colonial regime.
Rather, confrontation with differing social practice, ideologies and differing material worlds often lead to unforeseen results, far beyond the intentions of the involved individuals’.10
The term transculturation, coined by Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s,11 evokes the idea of entanglement, simultaneity and coexistence. Although criticised for having covered over racial conflicts in Cuba through a concept which accommodates crucial disparities,12 Ortiz’s contribution helped to stress the idea of cultural integration instead of cultural obliteration in colonial situations.
Since its proposition, the term transculturation has been re-contextualised and employed in this way: it does not disregard friction and conflict, but stresses the outcomes of a cultural encounter in terms of the contributions each group brings to the new cultural complex which arises from it.
‘Transculturation’ is a term which has been employed in studies about the Paraguay reductions in recent decades,13 as it points towards a phenomenon in which both the Guaraní and Europeans contributed to the development of a new sociocultural complex. Because of its stress on coexistence and cultural complementarity, without disregarding power relations, ‘transculturation’
has been preferred to concepts such as genocide, acculturation and hybridity, which are usually (although with some dispute) applied to evoke the idea of cultural annihilation.
10 P. Cornell and F. Fahlander, ‘Encounters – materialities – confrontations: an introduction’, in P. Cornell and F. Fahlander (eds.), Encounters, Materialities, Confrontations: Archaeologies of Social Space and Interaction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2007), pp. 1–14 (p. 4).
11 F. Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Barcelona: Ariel, 1973).
12 E. Oliveira, ‘Transculturação: Fernando Ortiz, o negro e a identidade nacional cubana, 1906–
1940’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal de Goiás, 2003).
13 Among many other works which base their interpretation of mission culture on the concept of transculturation see A. Kern, ‘Das aldeias guaranis às missões jesuíticas: um processo de transformações culturais’, Anais da I Jornada Regional de Cultura Missioneira (1985): 53–71;
and ‘Missões: um processo de transculturação no passado, uma possibilidade de integração regional no presente’, Veritas, 35 (1990): 635–45; Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule;
and C. Rahmeier, Cultura missioneira: interpretações a partir da cerâmica (Cruz Alta: Unicruz, 2003).
THE MATERIALITY OF CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS 73 A central Amazonian group in origin, the Guaraní (the name means
‘warrior’) spread south and established villages along the Paraná, Uruguay and Paraguay rivers and their tributaries 1,500 years before the arrival of the Europeans (2,000 BP).14 They also occupied subtropical forests, hills and grasslands of Guairá, Tape and the area of Lagoa dos Patos in southern Brazil, as well as the island of Martín García and the area east of the Tigre river delta in the Río de la Plata.15 During their expansion southwards they came into contact with other indigenous peoples, expelling and assimilating them, in a process called Guaranisation.16
Horticulturalists with a semi-sedentary organisation in which the caciques (male political leaders) and the pajé (male spiritual leaders) played a central role, the Guaraní saw their organisation change with the arrival of the Jesuits.
In this process, practices which had traditionally accompanied the Guaraní – such as anthropophagy, polytheism, polygamy, rituals involving drunkenness and smoking, burials in decorated ceramic urns, collective habitation in long houses, gender division of labour (with men searching for animal protein and women in charge of horticulture and the production of ceramic utensils for ritual and domestic use) – challenged the idea of civilisation brought by Jesuits and the colonial enterprise.
The Jesuits who organised the missions came from different areas of Europe, or sometimes from other regions of Spanish America. They were part of the Company of Jesus, created in the middle of the Counter-Reformation to secure souls and territories for the Catholic Church in face of the expansion of Protestant religions such as Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anglicanism. They were educated and trained as builders, carpenters, botanists, physicians, craftsmen, painters and farmers,17 as well as evangelists. In inhospitable territories in the hinterlands of an unknown continent, their secular skills were required more than their knowledge of religion. The Jesuits brought to the hinterlands of Latin America the printing press, new varieties of fruit and vegetables such as lettuce, cabbages, limes, oranges, peaches, pears, rice, coffee, bananas and sugarcane. They also brought cows, sheep and horses; and introduced technical innovations such as iron-mongering, the potter’s wheel and gunpowder.
