[This is an AI-generation transcription. If you find any mistake, please write to andrea.rota@ikos.uio.no]
Andrea Rota: Hello everyone, and welcome to a new episode of the IKOS Religion and Politics podcast. I am Andrea Rota, and joining us today is Zsolt Györegy. Zsolt, who has a background in archaeology, Jewish studies and comparative history, is currently a PhD fellow at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo. He is a member of the research project Bodies in Translation – Science, Knowledge and Sustainability in Cultural Transition. He is completing a dissertation on cultural translation in early modern ethnographic descriptions of the Tupi and Guarani people in South America. For our conversation, I have asked Jolt to help us explore the relevance of these documents in understanding the interrelation of religion, art, and politics in colonial South America. Zsolt, thank you so much for joining the podcast.
Zsolt Györegy: Hello, thank you for having me.
Andrea Rota: Before we dive into your sources, I would like to ask you to provide some context. Could you give us an overview of the Tupi and Guarani people from a geographical and historical perspective?
Zsolt Györegy: Of course. The term Tupi and Guarani designates indigenous peoples who speak one of the so-called Tupian or Tupi-Guarani languages in South America. These people might be little known by the name today, but their descriptions led to the image of the emblematic cannibals based on whom Europe began to envision Amerindians as bestial consumers of human flesh, or later as the mythical noble savages who live in perfect harmony with nature in a blissful state of ignorance, basically. There are no written sources from pre-colonial times from this region, but there are a few hypotheses concerning the Tupi-Guarani's pre-contact history, and most scholars suspect that they emerged from somewhere along the Amazon and branched out from there and eventually ended up on the Atlantic coast and the Rio de la Plata basin, pushing the so-called Zhe or Makruzhe people the then coastal population towards the inland. And this is the situation at the very moment when Iberians arrive at the beginning of the 16th century at the region and begin to explore and then colonize it. The European historical documents speak of two major, eventually homogenized branches regarding these indigenous peoples, the Tupi, who lived in coastal Brazil, and the Guarani, who moved inwards and occupied the Platine Basin, which is the riverine region of the Rio de la Plata. I need to emphasize, though, that this distinction between the Tupi and the Guarani must have, at least partially, come down to their separate colonization by the Portuguese and the Spanish, respectively. While whom we call Tupi speakers were subjected to the Portuguese crown, the Guarani were governed by Spain. The Spaniards made first contact with the Guarani sometime at the beginning of the 16th century, and their systematized colonization and conversion to Christianity began somewhat later, closer to the middle of the century, basically. I would also like to point out that the standardized versions of these languages, which were grammaticalized by Jesuit missionaries, were widely spoken in both the Portuguese colony of Brazil and the Spanish colony of Paraguay up until the 18th century, despite the indigenous population itself decreasing drastically due to a number of reasons such as wars with the invaders, forced labor and devastating epidemics that had been unknown to the Americas up until that point. And interestingly, despite having a very small indigenous population in the country today, Guaraní is still widely spoken in today's Paraguay as one of the official languages of the country alongside Spanish, which makes Guaraní one of the very few Amerindian languages having such a status on the entire continent.
Andrea Rota: That's fascinating. The accounts that we have about these peoples were not written by indigenous author, I assume. Who wrote these accounts and for whom were they intended?
Zsolt Györegy: No, no, no. They were not written by indigenous authors. Most of these accounts were written by missionaries. First and foremost Jesuits, actually, as they were often the first and for a very long time the only individuals who made long-term contact with the Tupi-Guarani in so-called imperial fringe areas or peripheries, and they were the ones who produced texts about these encounters. But of course there were a number of texts produced by explorers, non-missionary priests, or even landowners. So, depending on the profession of the author, basically, their readership varied greatly, depending on their genre as well, the author's goals, their interests that they articulated in their works' dedications. But, for example, missionary accounts were either addressed to their own community for pedagogical purposes, such as grammar books were, or they were to provide information on the Americas to the center of the Jesuit order, which had begun to accumulate knowledge on newly encountered peoples. And of course, implicitly, missionary works were also addressed to Rome itself, to the center of the Catholic Church that, at least in theory, oversaw every translational practice around the world. The accumulation of knowledge on foreign peoples was quite necessary in missionizing, since Jesuits had to get to know their interlocutors and their customs to find out what the best way was to change these very customs, basically. And I would also like to add that a lot of the times these texts were written with the purpose of gaining political or financial support from the royal court with whom the Jesuits closely collaborated in the Ibero-American context.
