04 Nov 2018 09:00 AM - 11:00 AM(America/Vancouver)
20181104T090020181104T1100America/VancouverMissionaries, Indigenous Knowledge, and Globalization in Early Modern Iberian Worlds
With the commercial and colonial expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the early modern world, European missionaries played an important role in the interactions with indigenous peoples around the globe. In the course of the interactions, European missionaries intentionally (and unintentionally) collected, reported, edited, and filtered knowledge of the natural world from various indigenous and colonial communities. In many places, missionaries were the leading edge of European colonization and provided some of the first accounts of new natural spaces and specimens. Consider the example of José de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit that served as a missionary in sixteenth-century Peru. His Natural and Moral History of Indies is considered to be on the earliest European accounts of American nature even though this work was part of Acosta’s primary goal to promote evangelization of the Americas. The papers in this session will present new research on missionaries in the Spanish and Portuguese empires and will engage in critical re-evaluation of the role of missionaries as mediators of indigenous knowledge of nature. The various contributions offer an important exploration of ways in which the social, political, and religious contexts shaped the ways in which missionaries engaged with indigenous communities, imperial projects, and new natural phenomena. Drawing on archival and printed sources, this panel seeks to offer new insight into the ways in which the experience and activities of missionaries confirms and challenges existing narratives of empire, globalization, and cross-cultural interaction in the history of early modern science and medicine.
Organized by Matthew Crawford (Kent State University)
Leschi, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
With the commercial and colonial expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the early modern world, European missionaries played an important role in the interactions with indigenous peoples around the globe. In the course of the interactions, European missionaries intentionally (and unintentionally) collected, reported, edited, and filtered knowledge of the natural world from various indigenous and colonial communities. In many places, missionaries were the leading edge of European colonization and provided some of the first accounts of new natural spaces and specimens. Consider the example of José de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit that served as a missionary in sixteenth-century Peru. His Natural and Moral History of Indies is considered to be on the earliest European accounts of American nature even though this work was part of Acosta’s primary goal to promote evangelization of the Americas. The papers in this session will present new research on missionaries in the Spanish and Portuguese empires and will engage in critical re-evaluation of the role of missionaries as mediators of indigenous knowledge of nature. The various contributions offer an important exploration of ways in which the social, political, and religious contexts shaped the ways in which missionaries engaged with indigenous communities, imperial projects, and new natural phenomena. Drawing on archival and printed sources, this panel seeks to offer new insight into the ways in which the experience and activities of missionaries confirms and challenges existing narratives of empire, globalization, and cross-cultural interaction in the history of early modern science and medicine.
Organized by Matthew Crawford (Kent State University)
Global Empire, Jesuit Networks, and the Deniable Body: Nature and Disease in Colonial Brazil, 1549-1565View Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 17:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 17:30:00 UTC
Portugal’s Atlantic empire had a way of ignoring Brazilian nature and of making some bodies more evidentiary than others. In an age in which the South American landscape was said to brim with all manner of mirabilia and in which many metropolitan naturalists eagerly sought novelties from abroad, not one naturalist from sixteenth-century Portugal travelled to Brazil to catalogue its nature and scour it for wonders. Meanwhile, in the face of widely circulated, lurid, and pained accounts of rampant disease beginning almost as soon as concerted colonization got underway in 1549, generations of Portuguese observers continued to tout the health of Portugal’s South American colonies. In this paper, I argue that the Society of Jesus helped inaugurate both of these patterns. If, as most modern historians suggest, the Jesuits were advocates of the careful, disciplined study of natural phenomena, I argue that for the mid-sixteenth century that view is at best anachronistic. I show that the first generation of Jesuits in Portuguese America encouraged both a learned ignorance of Brazilian nature and a tendency among colonial contemporaries to dismiss the bodily manifestations of epidemic disease. I show how Jesuit accounts of both nature and disease grew out of debates within the Society over the allocation of personnel and expertise—at a time when the order itself was still relatively new, poor, vulnerable, and vying for patronage and authority.
