Archaeology’s Offerings to Jesuit History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: The Archaeology of Jesuit Sites in the Americas
Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2021
The archaeological record of Jesuit sites in the Americas preserves an essential resource for the study of daily life among individuals in the Jesuit sphere of influence. The full potential of an archaeological synthesis of these sites has yet to be realized, since systematic excavations have occurred at only a relatively small number of Jesuit sites in the American continents and the Caribbean. This essay serves to introduce a collection of five archaeological case studies and a conclusion, which show how archaeology complements the written histories of Jesuits from Nasca to New France. These case studies address several major themes, including the definition of mission sites, scales of analysis, the nature of missionary “success,” and overcoming historical silences. In particular, they articulate the influence of Jesuit missionaries on the material worlds of numerous cosmopolitan communities of colonists, enslaved Africans, and American Indians.
(2019) Jesuit Missionaries and Missions in the Iberian Colonial World
Ines G. Županov (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)
This chapter aims to analyze the Jesuit missionaries and their missions in colonial America (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries) based on the categories of globalness (the global) and mundanity (the local) through three historical frameworks: first, the missionary expansion of the Society of Jesus from the viceroyalty of Peru and its ties to Rome and the Iberian monarchy in the sixteenth century; second, presenting the defensive war project implemented on Chile’s southern border between 1612 and 1626 as a missionary and political mechanism of territorial and spiritual “reduction”; and third, changes in missionary identity in the eighteenth century. The first two frameworks are based on case studies that give a view of the local dimension while at the same time allowing one to understand the global dynamics of the Society of Jesus in other colonial spaces. The third framework is based on broader geographical travel.
Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas, book review by Pablo Abascal.pdf
The anthology, which includes texts written in many languages by authors from many different countries and disciplines (historians, art historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars), results in a diverse compilation of Jesuit studies . Although most articles are about Jesuits in the eighteenth century, their relationship with the Enlightenment, and their expulsion from the American territories, it also contains some texts that cover the two previous centuries . The editors envisioned this book as part of a complex and international network where Jesuit knowledge and ideas circulated in different spaces, questioning its production and reception in both sides of the Atlantic, rethinking the relationship between the religious order's areas with anthropological and ethnographic knowledge .
MISSIONS AND MISSIONARIES IN THE AMERICAS: A Special Teaching and Research
F or more than 70 years, The Americas, a publication of the Academy of American Franciscan History, has been a leading forum for scholars studying the history of Spanish America's colonial missions. As the articles collected from the journal for this special issue show, the general trend has been to move beyond the hagiographic treatment of missionaries and towards a more complex understanding of the historical roles played by the colonial missions in rural life. While scholars such as Robert Ricard in the 1930s once posited a one-way " spiritual conquest " that cast native peoples as passive receptacles for Catholicism and European culture, such a view is no longer tenable, for several reasons. 1 First, since then scholars have demonstrated how the durability of indigenous cultural systems influenced the acceptance, rejection, or modification of Catholic teachings to form new kinds of syncretic and hybrid belief structures. Second, scholars have come to recognize the ways in which the " local " and idiosyncratic flavor of Spanish Catholicism also contributed to this hybridity, as did the missionaries' adaptation of their teachings through the use of indigenous languages and local forms of ritual expression. 2 Finally, recent scholarship has also begun to explore the contested nature of power within the missions and the larger spiritual economy that connected the missions, the missionaries, and native societies to the broader political and cultural terrain.
This article explores the vertical aspects of the Jesuit confraternity system in the thirty community towns under Span-ish rule (1609−1767) designated as " Missions " or " Reductions " in the Río de la Plata region of South America. The principal documents analyzed are the cartas anuas, the annual reports of the Jesuits. The chronological analysis is carried out with a view to tracing the process of integrating the Guaraní Indians into the Spanish colonial regime by means of the religious congregation founded in each Mission town. As a supplementary issue, we deal with the significance of the Spanish word policía (civility) used as a criterion to ascertain the level of culture attained by the Amer-indians. Normally the Jesuits considered members of indigenous confraternities to be endowed with policía, so they used confrater-nities to transplant Christian civility among the Guaraní Indians in the Spanish overseas colony.
Cultural Worlds of the Jesuits in Colonial Latin America
2020
(early 18th century). 1.11 Stone temple lion, forecourt of the Franciscan church of Santo António (popularly known as São Francisco), João Pessoa (c.1734 or 1779). 2.1 A nocturnal procession during Holy Week arriving at the door of the restored church of La Inmaculada, Concepción. 2.2 Part of a rhomboidal grid marked in reddish pigment on a rock face in the Serranía de Santiago. 2.3 Rock drawing given an ancient interpretation by a 20th-century Chiquitano. 2.4 Schematic drawings of incised decoration on three bowls disinterred at Campo Grande (top), El Abasto (middle) and Puerto Rico (bottom). 2.5 European engraving of Xaraye people in the 16th century. 2.6 Drawing of a painted or tattooed Caduveo (Kadiwéu) woman by Guido Boggiani in 1892 (right); and a drawing on paper CULTURAL WORLDS OF THE JESUITS vi made by a Caduveo (Kadiwéu) woman in the 1930s for Claude Lévi-Strauss (left). 2.7 Wall painting behind a crucifix in the sacristy, San Rafael. 2.8 View of San Miguel showing the lozenge-shaped mouldings on the doors. 3.1 and 3.2. Woman making a clay pot according to the traditional technique called acordelado 3.3 First sequence of clay pot making, before decoration, nearly finished. 4.1 Il Paraguai e Paesi Adiacenti. Venezia 1785. Courtesy of Geography and Maps Division, Library of Congress. 4.2 Photograph of the first page of the Guarani letter, Mission Jesús de Tavarangue (AGN IX 36-9-6 Misiones, 1782). 5.1 Cours du fleuve Maragnon, autrement dit des Amazones par le P. Samuel Fritz, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus. Author Samuel Fritz (1656-1725). 5.2 Detail from Cours du fleuve Maragnon, autrement dit des Amazones par le P. Samuel Fritz, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus. Author Samuel Fritz (1656-1725). 6.1 Portuguese and Spanish Jesuit missions of South America, 16th-18th centuries. In red: Portuguese missions; red circles where missions use two variants of the lingua geral. In blue: Spanish missions; blue circles where missions use Guaraní as a general language. 6.2 Jesuit missions of South America, 16th-18th centuries. Spanish frontier missions in blue; penetration of Portuguese missions in red.
The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History
For more than 70 years, The Americas, a publication of the Academy of American Franciscan History, has been a leading forum for scholars studying the history of Spanish America's colonial missions. As the articles collected from the journal for this special issue show, the general trend has been to move beyond the hagiographic treatment of missionaries and towards a more complex understanding of the historical roles played by the colonial missions in rural life.