What matters here for studying the genealogy of indigenous men’s bodies is their material substance, first of all, and then analyzing their symbolic dimension. If before the bodies of certain people were produced socially based on the interests of their communities, as was the case with Guiraverá, after the European invasion their bodies became the product of the colonial system.
With regard to the materiality of indigenous men’s bodies, there was a commitment to updating them in the context they faced. This is why the priests were surprised by the incessant requests for Spanish-style clothing, such as shirts and pants. In the accounts from the end of the 16th century by the Tyrolean Jesuit Antón Sepp, it can be seen that clothing represented an additional possibility for the men’s insertion into the colony so that they wouldn’t be mistaken for non-Christianized natives and therefore liable to slavery (Sepp, 1980, p. 129). There are, however, two peremptory refusals: indigenous men keep their hair at shoulder height and don’t wear shoes—“here all the natives walk barefoot”, the priest, Sepp assures (1980, p. 246).
Several sculptures on display today at the Museum of the Missions, an institution located inside the São Miguel Missions Archeological Site, depict this new body, such as the one below (Fig. 3):
Fig. 3: Indigenous man.
As you can see, the man with an upright posture, bare feet, and shoulder-length black hair materializes the body of the indigenous man raised in the Jesuit Missions.
In addition to this new materiality, Father Pedro Romero, a Jesuit who worked in the region during the first decades of the project, proudly recounts the changes in relations between these men and their communities since the arrival of the Jesuits. One “young man, among others solicited by a married woman”, says Romero, “not being able to get rid of her with words, slapped her so many times that in his entire life, no temptation will ever come to him again” (Romero, 1970, p. 124). Romero also talks about a man who “flogged his wife because she hadn’t gone to Mass”, as well as another who, on finding his sister with a man who wasn’t her husband, tied her to a log as punishment (Romero, 1970, p. 124). Given so many episodes in which indigenous men beat women, Romero concludes:
All this shows that [the indigenous people] already have some fear of God, hatred and abhorrence of sin, for which they carry out these excesses, whereas before they would not have touched their wives and relatives for as many cases as there were in the world, and so these are miracles of the mighty hand of God to which we entrust the finishing and perfecting of this work of his (Romero, 1970, p. 122, our underline emphasis)
As you can see, Romero makes it clear that violence by men against women was something new in those societies, even calling it excessive, but he ends up recognizing it as a miracle that aids the work of conversion. Just as Ojeda saw the hand of God in the punishment of the “sodomites” by the indigenous men, for Romero it is also employed against women.
A century after Romero, indigenous men loyal to the priests enjoyed full hegemony over the other bodies in the missions. This symbolic transformation was accompanied by the emergence of a new geography. In fact, from the end of the 17th century, the settlements began to resize considerably, moving away from the format of communal villages to become opulent indigenous cities. This surprising dimension can be seen in the field trips that this project made to the archeological parks/sites of São Miguel Arcanjo and São João, two missions that are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The ground plan of the settlement of São João in 1756 also attests to this development (Fig. 4):
Fig. 4: San Juan, 1756: ground plan.
Plan de la Reducción de San Juan. 1756.
The distribution of the mission spaces appears to conform to Cartesian layouts, with simple urbanistic intentions. However, in addition to the field trips, reading the ground plans of the missions using the analytical categories of gender and sexuality allows us to produce a queer cartography in which it is possible to identify the feminine spaces (in black) and the masculine spaces (in gray) (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5: Queer cartography of mission: spaces feminine (black) and spaces masculine (gray).
Ground plano f a mission based on a queer cartography.
As we can see, the missions were gendered in the 18th century through the affirmation of masculinity, the peripheralization of femininity, and the exclusion of dissident sexualities. Let’s take a look at each of the mission spaces: only men produced sculptures, paintings, bells, musical instruments, or any other goods in the workshops; indigenous teachers, all men, taught writing, reading, mathematics, and the arts in schools for boys only, knowledge which was then considered synonymous with masculinity and which would be vital for them to maintain power; the cloister, farmhouse, and sacristy were only accessible to priests, choirboys, cooks, gardeners, among other specialized trades required to live in close proximity to the priests; the nave of the church, the cemetery and the hospital were divided between men and women; Cotiguaçu, or Casa das Recolhidas, was the only space exclusively for women, as we will see later.
Note that sexually dissident people had no territory at all, except for the prison.
There are also two spaces where the centrality of the male determines the dominance of the other bodies: the Cabildo, with an uncertain location, a kind of town hall/council responsible for the town’s problems, made up only of men; and the cacicados, i.e., the families now led only by the chiefs who were aligned with the priests.
Finally, the central square may be considered male territory, since it served as a stage for daily celebrations in which, at least since the General Regiment of the Doctrines of 1680, “no women, no muchachas, no men in women’s clothing may enter” (Dondivas, 1913, p. 596).
It was in this square that a large table was set up each year with staffs, banners, signs, badges, medals, and other insignia to be distributed to the men loyal to the priests, so that they could occupy positions such as councilors, inspectors, guards, nurses, teachers, among other posts that regulated the day-to-day life of the towns.
In one of these ceremonies, in 1690, at the Mission of La Cruz, when handing over the staff of Inspector, an important position of moral vigilance, to a cacique, the Jesuit priest urged him to punish sinners. In front of all the spectators, the new Inspector said he had heard that one of his sons had set “a bad example through certain antics” and asked the priest for permission to begin his mandate by punishing him in an exemplary manner. The priest authorized him, whereupon the man proceeded to flog his son in the presence of everyone (Anônimo, 1960).
This shows the transformation that certain bodies underwent in the missionary project over the course of just one century. At first, there were people like Guiraverá, haughty in the face of the colonial forces and adorned with body paint, feathered cloaks, and traditional weapons, in a material expression of his kinsfolk, then made up of dozens of women and their original families. This was followed by the demobilization of the traditional families and the disappearance of the aforementioned items, which were subsequently replaced by Spanish-style clothing, ropes, whips, a closed fist, and a rough voice, all of which were used in a series of punitive exercises against women and men who were in their shadow. As Díaz-Cervantes (2014) rightly points out, the colonial indigenous man was far from constituting a single materiality.
Subaltern to white men, at the same time as hegemonic in relation to women and other indigenous men considered less male, the bodies of indigenous men in the missions are therefore a colonial production.
Source link : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02925-6
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Publish date : 2024-05-14 03:00:00
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