Infiéis e infidelidades : discursos e práticas à margem do projeto de conversão

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the discourse produced by civilians and missionaries about the indigenous who lived in the colonial Rio de la Plata region. We take as a starting point the foundation of the first urban centers (1536) and extended until the end of the 1640s, when the early years of establishing Jesuit reductions in the region. The colonial discourse point to the existence of native dichotomies good / bad, friend / enemy, faithful / unfaithful, that is, a division had been consolidated a division between the natives who collaborated with the colonial and missionary project, and those who were apart of this process. The latter group, it was considered appropriate to discuss in this study, because, in in the Ânuas´ letters and other correspondence, terms like natural, gentile and infidel were used, recurrently, to identify such indigenous groups, however, we perceive distinct intentionalities when using each term. From the identification, explicit or implicit of these terms, we seek, at first, to understand to what extent the indigenous not participating in the colonial project were used by the religious in their discourses, under the term infidel, as justification to carry out the demands of the religious themselves. Secondly, we analyze the records about native attitudes or practices, that emerge in colonial documentation, such as indigenous infidelities, or, where such practices were only described, but were not recorded in the texts under such terms. In this case, in questioning the omission of the terms, we identify traces of original customs that show a partial or rather occasional conversion to Catholicism. Finally, it appears that within the reductions, those indigenous practicing Catholic rites and, at the same time, adherents of traditional customs, could also be classified as infidel, as much as those indigenous placed by the discourse of the Jesuits as the margins of society reductional. In raising such questions, it is possible to understand at what junctures certain expressions were triggered by the religious, to describe the native groups, with different denominations, and their possible intentions. And in what circumstances the terms have been omitted in the discourse, but customs are being performed and recorded, constituting a coexistence of beliefs inherent to the natives, and eventually described by the religious.