3. The materiality of cultural encounters in the Treinta Pueblos de las Misiones

Clarissa Sanfelice Rahmeier

Cultural encounters occur in our everyday lives at a speed and frequency which are difficult to measure. Such encounters involve contemplation and confrontation. Moreover, they involve negotiation. Responses to cultural encounters vary a great deal and depend upon a number of factors, such as the place where they happen, the social and historical context in which they occur and the material and psychological conditions which they involve. Cultural encounters therefore involve people and things. As cultural beings we come across these kinds of encounter in almost all spheres of our lives, especially in the type of society in which we are immersed today. Although part of our everyday lives, and perhaps because of that, they are usually taken for granted. In colonial situations, however, cultural encounters are more evident. In the colonisation of Latin America they were striking, very visible and tangible. The various responses to these encounters are evident in the written records produced at the time of colonisation and in the material culture which originated from them, as well as in the social and cultural traces which form contemporary Latin America.

This chapter will address the materiality of cultural encounters in the Jesuit missions of South America, where missionaries and the indigenous Guaraní built ‘some of the largest and most prosperous missionary complexes in the New World’.¹ Functioning as an arm of the colonial enterprise, the missions represented the crown and the Catholic Church, institutions which intermingled at several points during the course of colonialism. In particular, the chapter will focus on the Jesuit missions established in the 17th and 18th centuries in the River Plate basin, in an area which today is part of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. More than thirty missions were founded in this region, forming a belt of settlements, or reductions, known as the Treinta Pueblos or thirty pueblos of Paraguay. These missions resulted from the interaction between a handful of priests and thousands of Guaraní. More than 140,000 Indians lived in reductions around the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers in 1732, the year the missions’ total population reached its highest number.² Nearly two hundred years of interaction between the Guaraní and the Jesuits allowed the emergence of a society and culture which are unique in the history of colonialism and possibly in the history of humankind. Instead of producing a narrative of this cultural encounter through its material manifestations, this chapter discusses how the materiality of the missions, particularly the making of pottery, can be interpreted in order to inform us about colonial history, in both empirical and theoretical terms.

The materiality of cultural encounters which contributed to and resulted from the process of introducing civilisation and evangelisation into indigenous communities in Latin America is not uniform, but it is possible to identify some common traces which indicate the level of reception of European practices and values by the Guaraní. In the particular context of the missions, the introduction of new artefacts and techniques, the building of houses, churches and cemeteries combined with the social use of these elements, among many others, contributed to creating choreographies of civilisation which represented as well as reproduced a more comprehensive embodiment of colonialism. The bodies which performed these choreographies objectified some new rules and desired mentalities, reproducing, at different levels and to different degrees, an educated interaction with materiality which helped to communicate the missionary purpose.

Among the many new material forms introduced by the Jesuits in the reductions was the potter’s wheel. Designed for producing all sorts of clay objects, this machine, in the context of the missions, helped to reconfigure the relationship between individuals and the products they made and allowed a reassessment of the meaning and reorganisation of labour and time. The production of pottery artefacts through the use of the wheel required a specific set of body movements in accordance with the new structure of thought which was being implemented in the missions. We need to consider, in this context, the importance the body and the senses had for the Guaraní people: for them, the senses and the body constituted the starting point of the process of perceiving, knowing and thinking, an understanding which probably did not conceive of the intellectual and the sensorial dimensions of experience as two contradictory ends.³

New techniques associated with the body can be seen, in this sense, as part of the introduction, among the Guaraní, of a civilising project, being at the same time the result of this project as well as a means for its reproduction.⁴ Putting ‘new demands on the bodies and brains of people making, using and appreciating objects’,⁵ new materials such as the potter’s wheel, as well as all the other new artefacts and buildings which structured the missionary context, contributed to shaping the experience of cultural contact in colonial Latin America.

Cultural encounters in the Treinta Pueblos de las Misiones

The Treinta Pueblos of Paraguay were established in an active frontier region where political delimitations were not clear. The area was part of the Spanish possessions according to the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), but was claimed by Portugal throughout the 18th century. Circa 1570 the Society of Jesus arrived in Spanish America and, coming later than other religious orders, they worked on frontiers ‘where hardly any other Europeans, clerical or lay, would care or dare to go’.⁶

Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, a missionary from Lima who had participated in the establishment of the missions at the beginning of the 17th century, estimated that no fewer than 95,000 natives were baptised in Paraguay between 1612 and 1626.⁷ Letters written by the Jesuits to their superiors in Europe describe the success of the conversions, providing a positive view upon which many subsequent interpretations have been based.⁸ These letters contributed, for instance, to the construction, in Europe, of the idea of the missions as places where indigenous populations lived in contented poverty, as suggested by the idyllic account of Ludovico Muratori in the first half of the 18th century, Il Cristianesimo felice nelle missione de padri della Compagnia de Gesú nel Paraguai.⁹

The positive views of the Jesuit work in the Treinta Pueblos conflicts with a more critical literature, which sees the mission as a project through which indigenous populations were alienated from their cultural origins, the latter being annihilated under the rule of the priests and the Spanish crown. We find, however, in the material culture of the missions grounds for a more complex interpretation of the encounter between the Guaraní and Europeans – one which perceives the phenomenon of the missions in Spanish America as a process of transculturation effected by both the Guaraní and the Jesuits, although not always equally – from which a new cultural complex emerged.

