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Religião como tradução: Missionários, Tupi e Tapuia no Brasil colonial

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-86-1-154

1527-1900

Alida C. Metcalf,

History of Colonial Brazil

This book is a long-overdue ethnohistory of Tupi peoples of the sixteenth-century Brazilian coast, and the inland peoples — known generically as the Tapuia — of the seventeenth-century Brazilian interior (sertão). Rejecting the approach often used by anthropologists and historians to characterize the history of contact, conquest, and colonization as a stark opposition between “Indians” who wanted to preserve their culture and “Europeans” who wanted to demonize, assimilate, dominate, or exterminate them, Pompa seeks to recreate the complexity of the relationships, and in particular the roles of indigenous groups in shaping these explosive encounters. Using the language of religion as her focus, Pompa argues that religion served as the means through which each culture translated and understood the other.The first part of the book focuses on the encounters between coastal Tupi and Guarani-speaking peoples and Europeans. Pompa emphasizes that a careful rereading of the well-known texts written by Europeans in the sixteenth century reveals multiple perspectives on each side: there was no one “Indian” voice, nor was there one “European.” In chapter 3, Pompa significantly revises a major tenet of Tupi and Guarani religion in the sixteenth century by carefully dissecting the anthropological literature on Tupi-Guarani messianic movements. Pompa argues that the anthropologists who first studied the prophetic tradition among the Tupi and Guarani, as well as the existence of migrations in search of “a land without evil,” were more interested in developing grand theories than in doing careful ethnographic analysis. As a result, she questions the validity of the Tupi-Guarani messianic migrations in the sixteenth century as stated by Alfred Métraux, Florestan Fernandes, Egon Schaden, Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, Hélène Clastres, and others. She reserves much of her criticism for Métraux, who assumed that there was a shared identity between modern Guarani and sixteenth-century Tupi and read into sixteenth century texts the existence of a messianic tradition that predated the sixteenth-century encounters with Europeans. In Pompa’s view, few texts document actual migrations in search of a land without evil. Rather, the sixteenth-century texts reveal ceremonies led by shamans (that Métraux and others misread as migrations led by messianic leaders), which were more likely rituals of renovation. Through such ceremonies, indigenous groups responded to and made sense of specific historical and cultural situations, such as the rapid changes in the sixteenth century. These rituals were not simply attempts to return to precontact native customs, Pompa maintains, but to symbolically reconstruct and renew the world in a way that took into account new realities.In the second part of the book, Pompa provides a detailed discussion of the encounter between many indigenous groups of the sertões of the Brazilian Northeast, who were known collectively and imprecisely as Tapuia, and the established coastal colonies. In this section, she maintains the complexity of her analysis of the sixteenth century by emphasizing that there were a variety of groups who entered the sertão from the coastal colonies — from cowboys and colonists to missionaries and expeditions of armed men. Their interests were not the same, nor were their interactions with indigenous peoples. Moreover, she analyzes the differences between the ways that colonial authorities formally dealt with indigenous leaders; there was a clear difference between the Portuguese and the Dutch. She draws attention, as well, to the distinct strategies used by the different religious orders. Most importantly, she insists on the diversity of indigenous groups by reconstructing the names and locations of the chiefs and villages. She spends considerable time on the Guerra dos Bárbaros, the period of violent conflict in the second half of the seventeenth century, arguing that it cannot be reduced to a war of extermination waged by the coastal groups against the Indians of the interior. In her view, the Tapuia were not simply victims but rather were dynamic actors who sought to defend and to promote their own interests in a variety of ways, depending on which colonial groups they interacted with.The book’s strength is its comprehensive treatment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its comparative focus on the Tupi and Tapuia. Ethnohistorians will appreciate her careful transcription of letters, reports, and eyewitness accounts of the seventeenth-century Tapuia, many of which are unknown and drawn from archives in Rome. While Pompa argues that the European encounters with the Tupi in the sixteenth century shaped how colonists, missionaries, governors, and military men viewed the Tapuia in the seventeenth century, she also clearly shows how the Tupi and the Tapuia responded. In her view, rituals were fundamental for the Tupi and the Tapuia — not to preserve traditions (which increasingly no longer served them) — but to reinterpret their place in a rapidly changing world. So did religion, Pompa argues, become the means through which historical change was translated and understood.