Modernity was born with the clash between Europe and its “other” and controlling it, defeating it, violating it, “to that", when you can dress with a discoverer, conqueror, colonizer and mainly civilizer.
Faced with the differences between indigenous peoples and Europeans, the first attitude is one of repudiation or fascination, with the natives questioning the ownership or not of the soul. The church insisted on the possession of souls by the natives, recommending that they be Christianized. This action served as a moral support to slavery and a cover-up for the other.
Missionary, in the religious sense of the term, is the person charged with preaching the Faith. It is a work designed for the conversion of heathens. “Mission” is the action of evangelizing the natives.
This spiritual achievement is a very contradictory process. Every conquest is irrational and violent, the Jesuits preach the love of a religion, Christianity, which in an ambiguous way has a founder who is crucified, an innocent victim, where bases the memory of a community of believers, the Church, which in the time of the Roman Empire was also victimized, and on the other hand, shows itself to be a modern and violent human person who preached an innocent in the native.
In the case of the Missions, they were not seen as enslaving but civilizing. To civilize meant to imbue the Hindu with the Christian faith and the values of the Iberian culture. For this action to be continuous, the Indians were reduced by the missionaries, that is, confined to a certain space called reduction, village or pueblo.
This work tries to go to the myth of modernity and its origin, where it develops an irrational myth of justification of violence that must be denied and overcome.
The Indians, who were previously conquered by force of arms, with the Jesuit missions, come to be dominated by the imagination, where they see their own rights denied, their own civilization, its culture, its gods, in the name of a single God, who is not yours, a foreigner, and of a modern reason that gave the conquerors the necessary legitimacy to conquer.
The Jesuits took care of the spiritual and the temporal, taking advantage of the customs of those who were dominated in this action. The Guarani reductions flourished in the Baroque period, which brought a new vision of the universe in motion, thanks to the works of Copernicus and Galileo.
Postmodern authors criticized the modern reason because it is a reason for terror, this view criticizes that reason for covering up an irrational myth. Overcoming modernity is what is intended.
A characteristic of modernity is to create a myth of its goodness, civilizing it, to justify its violence, declaring itself innocent by the annulment of the other. This imaginary is not fixed in concrete reality, they are pretext objects in which the conquerors exercise their projections, without considering the social context of the conquered.
The modern view has an ethnocentric perspective, which sees the fact through only a reference of behaviors, reducing the different attitudes of behaving to anomalies, mistakes, attitudes deviants. This perspective highlights the fact that one does not consider the other in himself, but sees himself in him.
The task performed by this work is to develop a theory, or philosophy of dialogue that is part of a philosophy of liberation of the oppressed, the excluded, the other. The Philosophy of Liberation starts from the position of the oppressed, the excluded (from the massacred and exploited culture), from the concrete fact of History. It tries to show this possibility of dialogue, from the affirmation of alterity and, at the same time, of negativity, from its empirical impossibility concrete, at least as a starting point for the dominated to effectively intervene not in an argument or in a conversation, but in a dialogue properly rational.
The allegedly innocent victim and sacrificial violence began its long destructive path. Alliances and treaties never fulfilled, demands to betray their religion and culture under penalty of death or expulsion, land occupation, and all sorts of cover-ups by the native.
Because they are different, is it necessary to consider them outside of humanity? Do you consider them as Christian virtualities? Or should we question our view of humanity? Recognize that culture is plural? What should be the rational or ethical position on this fact?
What would the meeting of two worlds be, of these two cultures? The clash of these worlds elaborates a myth of a New World, as a culture of harmony between the two sides. What happened in the case was not a meeting, but a shock, which devastated the indigenous culture. The concept of encounter is a cover-up because it hides the domination of the European “I”, of its “world”, over the world of the “other”, in this case, of the Jesuit catechist over the Guarani native.
No meeting can be held because there is total contempt for the Guaranítica culture and beliefs. What actually occurs is an asymmetrical relationship, where the other's world is excluded from all possible rationality and religious validity.
It is obvious that the result of the clash between the culture transmitted by the Jesuits – Iberian culture – and the native culture, in this case – the Guarani, results in a syncretic religion. The syncretism occurs due to the Jesuits using elements of the Guarani culture, such as the language, the use of chimarrão to avoid drunkenness. In addition, the Guarani tribes were not dispersed, but grouped in blocks of dwellings with their chiefs and their shape corresponded to the home of the indigenous clan.
What can be seen with this domination is that a new, syncretic, hybrid culture was born, whose subject it is far from being the result of a process of cultural synthesis, but rather an effect of its domination and acculturation.
Text written by historian Patrícia Barboza da silva, student of the Licentiate course at the Federal University of Rio Grande Foundation – FURG.
Bibliographic references:
FLOWERS, Moacyr. History of Rio Grande do Sul. Porto Alegre, Nova Dimensão, 1996, 5th edition.
LAPLANTINE, François. Learn Anthropology. Editora Brasiliense, 1994, 8th edition.
DUEL, Enrique. Philosophy of Liberation. São Paulo, loyolo-unimp, s/d.
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