This is not a case of categorising the result of contact as a melting pot, but of acknowledging that colonial situations can easily be (and frequently are) reduced to simplistic and, in the case of the Jesuit experience in Latin America, misleading interpretations. As argued by P. Cornell and F. Fahlander, ‘the encounter is seldom a matter of simple processes of local acculturation or assimilation of the way of life in the core areas of an expanding colonial regime. Rather, confrontation with differing social practice, ideologies and differing material worlds often lead to unforeseen results, far beyond the intentions of the involved individuals’.¹⁰

The term transculturation, coined by Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s,¹¹ evokes the idea of entanglement, simultaneity and coexistence. Although criticised for having covered over racial conflicts in Cuba through a concept which accommodates crucial disparities,¹² Ortiz’s contribution helped to stress the idea of cultural integration instead of cultural obliteration in colonial situations. Since its proposition, the term transculturation has been re-contextualised and employed in this way: it does not disregard friction and conflict, but stresses the outcomes of a cultural encounter in terms of the contributions each group brings to the new cultural complex which arises from it.

‘Transculturation’ is a term which has been employed in studies about the Paraguay reductions in recent decades,¹³ as it points towards a phenomenon in which both the Guaraní and Europeans contributed to the development of a new sociocultural complex. Because of its stress on coexistence and cultural complementarity, without disregarding power relations, ‘transculturation’ has been preferred to concepts such as genocide, acculturation and hybridity, which are usually (although with some dispute) applied to evoke the idea of cultural annihilation.

A central Amazonian group in origin, the Guaraní (the name means ‘warrior’) spread south and established villages along the Paraná, Uruguay and Paraguay rivers and their tributaries 1,500 years before the arrival of the Europeans (2,000 BP).¹⁴ They also occupied subtropical forests, hills and grasslands of Guairá, Tape and the area of Lagoa dos Patos in southern Brazil, as well as the island of Martín García and the area east of the Tigre river delta in the Río de la Plata.¹⁵ During their expansion southwards they came into contact with other indigenous peoples, expelling and assimilating them, in a process called Guaranisation.¹⁶

Horticulturalists with a semi-sedentary organisation in which the caciques (male political leaders) and the pajé (male spiritual leaders) played a central role, the Guaraní saw their organisation change with the arrival of the Jesuits. In this process, practices which had traditionally accompanied the Guaraní – such as anthropophagy, polytheism, polygamy, rituals involving drunkenness and smoking, burials in decorated ceramic urns, collective habitation in long houses, gender division of labour (with men searching for animal protein and women in charge of horticulture and the production of ceramic utensils for ritual and domestic use) – challenged the idea of civilisation brought by Jesuits and the colonial enterprise.

The Jesuits who organised the missions came from different areas of Europe, or sometimes from other regions of Spanish America. They were part of the Company of Jesus, created in the middle of the Counter-Reformation to secure souls and territories for the Catholic Church in face of the expansion of Protestant religions such as Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anglicanism. They were educated and trained as builders, carpenters, botanists, physicians, craftsmen, painters and farmers,¹⁷ as well as evangelists. In inhospitable territories in the hinterlands of an unknown continent, their secular skills were required more than their knowledge of religion. The Jesuits brought to the hinterlands of Latin America the printing press, new varieties of fruit and vegetables such as lettuce, cabbages, limes, oranges, peaches, pears, rice, coffee, bananas and sugarcane. They also brought cows, sheep and horses; and introduced technical innovations such as iron-mongering, the potter’s wheel and gunpowder.

