‘“Democracy” Otherwise: The Jesuit Reducciones and European Political Enlightenment’ is an initiative by Prof. Arnd Schneider (Department of Social Social Anthropology, UiO) and Prof. Pasi Väliaho (Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas) which discusses its research agenda over two days, with a film screening and panel discussion as well as an academic seminar, funded by UiO Democracy. Both events are open to the interested public.
FILM SCREENING & PANEL DISCUSSION
The Mission (1986, dir. Roland Joffé, UK; 125 mins; with Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons) is about a Jesuit missionary's experiences in the 18th century's South America. You can read more about the movie here: The Mission.
The film screening will be followed by a panel discussion.
- When: Tuesday 5 March
- Where: Auditorium 7, ground floor, SV-Fakultet, Moltke Moes vei 31
SCHEDULE
15.30 Reception in the Foyer
16.00 – 18.00 Film Screening
18.00 – 19.00 Panel discussion with Brian P. Owensby (University of Viriginia, US), Joel Robbins (Cambridge), Arnd Schneider (UiO), Pasi Väliaho (UiO), Guillermo Wilde (CONICET – Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina)
ACADEMIC SEMINAR
- When: Thursday 7 March 2024 (10.15 – 15.00)
- Where: Department of Social Anthropology, 9th floor, Seminarrom ES-B 929, SV-Fakultet, Moltke Moes vei 31.
The Jesuit Missions in South America in the 17th and 18th centuries present an important social experiment in the history of political thought and colonialism. The mission settlements (reducciones) were theocratic experiments of their times where indigenous cultures became mixed with Christian beliefs and European science. Whilst proselytizing enterprises, to be sure, they also allowed for a certain level of self-organization, agency and maintenance of indigenous traditions and languages. Interestingly, the missions challenged the voracious and extractive colonialism of early settlers and the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Idealized as a ‘land without evil’ by some, their form of government and the visual and ethnographic data produced by the Jesuits about indigenous forms of social life aroused the interest of Enlightenment thinkers, and influenced their debates about democracy and equality. The purpose of this workshop is to explore how European Enlightenment concepts of politics, especially democracy, might be seen as the result of a series of mediations through colonial encounters and projected utopias. Even if the primary objective of the reducciones was to impose a new, European notion of society on the natives, how might indigenous ideas and practices as conveyed by the Jesuits have challenged the European conceptual frame? How, indeed, did the political experiment of the Jesuits with the reducciones feed into European debates about good political life and government? And how, furthermore, might we envision the relevance of the reducciones in the present moment of decolonial political struggles?
SCHEDULE
10.15 - 10.45 Introduction (Arnd Schneider & Pasi Väliaho, UiO)
10.45 - 12.30 Guillermo Wilde (CONICET – Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina): Imagining the City of God: Disputed Visions of Space in the Jesuit Missions in the Iberian Frontiers
The Jesuit missions of Paraguay have been frequently regarded as the realization of an ideal Christian Government in the philosophical and political literature of the last centuries. Built in the beginning of the 17th century in the Southern borderlands of the Iberian Empires, the missions not only aimed at the conversion to Christianity of several indigenous populations that had resisted the Spanish conquest until then, but also a radical reform of customs that would transform Barbarians into true citizens. The forced resettlement and concentration of those populations in mission towns, led to the fragmentation of traditional indigenous lands and the emergence of new forms of colonial urbanism and territoriality based on principles of order, rationality and hierarchy. While most of the historical chronicles, maps and plans produced in the missions contributed to crystallize an hegemonic narrative of that urbanism and territory, some others point to alternative visions, disputes, appropriations associated with local uses and indigenous representations. Based on a corpus of urbanistic and cartographic corpus, this talk explores disputed narratives on missionary space and analyzes their complexity over the long term.
12.30 - 13.30 Lunch
13.30 - 15.00 Brian P. Owensby (University of Virginia, US): Aguîyeí, bien común and the Response to Gain and Predation in the Guaraní-Jesuit Mission World: “Democracy” and Good Government as a Shared Human Accomplishment?
Faced with Spanish individual gain-seeking beginning in the sixteenth century, Guaraní people came to understand their situation as one requiring a response to a new sort of predation. Europeans, they wrote to the king in 1630, were treating them like prey, undermining the very idea of social life. After royal law failed to control this behavior, Guaraní people had allied with Jesuit missionaries who were willing to work with the Guaraní to create communities rooted in the idea of tecó aguǐyeí, a state of social goodness governed by notions of reciprocity and mutuality, a principle that had much in common with the Jesuit notion of the “common good.” This convergence gave rise to the Mission World as a moral community which for a century-and-a half sheltered Guaraní from the worst effects of gain as the emerging dominant form of economic behavior among Europeans, while allowing the Guaraní to thrive at least partially on their own terms. By the end of the eighteenth century, Spanish imperial policy had reneged on its commitment to the Guaraní as vassals cabeza del rey (vassals directly under the authority of the king). Instead, the Guaraní, as “indios,” were to be made more “useful” through market-oriented reforms that ended the Mission World by the early nineteenth century. Through close consideration of available sources, this talk proposes that the Mission World experiment be seen as an example of indigenous “good government” that can extend recent efforts to understand democratic governance as a broadly shared aspect of the human political experience, rather than as a form that emerged singularly during the European Enlightenment. I conclude by suggesting that conceptualizing the problem of gain through the lens of predation, rather than in terms of Hobbes’ war of all against all, might lead to novel conclusions about the role of economy should play in good government.