Book
The supernatural history of Brazil
Book rescues obscure facts about work
Christianization of Indians in Portuguese America
Luiz Sugimoto
Anthropophagy, collective drinking, polygamy, pagan rituals, nomadism, everyday tribal wars. How to live with people like this? For the Portuguese rulers of colonial Brazil, it was impossible. Hence the decision to catechize the indigenous people or, if there was resistance, to enslave or decimate them.
The living and the dead in Portuguese America – From anthropophagy to the water of baptism is a book by Glória Kok, released by Editora da Unicamp, focusing on the links that Indians and Jesuits established with the supernatural world. Graduated in philosophy, master and doctorate in social history from USP, Glória gathered precious testimonies about the way Brazilian natives – notably the Tupi-Guarani – faced death and paradise, their shamanic practices, the meaning of their wars, the forms of resistance in the face of colonizers and the atrocities they were victims of in the name of Christianization.
Following the Pope's recognition that Indians are rational beings (in 1537) and the arrival of the Society of Jesus (in 1549), Glória Kok rescues obscure facts from colonial history that are still little publicized today. This omission, on the one hand, helped to perpetuate the prejudice against ancestral rites, because, by ignoring their meanings, we became accustomed to seeing them as a manifestation of the Indians' ignorance. On the other hand, it contributed to keeping the official history immaculate, where the genocide of natives is practically not mentioned and which is only now beginning to be revised and retold to primary school students.
In the opinion of the USP researcher, in recent years there has been a large production of theses and books by historians, which illuminated the topic of colonization of Portuguese America from different perspectives. “These texts are gradually transposed, albeit with filters, into primary and secondary education books. Thus, the conflicts inherent to the catechization process and slavery are already presented inseparably from the history of colonization in several textbooks and paradidactics on the Brazilian market", she states.
Glória, however, emphasizes that this is not enough. "In my opinion, the books should also include a more detailed and dynamic approach to the Tupi-Guarani indigenous rituals and the reading that the Jesuits made of them, as well as that the Indians made of the Christian world, so that students can understand the disputes symbolic structures that structure our imagination".
Today - Asked to evaluate the stance of today's Church towards the Indians, the author of The Living and the Dead recalls that, even in the Colony, the Jesuits gathered all their strength for catechesis and, to do so, they needed to make their own procedures more flexible. She believes that this approach towards Indians changed, especially since the 70s, with the emergence of Liberation Theology in Latin America, when the Church began to side with the oppressed. "I'm not an expert on the matter, but it can be seen that, on the one hand, the Church has developed a much more tolerant standard towards different and ancestral cultures and, on the other, many indigenous peoples have become more aware of the need to preserve traditions tribal and different cultures, organizing resistance movements".
The dead in unrest
Below is a (practically literal) reproduction of some topics from Chapter 1 of The Living and the Dead in Portuguese America – From anthropophagy to the water of baptism. The chapter has the title above and this summary, obviously, does not reflect the wealth of details with which Glória Kok rescues indigenous relationships with the supernatural world:
*At the time of the arrival of Europeans in Portuguese America, the Tupi lived on the Atlantic coast from Amazonas to Cananéia and in the Amazon basin region, while the Guarani were distributed along the coast from Cananéia to Rio Grande do Sul, infiltrating the banks of the Paraná, Uruguay and Paraguay rivers. This occupation by the Tupi-Guarani was interrupted only in some points on the coast: at the mouth of the Paraíba River by the Goitacá, by the Aimoré in the south of Bahia and north of Espírito Santo, and by the Tremembé in the strip between Ceará and Maranhão. These non-Tupi people were called Tapuias.
*Wars between indigenous tribes, even those with the same language, raged throughout the territory. There was only one reason for these conflicts: they wanted to avenge the death of their ancestral parents. For Europeans, these wars made no sense at all, as they were not aimed at expanding territory, enriching themselves, dominating, exploiting or annihilating the enemy. Often, a large contingent of men was mobilized for war raids, the result of which was the capture of a single prisoner, who would then be ritually eaten by the tribe.
*In the victorious village, the captured Indian was received with great joy and enthusiasm. He was under little supervision, because if he ran away he would be considered a coward in his homeland and would end up suffering the shame of being killed by the Indians of his own tribe. Death by the enemy was the ideal, desired by everyone: the consecration of the warrior. There was no prisoner who would not rather be killed and eaten than ask for forgiveness.
*For cowards and men who had never killed an enemy, destiny reserved for them the mortality of the soul, the rotting of the body, the transformation into a spectral existence, which retained nothing more human. Valorous warriors, who imprisoned and killed many enemies, or even women dedicated to preparing prisoners' meat and eating it, were allowed entry into this ideal life crowned by coexistence with ancestors, gods and civilizing heroes.
*It is fair to say that the Indians believed in the reality of a substance beyond the physical body, to which the Europeans gave the name soul. But the Indian soul did not involve the idea of absolute dematerialization. Nor did it suppress all connections between the "soul" and the mortal remains or free it from primitive needs. From this perspective, death represented a rift in the person, from which the body and soul underwent intense processes of transformation.
*In contrast to the victim in the yard who did not show the slightest hesitation in the face of the club blow, aware that his body would later be consumed by his enemies, the Indian who was affected by some illness and realized the proximity of death lived pierced by fear. It can be deduced that the fear came, in large part, from physical decomposition. "(...) they say it's a sad thing to die, and to be smelly and eaten by animals."
*The course of relations between the living and the dead in the Tupi-Guarani tribes changed substantially with the arrival of the Jesuits who, by bringing another model of the supernatural, disfigured and tore apart the bond existing between the living and the dead. However, before implementing it, they tried, above all, to undermine the indigenous resistance that would manifest itself in various regions and in different ways..
SERVICE
The living and the dead in Portuguese America - From anthropophagy to the water of baptism
Gloria Kok
Unicamp Publisher
Campinas, 2001
183 pages
R$19,00