Global Connections and Representations: The Circulation of a Medicinal Plant in the Late Eighteenth-century Portuguese AmericaView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 17:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 18:00:00 UTC
This paper will present an attempt to visualize the itineraries of objects and knowledge in the hinterlands of Portuguese America at the end of the eighteenth century. One source is a handwritten document that outlines the travels of José Joaquim Roiz, an expert in the hinterlands of Pernambuco. The Junta do Comércio (Council of Commerce) in Lisbon had commissioned Roiz to locate new medicines for trade and, as part of his commission, Roiz had extensive contact with indigenous communities in Portuguese America. In addition to the document relating to Roiz and his travels, this paper discusses the use of information from newspapers and medical journals (coevos) to track the movement of Ayapana in the Lusophone world from Piancó, in the hinterlands, to Lisbon. as well as the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a geoprocessing software, to construct maps of that trace the diffusion of this plant. Finally, the analysis will include some comparison of these GIS maps with geographical conceptions contained in the writings of Roiz and in maps of Portuguese America from the late eighteenth century. This project seeks to represent and frame the movement Ayapana from perspective of connected histories in which the site becomes global.
Jesuit Beans and Vomitory Nuts: Mobilising Indigenous Materia Medica in the Late Seventeenth-century PhilippinesView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences10:00 AM - 10:30 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 18:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 18:30:00 UTC
When stationed in Manila, the Jesuit pharmacist and missionary Georg Joseph Kamel (1661-1706) produced extensive accounts about Philippine flora, which were later printed in Europe. Drawing on the example of the St Ignatius bean, a medicinal plant native to the Philippines monopolised by the Jesuit order, I will explore Kamel’s strategies in mobilising local materia medica from the indigenous into a European context. I will argue that in introducing the ‘Jesuit bean’ to his European readers, Kamel downplayed its novelty and identified it with the nux vomica of the medieval Arabian physician Serapion, whose work had been adopted into European traditions centuries ago. This association endowed the plant with a clear place within European frameworks of knowledge, as well as with specific virtues: nux vomica means literally a ‘vomitory nut’. To bolster this carefully constructed link, Kamel provided accounts of medical cases which clearly attested to the emetic qualities of the plant. Perfectly blending erudite and empirical evidence, Kamel thus managed to smoothly transplant the St Ignatius bean into Europe. I will briefly contrast these Jesuit efforts to mobilise indigenous remedies and introduce them on the European market with those of the Spanish empire, which struggled to exploit local natural resources with such efficiency. I will suggest that – at least in the late seventeenth-century Philippines – Jesuit motivations, networks and modus operandi were more strongly aligned with extraction and exploitation of indigenous knowledge than the concerns and inner workings of the Spanish empire.
The Extirpation of Idolatry and the Secularization of Nature: Jesuit Missionaries and Indigenous Healing Knowledge in Colonial PeruView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences10:30 AM - 11:00 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 18:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 19:00:00 UTC
In colonial Spanish America, missionaries served as important collectors and mediators of indigenous knowledge of the natural world. Missionaries, especially Jesuit missionaries, provided some of the earliest accounts of American nature. Much of this knowledge came from their contacts in indigenous communities and, as a result, missionaries played a vital role in the assimilation of indigenous knowledge to European ways of understanding the natural world. Focusing on missionary accounts of indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants, this paper will explore the role of Jesuit missionaries in the secularization of indigenous knowledge – a process whereby missionaries stripped away any spiritual meaning that local nature had according to indigenous worldviews and religions. Instead, many missionaries reported and encouraged others to report only the pragmatic use and empirical information about natural phenomena. What is interesting is that the Jesuits and other missionaries had religious motivations for engaging in the secularization of indigenous knowledge of nature, especially in seventeenth-century Peru during the campaigns to extirpate “idolatry” among native Andeans. Consequently, this paper seeks to highlight the role that Jesuit missionaries played in making New World nature knowable to European sciences, while also emphasizing their underappreciated role in the secularization of indigenous knowledge – a process that has echoes in the persistent tendency to characterize indigenous informants as purveyors of empirical observations.
Matthew Crawford