In the missions two or three Jesuit fathers ministered to thousands of Indians – the mission of San Miguel Arcanjo, for example, counted more than four thousand Guaraní. The missions were self-sufficient communities which based their economic activities on agriculture, cattle raising, artisan production and the cultivation of yerba mate. Commercial relations with secular settlers were a
14 A. Kern, Antecedentes indígenas (Porto Alegre: Universidade/UFRGS, 1998), p. 104.
15 Ganson, The Guaraní under the Spanish Rule, pp. 17–18, referring to A. Métraux, La religion des Tupinamba et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus Tupí-Guaraní (Paris: Leroux, 1928).
16 J. Souza, ‘Uma introdução ao sistema técnico-econômico Guarani’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 1987).
17 P. Bardi, Arte da cerâmica no Brasil (São Paulo: Banco Sudameris do Brasil, 1980), p. 45.
secondary goal, but were necessary to raise capital for the payment of debts and tribute owed to the Spanish crown and for the purchase of church ornaments.18
In terms of physical organisation, the missions consisted of a village organised around a central plaza or square. Houses of the caciques surrounded this plaza and a church, ‘the largest and most imposing structure in every mission’,19 occupied a privileged location. Next to the church were the workshops, the living quarters for the priests, an orchard and a vegetable garden, as well as separate cemeteries for the women and children and for the men. Priests were buried inside the church. Orphans, single women and widows lived in separate quarters known as a coti guazu. The Guaraní who were part of a mission but did not belong to the nobility lived in thatched huts outside the main village.
To the Guaraní, living in a mission could constitute a guarantee of survival in the face of constant attacks by the bandeirantes, who came from São Paulo to hunt Indians and sell them in other areas of Brazil where African slaves were lacking. The Guaraní who lived in the mission were also protected from the European settlers, mainly from Asunción, who were interested in them as a labour force. At the same time, the mission represented a space where limited freedom was granted.
In order to live in a mission the Guaraní had to abandon some of their practices. Rituals involving drunkenness were to be replaced by the ceremony of baptism; anthropophagy20 was to be translated into the symbolic practice of the Holy Communion; the dead were to be buried in a Catholic cemetery, which was divided according to the gender and age of the deceased;21 children were to attend the missions’ schools; and through them adults were expected to learn the Gospel and the correct behaviour of a vassal of the king. Indian chiefs were expected to lead their people according to the plan for conversion and civilisation. The Guaraní were to pray and sing the Gospel; attend daily masses; cover their bodies; avoid prenuptial sexual relations; learn Spanish;
form an army; defend their territory from Portuguese incursions; and work in workshops and the fields. All these norms were introduced into the Indians’
life, but to what extent they were followed is a question which cannot be fully answered.22 We cannot truthfully rely, for instance, on the letters sent annually
18 Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule, p. 62.
19 Ganson, Ibid., p. 71.
20 There are accounts of the persistence of anthropophagy in the context of the Missions. See J.L. Costa Neto, ‘“Modo de estar” Guarani: Miguel de Artiguaye, política fragmentária e volatilidade do “ser”’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, 2008).
21 A. Kern, ‘Cultura européia e indígena no Rio da Prata nos séculos XVI/XVIII’, Estudos Ibero-americanos, 19 (2) (1993): 5–18.
22 G. Wilde provides a critical, well-documented account of life in the Paraguayan missions, arguing for the heterogeneity of the missionary contexts on many levels and in many instances; and criticising the spectrum of truth that many written records, lay or official, have incorrectly provided to the historiography when depicting the missions as politically ordered
THE MATERIALITY OF CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS 75 by the Jesuits to their superiors in Europe, which sought to depict the success of missionary work.23 In these letters the cultural encounters are described in idyllic terms, portraying an image of the missionary experience in which the possibility or expectation of changing in behaviour – the ‘were to’ of the sentences above – was presented instead as a real achievement of the Jesuit work.
