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Analogies of the Sacrament in Sixteenth-Century French and Spanish Ethnography: Jean de Léry and José de Acosta.

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/026399010x12645114972332

1745-8153

Geoffrey Shullenberger,

Latin American history and culture

This article uses the controversies surrounding the Eucharist in post-Reformation Europe to frame a comparison of two prominent ethnographic texts of the late sixteenth century. Calvinist Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578) and Jesuit father José de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), both bestsellers in their time, served as important vehicles of knowledge about the New World for European readers. Despite being written from opposite sides of the denominational divide, the two works display notable similarities in their detailed examination of indigenous ritual practices and their insistent use of sacramental analogies to account for the most troubling and the most intriguing components of these practices: human sacrifice and cannibalism. In addition to showing how the analogies that structure ethnographic representation serve polemical and doctrinal ends, I examine how analogy itself functions as a contested site in which the radically divergent assumptions guiding Roman Catholic and Protestant hermeneutics come to the fore.