Cultural Worlds of the Jesuits in Colonial Latin America

Abstract

Cultural Worlds of the Jesuits in Colonial Latin America is the result of an international conference marking the 250-year anniversary of the Jesuit expulsion from Spanish territories in 1767. Edited by Linda A. Newson, the 12 essays of this volume largely turn away from Jesuit conversion efforts to the order's other cultural contributions to Portuguese and Spanish America. The black robes in this book develop language tools, introduce technologies, promote new artistic styles, study the natural world, and teach music. They may occasionally baptize and offer spiritual instruction, but they rarely, if ever, pray, practice the Spiritual Exercises, or promote Marian devotion. While one book clearly cannot cover the entire history of the Society of Jesus in the Americas, as Newson openly confesses in her introduction, it must be emphasized that Cultural Worlds is primarily an account of Jesuit activities in South America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A few chapters offer some comparisons with New Spain, but overall this volume is focused on the southern Atlantic.While Cultural Worlds is largely concerned with Jesuit legacies, transculturation—a familiar theme in mission historiography—still drives the analysis of a few chapters. Kate Ford highlights the ways in which Chiquito painters drew on their own artistic traditions of rock painting, tattooing, and body painting to decorate their mission churches. She reads mission art not as the work of ingenious Jesuits but rather as a “fusion of European decorative imagery and indigenous memory” (p. 65). Clarissa Sanfelice Rahmeier studies the introduction of the potter's wheel among the Guaraní, which altered how ceramics were made, who crafted them, and how they were conceptualized as objects. Instead of only looking at how Jesuits modified traditional forms of pottery, she argues for the coexistence of Guaraní and European elements in the material culture of the missions in Paraguay. These examples of cultural hybridity in the visual and plastic arts mirror other ceremonial changes taking place on Jesuit missions because of disease. In one of the few essays dealing with demographics, Oriol Ambrogio compares perceptions of baptism on the frontiers of Chile and northwestern Mexico. He concludes that Christian rituals and local healing practices merged because Indigenous peoples did not see Jesuits and traditional healers as mutually exclusive in their worldviews.Another important theme in Cultural Worlds is the circulation of ideas, goods, and peoples in the Atlantic world and beyond. Samir Boumediene offers a fascinating look at the Jesuit drug trade and how their apothecaries formed part of medical marketplaces on both sides of the ocean. He shows how Jesuit procuradores played important roles in circulating plants and pharmacopoeia through systems of exchanges that they established in Madrid, Seville, and Rome. Turning our focus away from ships as the mainstay of early modern transportation, William G. Clarence-Smith shines the spotlight on the millions of mules on Jesuit estates. They bred them, sold them for cash, and used them in their operations, thus sustaining their educational and architectural programs and fueling the colonial economy. While most studies are rooted in Atlantic entanglements, Gauvin Alexander Bailey extends his gaze to the Pacific to reflect on the global character of the Society of Jesus. The fusion of European and Indigenous styles is a familiar story in studies of colonial art, but Bailey demonstrates that in certain cases in Brazil the Jesuits turned to Chinese-inspired works to decorate their churches.Most chapters in Cultural Worlds are based on Spanish and Portuguese texts, but a select few turn to Indigenous-language sources. Barbara Ganson and Capucine Boidin draw on an expanding corpus of works in Guaraní, which, as they point out, is increasingly available today in online databases. Concentrating on cases of adultery and grammatization respectively, they demonstrate that the Guaraní—much like Indigenous intellectuals and rulers in central Mexico and the Andes—created a “Euro-Amerindian legal and political space” in which they were able to voice their concerns to local authorities and the Spanish crown (p. 141). Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Caroline Egan highlight another important aspect of access to Indigenous-language texts: many were never published and ended up in European repositories as curiosities. They follow the travel itinerary of the “Christian Doctrine in the Brazilian Tongue,” a manuscript composed in Tupi between 1549 and 1591 that is today housed in the Bodleian Library. This early catechism represents the transatlantic connections between Indigenous Brazilians, Portuguese Jesuits, and English privateers.Transculturation, transatlantic circulation, and archival access are only three of many important themes emerging in Cultural Worlds. The volume rightly confirms that being a Jesuit missionary was more than just preaching Christianity to Indigenous neophytes. When combined with older narratives of evangelization that are centered on spiritual dialogues, this enlarged focus on other cultural spheres allows us to construct a more holistic vision of Jesuit-Indigenous encounters across the colonial Americas.