The Guaraní were infantilised in the narrative, depicted as children who needed to be guided and taught, as innocent creatures to whom the opportunity of becoming complete human beings had been given. This affected other symbolic and practical aspects of missionisation which were part of the colonial project in the Americas: in order to reach the true God the Indians first needed to be educated and civilised, which also implied their subservience to a faraway king. Through the official written record the cultural encounter appears as a work of edification. The material evidence of this encounter, however, points to a more complex and encompassing experience.
The process of transculturation which took place in the missions from the beginning of their formation varied according to the time, the people and the environment in which they were established. The missions had their economic, political and ideological role in the process of the colonisation of Latin America;
and the interaction between the players who took part in that process generated events which were marked by different degrees of friction and accommodation which varied over time. The process of transculturation did not imply only peaceful, successful or edifying integration, as narrated by the Jesuits in their official letters, nor was it characterised solely by violence towards, or disease and suffering on the part of, the Guaraní population, the people who were colonised. The material culture which characterised the missionary context is testimony to the fundamental role played by Guaraní traditional culture in shaping the missions of Paraguay in a colonial situation. For instance, the long houses which the caciques were allocated in the missions, around the plaza, make it evident that the practice of living with extended families did not disappear under the supervision of the Jesuits.24 However, while Indians of a high status could keep their multiple households, the Guaraní who did not take part in political decisions were expected to follow the single-family model of organisation as advised by the priests. The coexistence of Guaraní
and culturally homogeneous (G. Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de Guaraníes (Buenos Aires: SB, 2009)).
23 Costa Neto, ‘“Modo de estar” Guarani’, p. 50.
24 The persistence of the cacicado, as well as the maintenance of polygamy among the caciques in the missions, are well discussed in many sources and interpreted as one of the many examples of the continuity of Guaraní traditional practices under the rule of the Jesuits. Among many others, both Wilde and Costa Neto provide a well-based account of the practice of polygamy in the missions, discussing its importance for the Guaraní and the way it was negotiated between priests and caciques in the missionary context. See Wilde, Religión y poder; and Costa Neto, ‘“Modo de estar” Guarani’, esp. chapter 1.
and European practices and the materiality which accompanied them suggest a world of complementarity. It does not disregard conflict, but acknowledges the persistence of the Guaraní culture in a model of social organisation formally guided by Western thought.
Another example of the inclusive character of the cultural encounter in the missionary experience is the production of carved wooden Catholic images by Indians. The making of statues of saints by the Guaraní, who turned out to be great artisans even by European standards, reveals not simply their acceptance of a new religion, as narrated by the Jesuits, but their own re-reading of the new cultural element: many of the sculptures of saints depicted indigenous faces. Some expressed happiness and contentment, characteristics which were not common in Iberian and South American religious art in the same period.25 Similarly, the regional flora and the fauna were incorporated into the baroque style brought to the Americas. The diet based on local ingredients coexisted with European foods brought by the Jesuits, such as wheat and domesticated animal protein. The use of native plants to heal the sick also demonstrates the importance of pre-contact practices and expertise in the development of the missions.
These examples of the persistence of Guaraní cultural traces in the material culture of the missions, and therefore in the social dynamics which this materiality evoked, are important in the reconstruction of the narrative of the colonial process. They demonstrate the interdependent character of the cultural encounter, which is often ignored in the traditional colonial literature.
It is not the case of epistemologically equalising integration to passive or desired accommodation, but of understanding that, in the missions, although the Catholic religion was an imposition, its acceptance was not complete and did not erase native thoughts, practices and behaviour. The material culture created and utilised in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay points towards this interdependency. However, acknowledging the cultural complementarity and coexistence present in material evidence provides only limited insight into the cultural encounter and the historical production of reality. A concern with the human, embodied experience can, therefore, help to identify the cultural ruptures and persistence experienced in the context of the missions. We can look at how embodiment took place in the missions by looking at the pottery and the techniques involved in its production.
25 Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule, p. 68.
THE MATERIALITY OF CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS 77