In the missions two or three Jesuit fathers ministered to thousands of Indians – the mission of San Miguel Arcanjo, for example, counted more than four thousand Guaraní. The missions were self-sufficient communities which based their economic activities on agriculture, cattle raising, artisan production and the cultivation of yerba mate. Commercial relations with secular settlers were a secondary goal, but were necessary to raise capital for the payment of debts and tribute owed to the Spanish crown and for the purchase of church ornaments.¹⁸

In terms of physical organisation, the missions consisted of a village organised around a central plaza or square. Houses of the caciques surrounded this plaza and a church, ‘the largest and most imposing structure in every mission’,¹⁹ occupied a privileged location. Next to the church were the workshops, the living quarters for the priests, an orchard and a vegetable garden, as well as separate cemeteries for the women and children and for the men. Priests were buried inside the church. Orphans, single women and widows lived in separate quarters known as a coti guazu. The Guaraní who were part of a mission but did not belong to the nobility lived in thatched huts outside the main village. To the Guaraní, living in a mission could constitute a guarantee of survival in the face of constant attacks by the bandeirantes, who came from São Paulo to hunt Indians and sell them in other areas of Brazil where African slaves were lacking. The Guaraní who lived in the mission were also protected from the European settlers, mainly from Asunción, who were interested in them as a labour force. At the same time, the mission represented a space where limited freedom was granted.

In order to live in a mission the Guaraní had to abandon some of their practices. Rituals involving drunkenness were to be replaced by the ceremony of baptism; anthropophagy²⁰ was to be translated into the symbolic practice of the Holy Communion; the dead were to be buried in a Catholic cemetery, which was divided according to the gender and age of the deceased;²¹ children were to attend the missions’ schools; and through them adults were expected to learn the Gospel and the correct behaviour of a vassal of the king. Indian chiefs were expected to lead their people according to the plan for conversion and civilisation. The Guaraní were to pray and sing the Gospel; attend daily masses; cover their bodies; avoid prenuptial sexual relations; learn Spanish; form an army; defend their territory from Portuguese incursions; and work in workshops and the fields. All these norms were introduced into the Indians’ life, but to what extent they were followed is a question which cannot be fully answered.²² We cannot truthfully rely, for instance, on the letters sent annually by the Jesuits to their superiors in Europe, which sought to depict the success of missionary work.²³ In these letters the cultural encounters are described in idyllic terms, portraying an image of the missionary experience in which the possibility or expectation of changing in behaviour – the ‘were to’ of the sentences above – was presented instead as a real achievement of the Jesuit work.

The Guaraní were infantilised in the narrative, depicted as children who needed to be guided and taught, as innocent creatures to whom the opportunity of becoming complete human beings had been given. This affected other symbolic and practical aspects of missionisation which were part of the colonial project in the Americas: in order to reach the true God the Indians first needed to be educated and civilised, which also implied their subservience to a faraway king. Through the official written record the cultural encounter appears as a work of edification. The material evidence of this encounter, however, points to a more complex and encompassing experience.

The process of transculturation which took place in the missions from the beginning of their formation varied according to the time, the people and the environment in which they were established. The missions had their economic, political and ideological role in the process of the colonisation of Latin America; and the interaction between the players who took part in that process generated events which were marked by different degrees of friction and accommodation which varied over time. The process of transculturation did not imply only peaceful, successful or edifying integration, as narrated by the Jesuits in their official letters, nor was it characterised solely by violence towards, or disease and suffering on the part of, the Guaraní population, the people who were colonised. The material culture which characterised the missionary context is testimony to the fundamental role played by Guaraní traditional culture in shaping the missions of Paraguay in a colonial situation. For instance, the long houses which the caciques were allocated in the missions, around the plaza, make it evident that the practice of living with extended families did not disappear under the supervision of the Jesuits.²⁴ However, while Indians of a high status could keep their multiple households, the Guaraní who did not take part in political decisions were expected to follow the single-family model of organisation as advised by the priests. The coexistence of Guaraní and European practices and the materiality which accompanied them suggest a world of complementarity. It does not disregard conflict, but acknowledges the persistence of the Guaraní culture in a model of social organisation formally guided by Western thought.

Another example of the inclusive character of the cultural encounter in the missionary experience is the production of carved wooden Catholic images by Indians. The making of statues of saints by the Guaraní, who turned out to be great artisans even by European standards, reveals not simply their acceptance of a new religion, as narrated by the Jesuits, but their own re-reading of the new cultural element: many of the sculptures of saints depicted indigenous faces. Some expressed happiness and contentment, characteristics which were not common in Iberian and South American religious art in the same period.²⁵ Similarly, the regional flora and the fauna were incorporated into the baroque style brought to the Americas. The diet based on local ingredients coexisted with European foods brought by the Jesuits, such as wheat and domesticated animal protein. The use of native plants to heal the sick also demonstrates the importance of pre-contact practices and expertise in the development of the missions.

