Alone, the production of pottery on the wheel, by male Guaraní, in a delimited territory and controlled by a supervisor during a certain period of time, cannot encompass the whole process of civilisation and conversion to Christianity.
However, it can add to other elements which were involved, such as the physical and conceptual transformation of the landscape and the implications for individuals’ relationships. Roads, houses, workshops, allotments, communal gardens, a square, a church, cemeteries can all be perceived as ‘moments in
cyclically celebrated, provided to the rhythm of social life in the missions (p. 70).
40 Tocchetto, ‘A cultura material’, interprets this permanence as a means of resistance and the preservation of identity in times of change.
41 For a reflection on the relevance of ordinary things in the ordering of people’s lives, see D. Miller, ‘Artefacts and the meaning of things’, in T. Ingold, Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 396 – 419.
42 Tocchetto, ‘A cultura material’; Ganson, The Guaraní under the Spanish Rule; Rahmeier, Cultura missioneira; Kern, ‘Missões: um processo de transculturação’; Kern, Cultura europeia e indígena; A. Kern, Missões: uma utopia política (Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto, 1982).
a general technology of localisation’.43 In this way, the building of a mission involved several instances of the production of locality, all eminently connected to and imbued with ideas of immorality and sin, of private and public property, of heaven and earth, dichotomist concepts which permeated the process of evangelisation and the Western idea of civilisation.
Clothing the people, housing them in a different materiality and within a new spatial organisation, renaming them, reorganising their time, changing burial rituals and the places where they occurred, introducing the sounds of musical instruments and the church bell, organising daily routine according to the ringing of the bell, inaugurating new practices such as ploughing and manufacturing pottery – all this contributed to the production of the locality
‘as a structure of feeling’.44 Through experiencing the locality produced by the Jesuit project, the Guaraní were slowly and systematically embodying colonialism, which allowed the production of a particular habitus,45 one which accommodated the new cultural references and naturalised elements from the civilised world proposed by the Jesuits. In other words, the colonisation associated with the missions allowed the creation of particular routines and, as a consequence, particular somatic spaces.46 The body and its actions thus became a tool which in different ways incorporated and communicated colonialism. 47
From a large-scale perspective the missions were indeed part of colonialism.
However, we should avoid generalisations when classifying them as such.
On a micro-scale, on which the particularities of each cultural encounter are considered, the missions emerge as places where power was not exercised in a uni-directional way. Transformations in daily life were always negotiated between the priests and indigenous populations. These negotiations revealed disputes over power which were transmitted to the material culture of the missions through introductions, obliterations, changes in and continuities of objects and the techniques of their production and consumption.
The Guaraní fashioned a way to remain Guaraní in the changing and challenging circumstances of a mission, behaving in an ambivalent way which
43 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 179.
44 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 182.
45 As proposed by Bourdieu in P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977).
46 For a study on the somatic spaces generated in a given materiality see C. Rahmeier, ‘Materiality, social roles and the senses: domestic landscape and social identity in the Estâncias of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’, Journal of Material Culture, 17 (2012): 153–71.
47 In Merleau-Ponty’s sense, which perceives the body as immersed in the world and as a means of communication with it (M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The experience of the body and classical psychology’, in M. Fraser and M. Greco (eds.), The Body; A Reader (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005), pp. 52–4.
THE MATERIALITY OF CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS 83 revealed more superposition and duplicity than obliteration.48 The Guaraní did not become Europeans, neither did the Jesuits adopt Indian values and their way of life. Regarding pottery, specifically, its traditional domestic production did not disappear in the missions.49 Even clay artefacts used in traditional indigenous rituals, such pipes and funerary urns, have been found in archaeological surveys in the mission area,50 suggesting they were possibly still in use after the arrival of the Jesuits.
The material culture of the reductions reveals a process in which elements of both Guaraní and Jesuit culture coexisted in some aspects, merged in others and, to a great extent, made priests and Indians dependent upon one other.
We can, therefore, talk about the emergence of a transcultural form of social and economic organisation in which both Guaraní and European cultural elements coexisted. In order to prosper, the Jesuits had to make concessions.
In order to survive, the Guaraní, too, had to make concessions. The Jesuits were entrusted with people to civilise and to whom to teach the catechism.
The Guaraní were given guns to protect their people from the bandeirantes.
The concessions made by each of these groups permeated the whole experience of the missions – from their beginnings in the 17th century until the Guaraní War and the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish and Portuguese territories in the 1760s. Regarding the production of ceramics, the choreographies involved in the making of pots, pipes, bricks or church ornaments do not represent the emergence of a community of practice,51 as sometimes argued for indigenous cultures in similar post-colonial contexts, but indicate the coexistence of two modes of ceramic production: a Guaraní one, conducted by women in the domestic sphere; and a European one, implemented and controlled by priests and relying heavily on male labour. Different cosmologies were present in these two ways of making things and, in the process, of organising people and their time.
The way pottery was produced and consumed throughout the experience of the Jesuit missions is a testimony to the cultural negotiations present in that context. It challenges the dualistic oversimplification of the ‘coloniser-colonised’ dichotomy, allowing the emergence of multidirectional models of
48 For a comprehensive and pertinent discussion of ambivalence in the context of the missions see Wilde, Religión y poder.
49 S. Zuse, ‘Permanências e mudanças técnicas na cerâmica de uma redução jesuítico-guarani do início do século XVII na região central do Rio Grande do Sul/Brasil’, Cuadernos del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Pensamiento Latinoamericano – Series Especiales, 1 (2013): 160–72.
50 Tocchetto, ‘A cultura material’, pp. 159–60.
51 M. Pigott, ‘Communities of potters: reconsidering colonialism and cultural change through ceramic analysis’, paper presented at the 75th annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Augusta, GA, 14–17 November 2018; Worth, ‘Materialized Landscapes of Practice’, https://www.academia.edu/38927697/Communities_of_Potters_
Reconsidering_Colonialism_and_Culture_Change_through_Ceramic_Analysis [accessed 1 September 2019].
interpretation which acknowledge the so-called ‘dominated’ populations.52 In this way, the materiality of the cultural encounters allows the reframing of our understanding of colonialism in accordance with the various empirical conditions it encompasses. The material structure of the missions and the routines they created led to the embodiment of certain Western rules and values and, ultimately, to the formation of a particular habitus which contributed to the assimilation of the Jesuit project in colonial Latin America. We cannot forget, however, that the bodies which performed the choreographies of civilisation in this context were the same ones which performed resistance through the very habitus which still held some elements of the Guaraní tradition.
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