A cosmologia construída de fora: a relação com o outro como forma de produção social entre os grupos chaquenhos no século 18

Abstract

After more than one and a half century of dangerous and sporadic contacts made with natives from Chaco, the Spanish Crown began, in the second half of the seventeenth century, an evangelizing project by the encouragement of evangelical missions in that region, in order to establish a peaceful approach with the various indigenous groups and to ensure a safe transit to the trade route between Buenos Aires harbor and Chilean Andean mines. Although this new colonizing approach has not resulted in a native pacification, the contact between them was intensified by the proliferation of Reductions in the region over the referred century, leading many missionaries and explorers to venture into the interior of Chaco, with the purpose of having a broader contact with the uncontacted groups. This opportunity has generated a series of impressions, criticism, ethnographic descriptions, official reports, agreements and negotiations, which had been documented throughout the eighteenth century, enabling an analysis not only of the Spanish speech concerning the contact, but also the posture, the understanding and the choices indians made regarding the contact with agents and colonial institutions. This thesis details, as a result of studies carried out in a variety of historical records produced by civil and religious observers, from a historiography on the contact between natives and Europeans in Chaco and from ethnographies produced about Chaco’s contemporary groups, that indians made their own decisions and took actions on the basis of a logic that was not spontaneous or case-by-case, neither the result of improvisation with the new situations posed by colonial advance. This logic is held in a complex mythological system which guided the indigenous way of thinking and perceptions, providing their own cosmology, unlike that of modern colonizers. To demonstrate this hypothesis, I analyze three indigenous socioeconomic features on a daily basis, whose practical backgrounds rely on the relationship with mythological elements and thus on the cosmological understanding that indians possessed about the world: the war, the trade and the economic system of production and food consumption.