These examples of the persistence of Guaraní cultural traces in the material culture of the missions, and therefore in the social dynamics which this materiality evoked, are important in the reconstruction of the narrative of the colonial process. They demonstrate the interdependent character of the cultural encounter, which is often ignored in the traditional colonial literature. It is not the case of epistemologically equalising integration to passive or desired accommodation, but of understanding that, in the missions, although the Catholic religion was an imposition, its acceptance was not complete and did not erase native thoughts, practices and behaviour. The material culture created and utilised in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay points towards this interdependency. However, acknowledging the cultural complementarity and coexistence present in material evidence provides only limited insight into the cultural encounter and the historical production of reality. A concern with the human, embodied experience can, therefore, help to identify the cultural ruptures and persistence experienced in the context of the missions. We can look at how embodiment took place in the missions by looking at the pottery and the techniques involved in its production.

Techniques of pottery production and the embodiment of the Jesuit project

Technical processes are a strategic site for the organisation and reproduction of society.²⁶ As argued by A. Leroy-Gourhan, techniques can reveal human acts throughout time.²⁷ Techniques therefore provide insights into the historical production of reality. It is not the case that the use of increasingly complex techniques can necessarily be linked to the acceptance of the new to the detriment of the old, but it can tell us about the level of attainment of a particular skill by a group, as well as the social character of the acceptance or rejection of this skill. Technical variants (in terms of form, decoration, tools, essential operations or whole processes) not only provide evidence for the existence of choices but also reveal them to the observer.²⁸ Changes in technique also offer insight into social changes as the two live in constant symbiosis.²⁹

We can verify, through pottery, the interaction between the technologies of the Guaraní and Europeans in the missions in terms of what changed and what continued to be produced, as well as how objects were produced. More specifically, we can trace a chronology of change in techniques, form, decoration and function of pottery throughout the almost two hundred years of contact between the Guaraní and Europeans, as well as infer the degree of assimilation, exchange, accommodation and persistence of traces of both cultures. The life of this segment of culture, through its production, consumption and discarding, is linked to the life of the mission itself, to the dynamics of colonisation and to the processes of social interaction which developed in that milieu. The introduction of the technology of the potter’s wheel by the Jesuits changed the way pottery was made, conceptualised and perceived. These changes also demonstrate variations in culture and social organisation, indicating ruptures and continuities which characterised the cultural encounter.

The introduction of new European techniques into the lives of the Guaraní formed a channel via which a new model of social organisation was taught and reinforced. This new model was associated with new forms of behaviour and, ideally, with new forms of thought. The new concrete sequences of operations (chaînes opératoires) involved in the process of pottery-making introduced by the Jesuits to the missions contributed to the embodiment of the values present in the colonial enterprise. Amongst all the techniques introduced by the Jesuits into South America, the manufacture of pottery has probably the greatest potential for revealing the encounter through embodiment since it has a counterpart in Guaraní culture prior to the arrival of the Jesuits.

Figures 3.1 and 3.2. Woman making a clay pot according to the traditional technique called acordelado (Source: G. Jussara. Artisan: Feliciana Tenazor, Tukúna Indian from Belém village, River Solimão, 1979, from T. Lima, ‘Cerâmica indígena brasileira’, in B. Ribeiro (ed.) (1986), Suma etnológica brasileira, vol. 2 (Petrópolis: Vozes), p. 182).

The Guaraní technique for pottery making

Like in many other indigenous cultures in which clay objects are hand-crafted by women,³⁰ in Guaraní culture women and pottery were also intrinsically linked.³¹ Men could take part only in the collection and transportation of clay from the river banks, but the ceramics were then prepared by women in a domestic setting mainly according to the acordelado technique.³² Still used in many different contexts around the world, this technique of modelling consists of twisting chunks of soft clay to make coils which are layered from the bottom up until a desired form is reached.³³

Figure 3.3. First sequence of clay pot making, before decoration, nearly finished. (Source: J. Gruber. Artisan: Feliciana Tenazor, Tukúna Indian from Belém village, River Solimão, 1979, from T. Lima, ‘Cerâmica indígena brasileira’, in B. Ribeiro (ed.) (1986) Suma etnológica brasileira, vol. 2 (Petrópolis: Vozes), p. 183).

Squatting or sitting on the floor, women engaged directly with the clay throughout the whole process of making a piece, from regulating the earth texture until the decoration, finishing and firing of the object.³⁴ They put their skills into it; their whole bodies were connected to the actions of making a piece from the beginning to the end. Working the clay with their bare hands against a board or even their thighs in order to make coils, using their fingers to repair gaps and smooth the surface required a corporeal connection which imprinted a very personal mark on the final object. In this way traditional ceramic objects represented not only a tribe or clan but also woman’s individuality, deliberately or not. Nail and finger marks on pots illustrate this connection and the artisanal, unique way of working the clay.

