The Politics of Accommodation

Abstract

Chapter 4 introduces the concept of ‘cultural accommodation’ and explores how the missionaries defined it in terms of religion and politics. Both the Jesuits themselves and members of other religious orders often disagreed on the extent to which this was possible or even desirable. Jesuits judged the need for adaptation depending on how they judged the ‘civility’ of a particular people. Hence, they endeavoured to describe the innate virtues and vices of the Japanese, which would determine their strategies of evangelization. This came in the wake of the famous Las-Casas–Sepúlveda debates over ‘natural slavery’ and whether the American Indios possessed truly human souls. The creation of civilizational and racial hierarchies also influenced how the Spanish and Portuguese conceived their missionary, merchant, and colonial ‘enterprises’ in East Asia. This inevitably included questions about what to do when faced with hostility and suspicion on the part of the Japanese or Chinese.