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The Company of Jesus in Colonial Brazil and Mexico: Missionary Encounters with Amerindian Healers and Spiritual Leaders, 1550-1625

Rutherford, Jessica Lee, Rutherford
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1498153229747891

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.
In this dissertation, I argue that Jesuit missionary writings in the Americas demonized and appropriated indigenous sources of medical knowledge, contributing to the exclusion of indigenous voices from the archive of the western history of science and medicine. I take a critical look at the way in which Jesuits implemented a discourse of sorcery as a strategy to delegitimize Amerindian healers and spiritual leaders that stood in opposition to the colonial occupation of present-day Brazil and Mexico. In chapter 1, I illuminate the cognitive operations behind the Jesuit impulse to impose Christianity on native communities through a reading of Jesuit-authored letters from colonial Brazil, including missionary correspondence from Jose de Anchieta, Fernão Cardim, and Antonio Vieira as well as a set of anonymous letters penned from São Vicente. In these documents we find that— given the swiftness of smallpox outbreaks—encounters among Jesuit missionaries and Amerindians were often structured around an urgent need to care for the sick, making the study of local medicines all the more necessary. In chapter 2, I analyze Portuguese Jesuit Fernão Cardim’s appropriation of indigenous botanical information in his natural history, known today under the title Tratados da Terra e Gente do Brasil [Treatises on the Land and People of Brazil] (1583-1601). As Cardim’s text demonstrates, missionaries wrote natural histories to serve as conversion manuals, set alongside useful information on how to survive in foreign places. In my final chapter, I bring in a natural history from another area of the Americas, Jose de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias [Natural and Moral History of the Indies] (Sevilla 1590), to demonstrate the systematic approach that the Company of Jesus took in their study of American nature. As visitors to the missions in the Americas, both Cardim and Acosta drew heavily from locally based Jose de Anchieta and Juan de Tovar as they compiled their studies on colonial Brazil and Mexico respectively. I focus my reading of Acosta’s natural history on the spiritual politics of Nahua-Christian ritual encounters in present-day Mexico. I analyze the way in which Jesuit missionaries’ ambivalent representations of American botanical medicine worked to value indigenous knowledge of the natural world for practical use, while they criminalized native healers based on alternative spiritual application. This study focuses on how demonizing discourses, religious in ideology and spiritual in scope, use the notion of universal truth-value and geo-privileged spaces of representation to commit acts of epistemological violence against oppressed communities. Moreover, this study demonstrates that the Jesuit discourse of sorcery was used to legitimize the Christian missionary’s “right” to possess indigenous land and extract their natural resources for their own gain, whether spiritual or economic. In order to polemicize the authority that Europeans assumed in these cross-cultural exchanges, this research dialogues with postcolonial debates on the geo-politics of knowledge and power in colonial Latin American studies. Specifically, I work beyond the confines of present-day national borders that have traditionally separated the study of Brazil and Mexico, and I challenge Western-dominated paradigms of scientific authority to highlight the contribution of indigenous knowledge to the history of science and medicine.
Lisa Voigt (Advisor)
250 p.
Alternative Medicine; Comparative Literature; Epidemiology; European History; European Studies; History; Latin American History; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Medicine; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Native American Studies; Religion; Science History
Jesuit; missionary; Cardim; Anchieta; Vieira; Montoya; Acosta; Tovar; Castrillo; magic; medicine; religion

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Rutherford, Rutherford, J. L. (2017). The Company of Jesus in Colonial Brazil and Mexico: Missionary Encounters with Amerindian Healers and Spiritual Leaders, 1550-1625 [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1498153229747891

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Rutherford, Rutherford, Jessica. The Company of Jesus in Colonial Brazil and Mexico: Missionary Encounters with Amerindian Healers and Spiritual Leaders, 1550-1625. 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1498153229747891.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Rutherford, Rutherford, Jessica. "The Company of Jesus in Colonial Brazil and Mexico: Missionary Encounters with Amerindian Healers and Spiritual Leaders, 1550-1625." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1498153229747891

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1498153229747891
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.