The introduction of the potter’s wheel by the Jesuits de-personalised the ceramic objects. One could argue that throwing a pot is as much a corporeal technique as is modelling and can thus reveal the artist’s presence. However, pats, squeezes, pinches and hand-pressure on the clay objects made according to the acordelado technique communicate individuality in a way the potter’s wheel does not. The two techniques derived from different cosmologies and served two different purposes in the context of the mission; and these were reproduced on the objects themselves. The use of the wheel required a new physical skill, a re-ordering of time and the reinforcement of the European concept of labour. The articles manufactured through throwing clay on a wheel did not carry the mark of the artisan or the symbol of the ethnic group. They were similar to the pottery produced in other missions or in Europe. The standardisation of production accompanied the civilising project brought to America by the Jesuits, which aimed at eventually turning Indians into Christians through forging a spatial and temporal order which involved objects, practices, concepts and bodies perceived essentially as symbols of Christianity.³⁵ The potter’s wheel, in this context, not only sped up the production of pottery, but ended up being a means through which the embodiment of a new social and moral code took place.

The technique introduced by the Jesuits: the potter’s wheel

Under the Jesuits the manufacture of pottery using the wheel was a male task. All male Guarani between the ages of 12 and 50, except those men in charge of agriculture and farming, had to work in the workshops next to the church.³⁶ Overseen by the priest, the men produced housewares and church ornaments (tiles and bricks were produced in the brickyard). During the harvest the artisans divided their labour between the workshops (for one week) and the fields (two weeks), for which they received rations after attending mass at the end of the day.³⁷ All tasks carried out in the artisan workshops were overseen by a Jesuit, who guided and controlled their execution. Keeping the Guaraní men busy with work was consistent with the religious view that spare time was a gap which could be filled by temptation, sin or addiction³⁸ and that in a civilised world it should be filled by the catechism, prayer and labour.³⁹

The physical contact of the male artisan with the clay was limited almost entirely to his hands. The work was very dependent on the manipulation of instruments, such as shovels, moulds and the potter’s wheel, and on the management of the animals used to tread the clay and to carry it from its source to the place of pottery production. The artist engaged with the clay and with the wheel, which directed both his movements and the form of the raw material acquired. The machine had to be understood by the artisan and moulded to his body so that both its spin and speed would be aligned with the artisan’s intentions and movements. Despite this connection, the body did not manifest itself in the piece produced. Contrary to the pottery produced by the Guaraní in the traditional, pre-contact way, the personal marks of the artisan were not clearly objectified in an artefact produced using the wheel.

Although the new elements and techniques presented to the Guaraní by the Jesuits had an impact, they were not sufficient to separate them completely from the traditional manner of producing pottery. As previously shown, concessions were made in many aspects of life, such as allowing residence in extended family houses, permitting polygamous relationships and also keeping alive the traditional way of making pottery: by women, individually, in the domestic setting.⁴⁰ In other words, even though the ordinary artefacts brought into the Guaraní’s life by the Jesuits had a considerable impact in re-ordering their lives and structuring thought, ⁴¹ the political, social and economic organisation of the Guaraní was to some extent preserved in order to secure the missions’ stability.⁴²

Cultural negotiations: material culture and transculturation in the missions

Alone, the production of pottery on the wheel, by male Guaraní, in a delimited territory and controlled by a supervisor during a certain period of time, cannot encompass the whole process of civilisation and conversion to Christianity. However, it can add to other elements which were involved, such as the physical and conceptual transformation of the landscape and the implications for individuals’ relationships. Roads, houses, workshops, allotments, communal gardens, a square, a church, cemeteries can all be perceived as ‘moments in a general technology of localisation’.⁴³ In this way, the building of a mission involved several instances of the production of locality, all eminently connected to and imbued with ideas of immorality and sin, of private and public property, of heaven and earth, dichotomist concepts which permeated the process of evangelisation and the Western idea of civilisation.

Clothing the people, housing them in a different materiality and within a new spatial organisation, renaming them, reorganising their time, changing burial rituals and the places where they occurred, introducing the sounds of musical instruments and the church bell, organising daily routine according to the ringing of the bell, inaugurating new practices such as ploughing and manufacturing pottery – all this contributed to the production of the locality ‘as a structure of feeling’.⁴⁴ Through experiencing the locality produced by the Jesuit project, the Guaraní were slowly and systematically embodying colonialism, which allowed the production of a particular habitus,⁴⁵ one which accommodated the new cultural references and naturalised elements from the civilised world proposed by the Jesuits. In other words, the colonisation associated with the missions allowed the creation of particular routines and, as a consequence, particular somatic spaces.⁴⁶ The body and its actions thus became a tool which in different ways incorporated and communicated colonialism. ⁴⁷

From a large-scale perspective the missions were indeed part of colonialism. However, we should avoid generalisations when classifying them as such. On a micro-scale, on which the particularities of each cultural encounter are considered, the missions emerge as places where power was not exercised in a uni-directional way. Transformations in daily life were always negotiated between the priests and indigenous populations. These negotiations revealed disputes over power which were transmitted to the material culture of the missions through introductions, obliterations, changes in and continuities of objects and the techniques of their production and consumption.

