Indiens Guaraní et Chamanes Franciscains: Les premières réductions du Paraguay (1580-1800)

The author addresses the question of what was at stake in the “spiritual conquest” of the Guaraní Indians of Paraguay. The attention of researchers has so far been principally concentrated on the Jesuit missions in Paraguay; but it was the Franciscans who were first in the field, and it is on their endeavors that the book is focused. During the late sixteenth century, a small number of Franciscans succeeded, where conquerors and men of war had failed, in “pacifying” many of the Guaraní and resettling them in reducciones where their labor could be organized to support the colonial state and its representatives. Thus integrated into the political and economic structures of colonial Paraguay, the Guaraní of the reducciones moved from their Stone-Age subsistence economy to producing crops and artifacts for export under the supervision of their Franciscan curas. The author traces this evolution from the first reducciones made by the friar Luis Bolaños after 1575 to their legislative validation in 1603 and 1611. He then describes in detail and with careful documentation how the Franciscan reducciones were run from the political, economic, and religious points of view. The central thesis of the book is that the Franciscan, and later the Jesuit, reducciones functioned relatively well because the missionaries appeared to their potential converts as being invested with a legitimate form of authority, an authority similar to that of the chief-shaman of preconquest Guaraní society. It was for this reason, so the author argues, that missionary endeavors of “pacifying” Guaraní resistance to conquest was effective while military expeditions were not. For the same reason, the Franciscans, and after them the Jesuits, were able to exact from the Guaraní that degree of compliance required to make the reducciones operative economically and socially. In short, the author explains the success of the missionary reducciones in terms of a certain continuity with the preconquest past. This is an important insight, which could fruitfully be applied in the study of other frontier missions of the Spanish empire. A difficulty is that the sources speak of the Guaraní only indirectly and in a fragmentary fashion. As a result, the Guaraní remain somewhat enigmatic in this otherwise well-researched, carefully reasoned, and thought-provoking study. Equally enigmatic are the missionaries. It would be useful to understand what exactly moved them to separate themselves from their own society so as to integrate into that society those who would have preferred—had they had a choice—to stay apart. The author demonstrates that these issues merit further attention, and provides substantial groundwork from which to proceed.