In a recently published article, you focus on one of these chronicles. It is titled Conquista Espiritual and was authored in 1639 by the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya. What are the most salient features or topics of this document? So Montoya's Chronicle is basically a history of the Jesuit order in the province of Paraguay, and as such it documents where the Jesuits went, where they established a new village, what happened in that village, and in which village, and when certain events happened basically. Seemingly it does not really offer a lot of information about the Guarani themselves, as the book's protagonists are the Jesuits, and only one chapter is dedicated explicitly to Guarani's customs. But if you look more closely, you can see a lot more of the Guarani in forms of interaction, encounter, in disagreements, etc., basically in a relational form. And if you consider the very telling title, Conquista Espiritual, which means Spiritual Conquest. The main message Montoya wants to convey is the Jesuit order's beneficial activity in the region, basically, that Montoya and most other authors writing about Paraguay describe as extremely tough and extremely hostile, not to mention the devil's constant scheming among the Guaraní, who tempts them and tries to lure them back to their old customs or entices them to exhibit resistance to evangelization. And it is an area that does not really offer great victories and tons of silver and gold to the Spaniards. It is a rather trying place that Montoya keeps emphasizing in his book too. And I think that this is sort of the language of martyrdom because he evokes hardships that he has had to go through and had to overcome to achieve the success that he testifies to basically in this chronicle as a some sort of a trustworthy eyewitness. And with the book he tries to prove that the Jesuits are essential in the field and they should maintain control over the Guaraní to fully convert them all. But for this they need financial and political support from the Spanish king.
Andrea Rota: I found your research fascinating not only from a historical point of view but also from a methodological one. You employ an expanded notion of translation that goes beyond the linguistic domain to encompass the cultural and the material.
What insights does this approach offer into the interaction between Montoya and the Guarani people?
Zsolt Györegy: For instance, it shows how authors such as Montoya himself, instead of discovering and faithfully recording so-called authentic observations out there in the field, he and other authors actively produced knowledge by means of translation and rendered the Guarani according to whatever the respective author's agenda was.
And since colonial relations were highly, highly asymmetric and often, as we well know, often quite violent, it is quite a given to propose or assume that indigenous people had no say over what was written about them. It is also often stated that the Guarani were erased along with their culture and knowledge that did not fit into the expectations of the colonizers in a conceptual manner. They either did not understand them, or they considered these pieces of knowledge marginal, or even on the contrary, quite harmful or dangerous. And I myself do not question or downplay the accuracy of these kinds of statements either, but newer trends in historiography do not wish to disregard the indigenous actors that were present in these relations and interactions anymore. And so more and more scholars want to acknowledge indigenous agency and sort of undo this epistemic erasure from history writing, so to speak. And I think I would say that this is a rather political move. So of course, yes, the Guaranis' influence was much smaller, but they did possess at least some amount of agency, and it is earlier historiography's flaw that we forgot about Amerindians and considered them invisible or even non-existent or passive in later colonial or contemporary times. However, even though in small numbers they were and they are still there, they're still present in these relations, they still negotiate their existence, they still try to carve out some sort of autonomy over their lives, they still try to resist, they still try to acculturate, adapt, collaborate, or whatever else they choose to do under the circumstances that they face. And what a translational lens can add is, I think, an emphasis on dynamisms, change, relations and interaction. And the relationality and interaction point out that there are at least two participants in play every time, and it's not a subject and it's a passive object that we are talking about. It means that the Guarani also had to have some effect on the Spaniards, no matter how small that effect was and no matter how much Montoya or his colleagues misunderstood Guarani cultures or Guarani utterances or customs and the like. Even not understanding something has some constitutive role in producing ethnographic knowledge about a community. What is perhaps even more important when interpreting these accounts as sorts of translations, is that translation also signals that something inescapably changes during these encounters. So what I want to say and want to warn people about, and what I think translation helped me realize as well, is that you still won't be able to get to some sort of an untouched Guaraní society, no matter how hard you are trying to quote-unquote read between the lines or read against the grain. And translation theory points out that these sources that we read, searching for some indigenous history or indigenous agency, are ultimately just histories of encounters and relations. They're nothing more, but definitely nothing less either. Because they grasp the Guaraní after the very moment of facing the Spaniards, after making the first impact on one another, resisting and negotiating these impacts and in the end somehow influencing but not necessarily deciding how they will be depicted in early colonial accounts. So you can sense that the Guarani are there in some sort of altered form via epistemic traces or residues or echoes or whatever you want to call it, but you can never really touch them and see them in their original, authentic, pre-colonial form, just like you cannot really see a black hole itself either.
Andrea Rota: So if I understand correctly and if I may use a photographic metaphor, Montoya provides a kind of negative picture of the Guarani that you have to reconstruct by analyzing his own acts of translation. Montoya frames Guarani culture in somewhat familiar terms, and yet he emphasizes its subordinate status.
Could you elaborate on this form of translation and how it relates to his missionary work?