The Guaraní fashioned a way to remain Guaraní in the changing and challenging circumstances of a mission, behaving in an ambivalent way which revealed more superposition and duplicity than obliteration.⁴⁸ The Guaraní did not become Europeans, neither did the Jesuits adopt Indian values and their way of life. Regarding pottery, specifically, its traditional domestic production did not disappear in the missions.⁴⁹ Even clay artefacts used in traditional indigenous rituals, such pipes and funerary urns, have been found in archaeological surveys in the mission area,⁵⁰ suggesting they were possibly still in use after the arrival of the Jesuits.

The material culture of the reductions reveals a process in which elements of both Guaraní and Jesuit culture coexisted in some aspects, merged in others and, to a great extent, made priests and Indians dependent upon one other. We can, therefore, talk about the emergence of a transcultural form of social and economic organisation in which both Guaraní and European cultural elements coexisted. In order to prosper, the Jesuits had to make concessions. In order to survive, the Guaraní, too, had to make concessions. The Jesuits were entrusted with people to civilise and to whom to teach the catechism. The Guaraní were given guns to protect their people from the bandeirantes. The concessions made by each of these groups permeated the whole experience of the missions – from their beginnings in the 17th century until the Guaraní War and the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish and Portuguese territories in the 1760s. Regarding the production of ceramics, the choreographies involved in the making of pots, pipes, bricks or church ornaments do not represent the emergence of a community of practice,⁵¹ as sometimes argued for indigenous cultures in similar post-colonial contexts, but indicate the coexistence of two modes of ceramic production: a Guaraní one, conducted by women in the domestic sphere; and a European one, implemented and controlled by priests and relying heavily on male labour. Different cosmologies were present in these two ways of making things and, in the process, of organising people and their time.

The way pottery was produced and consumed throughout the experience of the Jesuit missions is a testimony to the cultural negotiations present in that context. It challenges the dualistic oversimplification of the ‘coloniser-colonised’ dichotomy, allowing the emergence of multidirectional models of interpretation which acknowledge the so-called ‘dominated’ populations.⁵² In this way, the materiality of the cultural encounters allows the reframing of our understanding of colonialism in accordance with the various empirical conditions it encompasses. The material structure of the missions and the routines they created led to the embodiment of certain Western rules and values and, ultimately, to the formation of a particular habitus which contributed to the assimilation of the Jesuit project in colonial Latin America. We cannot forget, however, that the bodies which performed the choreographies of civilisation in this context were the same ones which performed resistance through the very habitus which still held some elements of the Guaraní tradition.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (2005) ‘The experience of the body and classical psychology’, in M. Fraser and M. Greco (eds.), The Body: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 52–4.

Miller, D. (2002) ‘Artefacts and the meaning of things’, in T. Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 396–419.

Morais, R. (2006) ‘L. A. Muratori e o cristianismo feliz na missão dos padres da Companhia de Jesus no Paraguai’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói).

Muratori, L. (1743) Il Cristianesimo felice nelle missione de padri della Compagnia de Gesú nel Paraguai (Venice: Giambatista Pasquali).

Oliveira, E. (2003) ‘Transculturação: Fernando Ortiz, o negro e a identidade nacional cubana, 1906–1940’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia).

Ortiz, F. (1973) Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Barcelona: Ariel).

Pigott, M. (2018) ‘Communities of potters: reconsidering colonialism and cultural change through ceramic analysis’, paper presented at the 75th annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (Augusta, GA, 14–17 Nov.) https://www.academia.edu/38927697/Communities_of_Potters_Reconsidering_Colonialism_and_Culture_Change_through_Ceramic_Analysis [accessed 1 September 2019].

Rahmeier, C. (2003) Cultura missioneira: interpretações a partir da cerâmica (Cruz Alta: Unicruz).

— (2012) ‘Materiality, social roles and the senses: domestic landscape and social identity in the Estâncias of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’, Journal of Material Culture, 17: 153–71.

Souza, J. (1987) ‘Uma introdução ao sistema técnico-econômico guarani’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre).

Stein, G. (2005) ‘Introduction’, in G. Stein (ed.), The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press), pp. 3–32.

Tocchetto, F. (1991) ‘A cultura material do guarani missioneiro como símbolo de identidade étnica’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis).

Van der Leeuw, S. (2002) ‘Giving the potters a choice: conceptual aspects of pottery techniques’, in P. Lemonnier (ed.), Technological Choices: Transformations in Material Cultures Since the Neolithic (2nd edn, New York: Routledge), pp. 238–88.

