The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio De La Plata - Softcover

Ganson, Barbara Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804754950 ISBN 13: 9780804754958

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America—that of the Jesuit missions to the Guaraní Indians, who inhabited the border regions of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of Indian adaptation to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.

The book demonstrates conclusively that the Guaraní were as instrumental in determining their destinies as were the Catholic Church and Spanish bureaucrats. They were neither passive victims of Spanish colonialism nor innocent “children” of the jungle, but important actors who shaped fundamentally the history of the Río de la Plata region. The Guaraní responded to European contact according to the dynamics of their own culture, their individual interests and experiences, and the changing political, economic, and social realities of the late Bourbon period.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Barbara Ganson is Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University.

Barbara Ganson is Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America—that of the Jesuit missions to the Guaraní Indians, who inhabited the border regions of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of Indian adaptation to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.
The book demonstrates conclusively that the Guaraní were as instrumental in determining their destinies as were the Catholic Church and Spanish bureaucrats. They were neither passive victims of Spanish colonialism nor innocent “children” of the jungle, but important actors who shaped fundamentally the history of the Río de la Plata region. The Guaraní responded to European contact according to the dynamics of their own culture, their individual interests and experiences, and the changing political, economic, and social realities of the late Bourbon period.

Aus dem Klappentext

This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America that of the Jesuit missions to the Guaraní Indians, who inhabited the border regions of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of Indian adaptation to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.
The book demonstrates conclusively that the Guaraní were as instrumental in determining their destinies as were the Catholic Church and Spanish bureaucrats. They were neither passive victims of Spanish colonialism nor innocent children of the jungle, but important actors who shaped fundamentally the history of the Río de la Plata region. The Guaraní responded to European contact according to the dynamics of their own culture, their individual interests and experiences, and the changing political, economic, and social realities of the late Bourbon period.

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The Guaran Under Spanish Rule in the Ro de la Plata

By BARBARA GANSON

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5495-8

Contents

List of Illustrations....................................................................................ixAcknowledgments..........................................................................................xiIntroduction.............................................................................................1Part One: The Invasion from Within1. Early Encounters......................................................................................172. The Footprints of Saint Thomas........................................................................303. Daily Life............................................................................................52Part Two: The Invasion from Without4. From Resistance to Rebellion..........................................................................875. The Guaran in the Aftermath of the Expulsion of the Jesuits..........................................1176. Our Warehouses Are Empty: Guaran Responses to the Reorganization of the Missions.....................1377. Guaran Cultural Resiliency and Reorientations........................................................164Appendices...............................................................................................191Glossary.................................................................................................205Notes....................................................................................................207Bibliography.............................................................................................257Index....................................................................................................285

Chapter One

Early Encounters

AN OUTLINE of pre-Columbian Guaran political, economic, and social organization, gender roles, and religion serves to establish a framework for illustrating the processes that demonstrate how the Guaran, an agricultural people, were incorporated into the Spanish Empire in the mid-sixteenth century. These historical processes included military alliances, the forming of kinship relations through intermarriage and cohabitation, Indian slavery, rape, the encomienda, and missions. At the same time, the chapter will highlight the patterns of interactions that show how the Spaniards and their mestizo offspring adopted many elements of Guaran culture, including their language, diet, and material culture, to survive in this new environment. Together the Guaran and the Europeans, willingly or unwillingly, created the beginnings of a new hybrid culture prior to the arrival of the Jesuits in the Ro de la Plata during the late sixteenth century.

The Cultural Landscape

The Tup-Guaran-speaking peoples were central Amazonian in origin, although they evolved independently of one another during the past 1,500 to 2,000 years. According to the archaeological record, the spread of the Amazonian Polychrome Ceramic Tradition correlated with the migration of the Tup and the Guaran from central Amazonia. This migration must have started at least by 200 B.C., a conservative estimate. Among other tropical lowland native peoples, the Tup occupied most of Brazil, and the Guaran established villages in southern South America, along the Paran, Uruguay, and Paraguay Rivers and their tributaries. The Guaran also occupied the subtropical forests, hills, and grasslands of Guair, Tape, and the area of Lagoa dos Patos in southern Brazil, as well as the island of Martn Garca and the area east of the Tigre River delta in the Ro de la Plata. The Av-Chiriguanos migrated from the region east of the Paraguay River and settled along the eastern mountain ranges of the Andes in present-day Bolivia. Cario, Guarambarense, Itatn, Mondayense, Paran, Uruguayense, Tape, and Mbaracayense were among the principal guras (regional-ethnic groups) of the Guaran. Together the various Guaran communities may have numbered approximately 1.5 million in 1500 A.D. at the time of the first European contact.

The Guaran usually referred to themselves as ab (men) or ande ore (all of us). According to their mythology, Tup and Guaran were brothers whose wives fought with one another over the ownership of a large colorful parrot. Following the dispute, Tup, the older brother, and his wife remained in Brazil, while the younger brother, Guaran, and his family left to establish new villages in the subtropical lowlands of the Ro de la Plata River systems. The native peoples mentioned as Guaran in Spanish and Portuguese historical documents spoke different dialects of the Tup-Guaran language. Guaran, which means "warrior" in their language, was the more common name the Europeans in the Ro de la Plata used to refer to these people, a name evidently acceptable to the Guaran themselves because it appears as a self-reference symbol in one of their texts. The Guaran rarely referred to themselves as Indians, a European category.

Approximately 2,000 years before Christ, bands of Guaran hunters and gatherers learned the slash-and-burn method of agriculture. Both men and women used the branches of the trees, along with straw, to build their long houses. These were usually one or two large straw-thatched huts where multiple families resided under the same roof in villages often surrounded by wooden palisades. These settlements of five or six long houses usually had two to three hundred inhabitants, but never had more than a thousand. Every three to five years, when their soils were exhausted, the Guaran abandoned their villages and selected new sites to plant their crops and build long houses.

The division of labor was predominantly based on gender. Men engaged in intermittent activities. When not hunting, fishing, or burning or clearing the fields, they made fish nets and small wooden benches, prepared for and engaged in warfare, and visited other villages. Women always were more burdened than men were, at least from the perspective of sixteenth-century Europeans. Female activities included all the planting and harvesting of manioc, corn, beans, peanuts, squashes, and sweet potatoes using digging sticks, as well as the collection of roots, fruits, and cotton. Women also transported water, gathered honey and palm hearts, made pottery, spun cotton, wove baskets and hammocks, cared for the children, did domestic chores, and prepared the food. In addition, using their saliva to ferment corn, native women made a mild alcoholic beverage called canv, canouin, or cagu (maize beer) in large earthen vessels, a common practice among many Amerindians in South America.

Each village or long house where the Guaran extended their cotton hammocks was headed by a patrilineal chief called a tuvich. The chiefs were responsible for governance in their communities, warfare, diplomacy, and forming marriage alliances. Guaran societies generally operated according to the concepts of reciprocity and mutual consent. Chiefdoms were hereditary offices passed on from the father to the son. In the absence of a son, the position went to a brother or another male relative. If a tuvich were an eloquent orator or a great warrior, he might rule over several villages.

The Guaran societies were patrilineal and matrilocal, according to which when a couple married, they went to live in the household of the wife and were...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804754950
• ISBN 13: 9780804754958
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 290
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: ankabu; service@ankabu.de; ; Erdweg 17; Pöttmes; Bayern; Deutschland