Zsolt Györegy: Yes, yes, of course. What it all came down to was legitimizing their own presence in a foreign land that they had just annexed. And the Catholic Church had a major role in these so-called polemics of possession. And in the case of Montoya, we see him move to Paraguay, we see him encounter an indigenous group that behaves quite differently from what he'd expect. So he has to make sense of these differences with the tools that he's got, the tools the terms, frames and concepts that he adopted during his own socialization in a europeanized intellectual world basically. And so he and many many other missionaries start to interpret the Guarani first as a people who have no religion or no superstition and then as a people who also belong to the same human race and who therefore had to have prior understanding of god or christianity sometime in the past but then the question arises why are they different then if they are also human and they also have some understanding of god and christianity then the explanation that these jesuits come up with is a demonological explanation it was the devil who made them turn down from this righteous path, and it was the devil who made them live now, today, a perplexed and bewildered life. And what an argument like this does is that it depicts the Guarani as a people who actually have the potential to find the right path again, because the stakes are quite high, Montoya does this so that the Guarani souls would be able to gain eternal salvation, which is what every Christian wanted. But they have to be shown how to find that path and follow a civilized Catholic lifestyle and leave behind their horrible traditions inspired by the devil. They need to develop a consciousness that is built on sin specifically, or otherwise Montoya would frame his own activities and efforts as basically useless and in vain, both to himself and to the people that finance their efforts, the Catholic Church and the Spanish court.
Andrea Rota: In your article you use, in addition to the category of translation, also the category of art to frame the Guaranese people interaction with ritual artifacts, particularly bodies and bones. I was wondering why you chose this category, art, over religion, for example.
Zsolt Györegy: Yeah, that is a great question. So I did this as an act of being purposefully and quite explicitly anachronistic to turn on a kind of, let's say, Brechtian alienating effect when discussing issues of colonialism. Since the sources that I work with are heavily mediated and biased, meaning that they were written about the Guarani, but not by the Guarani, from an external point of view, I wanted to try to create some distance between my own vocabulary and the heavily contested vocabulary of my authors. And so being out of time and being out of place hopefully helps me create a more, let's call it, just vocabulary narrative than the ones from earlier historiography. And I also had a more abstract aim with my choice, and that was to emphasize and make explicit the inherently translational nature of history writing itself as well, because I personally see it as a practice of interpreting past and foreign cultures with the present language and present concepts. Regarding religion, well, since I keep seeing missionaries trying to find religion among the Tupi-Guarani peoples, sometimes quite desperately, if I might say, I thought I should choose another analytical tool that does not coincide with the tool that my authors apply to their material. In a way, I am translating how missionaries translate indigenous practices and relations. After all, we can never really be sure what these phenomena were to the Guarani anyway. And reading these depicted scenes as art-like situations, I hoped to get a fresh look at the sources and not get trapped in trying to identify whether a strange bone cult or some sort of charismatic movement in the texts
was a religious phenomenon or not. I was more interested in the Guaranis' relation to their surroundings and how they built their social world via bodies, bones, other artefacts, particularly during this very formative phase of colonialism, when everything was still being tested, everything was still being shaped. But of course, this is not to say that afterwards everything was rock solid and unchanged.
Andrea Rota: I find this choice of displacing your vocabulary incredibly interesting. The word religion is nonetheless relevant for Montoya himself. He advocated for the rights of the Guaraní people in the Spanish court. And I was wondering what was the role of his understanding of Guaraní religion and Guaraní material culture in his plea?
Zsolt Györegy: So I find that Montoya played a curious balancing act, sort of navigating between two strategies. For example, on the one hand he depicts Guaraní as a people who are rather skillful and susceptible to absorbing Catholic teachings, right? This way he's showing the potential of successful conversions and the validity of the Jesuits' presence in Paraguay. And by presenting data on conversions, marriages, baptisms, etc., he basically reinforces this potential and the success that the Jesuits have achieved so far. But on the other hand, he shows the Guaranis inconstancy as well. He argues that they are still kind of prone to return to their old undesirable habits, which he explains as inspired by the devil, of course. And I think Montoya tries to argue that the Jesuits are needed in the field to properly civilize the Guarani, so that they could turn into proper Christian subjects of the empire itself. And of course in the paratext of the Chronicle, Montoya reveals that he expects the Spanish crown to support their efforts as they are underfunded and understaffed and constantly challenged and sabotaged by slave raiders and landowners and they need more staff and they need more money to successfully convert the Guaraní into these desired acceptable social beings. And this is a task, he says, that only the Jesuits could execute.
Andrea Rota: Fascinating. Thank you very much, Zsolt, for introducing us to this complex interrelation between missionary and indigenous cultures in early modern South America.
Zsolt Györegy: This has been a truly fascinating conversation. Thank you for having me. It was really, really a pleasure.
Andrea Rota: That's all for today's episode of the podcast.
Our guest was Zsolt Györegy, a PhD fellow at the Department of Cultural, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo. In the post description, you will find more information about his ongoing research, including a link to his article Translating Guarani Artifacts in Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's Conquista Espiritual. Thank you for listening and until next time.