Wilde, G. (2009) Religión y poder en las misiones de Guaraníes (Buenos Aires: SB).

Worth, J. (2016) ‘Materialized landscapes of practice: exploring Native American ceramic variability in the historic-era Southeastern United States’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, FL, 9 Apr.), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301338915_Materialized_Landscapes_of_PracticeExploring_Native_American_Ceramic_Variability_in_the_Historic-Era_Southeastern_United_States [accessed 1 September 2019].

Zuse, S. (2013) ‘Permanências e mudanças técnicas na cerâmica de uma redução jesuítico-guarani do início do século XVII na região central do Rio Grande do Sul/Brasil’, Cuadernos del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Pensamiento Latinoamericano – Series Especiales, 1: 160–72.

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1 B. Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 52.

2 Ibid., pp. 52–3.

3 G. Chamorro, ‘Historia del Cuerpo Durante la “Conquista Espiritual”’, in Fronteiras, 10 (2008): 277–99 (297).

4 M. Mauss, ‘Techniques of the body’, in M. Fraser and M. Greco (eds.), The Body: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 73–7.

5 C. Gosden, ‘Social ontologies’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363 (2008): 2003–10.

6 P. Bakewell and J. Holler, A History of Latin America (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 319–20.

7 D. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1867F (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 173.

8 In the 18th century the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, an editorial enterprise created by the Jesuits to give an account of their missionary work, constituted, alongside a few travellers’ diaries, the main source for information about the life in the missions. Based on these letters, Muratori wrote his own interpretation of the missions, classifying them as an example of happy Christianity. For an interpretation of Muratori’s publications on the missions see R. Morais, ‘L.A. Muratori e o cristianismo feliz na missão dos padres da Companhia de Jesus no Paraguai’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2006).

9 L. Muratori, Il Cristianesimo felice nelle missione de padri della Compagnia de Gesú nel Paraguai (Venice: Giambatista Pasquali, 1743).

10 P. Cornell and F. Fahlander, ‘Encounters – materialities – confrontations: an introduction’, in P. Cornell and F. Fahlander (eds.), Encounters, Materialities, Confrontations: Archaeologies of Social Space and Interaction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2007), pp. 1–14 (p. 4).

11 F. Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Barcelona: Ariel, 1973).

12 E. Oliveira, ‘Transculturação: Fernando Ortiz, o negro e a identidade nacional cubana, 1906– 1940’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal de Goiás, 2003).

13 Among many other works which base their interpretation of mission culture on the concept of transculturation see A. Kern, ‘Das aldeias guaranis às missões jesuíticas: um processo de transformações culturais’, Anais da I Jornada Regional de Cultura Missioneira (1985): 53–71; and ‘Missões: um processo de transculturação no passado, uma possibilidade de integração regional no presente’, Veritas, 35 (1990): 635–45; Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule; and C. Rahmeier, Cultura missioneira: interpretações a partir da cerâmica (Cruz Alta: Unicruz, 2003).

14 A. Kern, Antecedentes indígenas (Porto Alegre: Universidade/UFRGS, 1998), p. 104.

15 Ganson, The Guaraní under the Spanish Rule, pp. 17–18, referring to A. Métraux, La religion des Tupinamba et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus Tupí-Guaraní (Paris: Leroux, 1928).

16 J. Souza, ‘Uma introdução ao sistema técnico-econômico Guarani’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 1987).

17 P. Bardi, Arte da cerâmica no Brasil (São Paulo: Banco Sudameris do Brasil, 1980), p. 45.

18 Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule, p. 62.

19 Ganson, Ibid., p. 71.

20 There are accounts of the persistence of anthropophagy in the context of the Missions. See J.L. Costa Neto, ‘“Modo de estar” Guarani: Miguel de Artiguaye, política fragmentária e volatilidade do “ser”’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, 2008).

21 A. Kern, ‘Cultura européia e indígena no Rio da Prata nos séculos XVI/XVIII’, Estudos Ibero-americanos, 19 (2) (1993): 5–18.

22 G. Wilde provides a critical, well-documented account of life in the Paraguayan missions, arguing for the heterogeneity of the missionary contexts on many levels and in many instances; and criticising the spectrum of truth that many written records, lay or official, have incorrectly provided to the historiography when depicting the missions as politically ordered and culturally homogeneous (G. Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de Guaraníes (Buenos Aires: SB, 2009)).

23 Costa Neto, ‘“Modo de estar” Guarani’, p. 50.

24 The persistence of the cacicado, as well as the maintenance of polygamy among the caciques in the missions, are well discussed in many sources and interpreted as one of the many examples of the continuity of Guaraní traditional practices under the rule of the Jesuits. Among many others, both Wilde and Costa Neto provide a well-based account of the practice of polygamy in the missions, discussing its importance for the Guaraní and the way it was negotiated between priests and caciques in the missionary context. See Wilde, Religión y poder; and Costa Neto, ‘“Modo de estar” Guarani’, esp. chapter 1.

25 Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule, p. 68.

26 M.-C. Mahias, ‘Pottery techniques in India: technical variants and social choice’, in P. Lemonnier (ed.), Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures Since the Neolithic (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 157–80 (p. 158).

27 A. Leroi-Gourhan, Evolução e técnicas. I – o homem e a matéria (Lisboa: Edições 70, 1984).

28 Mahias, ‘Pottery techniques in India’, p. 158.

29 S. Van der Leeuw, ‘Giving the potter a choice: conceptual aspects of pottery techniques’, in P. Lemonnier (ed.), Technological Choices: Transformations in Material Cultures Since the Neolithic, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 238–88 (p. 240).

30 As in Côte d’Ivoire, as shown by I. Köhler, ‘Movement in making: women working with clay in northern Côte d’Ivoire’, in C. Heitz and R. Stapfer (eds.), Mobility and Pottery Production: Archaeological & Anthropologicval Perspectives (Leiden: Sidestone, 2017), pp. 189–211; and in the south-eastern United States, as demonstrated by J. Worth, ‘Materialized landscapes of practice: exploring Native American ceramic variability in the historic-era Southeastern United States’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, FL, 9 April 2016, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301338915_Materialized_Landscapes_of_PracticeExploring_Native_American_Ceramic_Variability_in_the_Historic-Era_Southeastern_United_States [accessed 1 September 2019].

31 B. Landa, ‘A mulher guarani: atividades e cultura material’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, 1995), p. 53.

32 F. La Salvia and J. Brochado, Cerâmica guarani (Porto Alegre: Posenato Arte e Cultura, 1989), p. 11; Rahmeier, Cultura missioneira.

33 T. Lima, ‘Cerâmica indígena brasileira’, in B. Ribeiro (ed.), Suma etnológica brasileira, vol. 2 (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1986), pp. 173–229.

34 Ibid.

35 Wilde, Religión y poder, p. 51.

36 F. Tocchetto, ‘A cultura material do guarani missioneiro como símbolo de identidade étnica’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 1991), p. 32.

37 Ibid., p. 32.

38 M. Flores, Reduções jesuíticas do guaranis (Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 1987), p. 80.

39 M. Flores, ‘Deus e o Diabo na fronteira com os gentios’, Estudos Ibero-americanos, 1 (2000): 57–68 (59). In Religión y poder, Wilde also points to the guidance that labour and feasting, cyclically celebrated, provided to the rhythm of social life in the missions (p. 70).

40 Tocchetto, ‘A cultura material’, interprets this permanence as a means of resistance and the preservation of identity in times of change.

41 For a reflection on the relevance of ordinary things in the ordering of people’s lives, see D. Miller, ‘Artefacts and the meaning of things’, in T. Ingold, Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 396 – 419.

42 Tocchetto, ‘A cultura material’; Ganson, The Guaraní under the Spanish Rule; Rahmeier, Cultura missioneira; Kern, ‘Missões: um processo de transculturação’; Kern, Cultura europeia e indígena; A. Kern, Missões: uma utopia política (Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto, 1982).

43 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 179.

44 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 182.

45 As proposed by Bourdieu in P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

46 For a study on the somatic spaces generated in a given materiality see C. Rahmeier, ‘Materiality, social roles and the senses: domestic landscape and social identity in the Estâncias of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’, Journal of Material Culture, 17 (2012): 153–71.

47 In Merleau-Ponty’s sense, which perceives the body as immersed in the world and as a means of communication with it (M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The experience of the body and classical psychology’, in M. Fraser and M. Greco (eds.), The Body; A Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 52–4.

48 For a comprehensive and pertinent discussion of ambivalence in the context of the missions see Wilde, Religión y poder.

49 S. Zuse, ‘Permanências e mudanças técnicas na cerâmica de uma redução jesuítico-guarani do início do século XVII na região central do Rio Grande do Sul/Brasil’, Cuadernos del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Pensamiento Latinoamericano – Series Especiales, 1 (2013): 160–72.

50 Tocchetto, ‘A cultura material’, pp. 159–60.

51 M. Pigott, ‘Communities of potters: reconsidering colonialism and cultural change through ceramic analysis’, paper presented at the 75th annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Augusta, GA, 14–17 November 2018; Worth, ‘Materialized Landscapes of Practice’, https://www.academia.edu/38927697/Communities_of_Potters_Reconsidering_Colonialism_and_Culture_Change_through_Ceramic_Analysis [accessed 1 September 2019].

52 G. Stein, ‘Introduction’, in G. Stein (ed.), The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2005), pp. 3–32.