The Heathen Castes of Sixteenth-Century Portuguese America: Unity, Diversity, and the Invention of the Brazilian Indians
2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-80-4-697
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)History, Culture, and Diplomacy
ResumoThe Portuguese first arrived on the eastern coast of South America in April 1500, but it was only in the final quarter of the sixteenth century that they began to produce systematic accounts that described and classified indigenous populations.1 However, with the exception of Pero de Magalhães Gândavo’s brief História da província de Santa Cruz, published in Lisbon in 1576, and various Jesuit letters widely disseminated throughout Europe in several languages, the most important Portuguese writings remained unpublished for centuries.2 For example, both Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s rich descriptive treatise of 1587, considered by many to be the single most important sixteenth-century account, and Jesuit father Fernão Cardim’s writings circulated in multiple manuscript copies and probably did not have a great deal of influence before the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the Tratado descritivo, as Soares de Sousa’s texts came to be known, and the Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, a compilation of Cardim’s works, provide a clear guide to the accumulated perceptions and images that the Portuguese had about the vast, varied, and largely incomprehensible indigenous universe during this crucial period in Portuguese-indigenous relations.3This article examines Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s writings in two steps: first, in the historical context of the late sixteenth century; and second, in the historiographical context of the nineteenth century, when his detailed descriptions and schematic classifications were absorbed by Brazil’s first national historians as objective ethnographic facts. One of the problems that this created lay in the tendency for Brazilian historians to project back to 1500—the emblematic eve-of-conquest date—a portrait of indigenous diversity and interethnic relations that actually developed much later, reflecting the deep transformations that had already affected many of the coastal societies. Nonetheless, like other historiographical traditions in the Americas, these early accounts were written by the observers themselves and interpreted by latter-day historians to convey a static and permanent image of pristine societies as if they had been untouched by contact with Europeans. At the same time, this approach has ignored the role of indigenous polities and actors in their response to European expansion, which played an important part in shaping the kinds of ethnic configurations that have been passed down generation after generation as “original” and timeless, only to be upset, dilapidated, and, finally, destroyed by Western colonialism. Recent ethnohistorical trends, however, have begun to undermine these long-established views, interweaving careful documentary research and new anthropological perspectives to produce a refreshing portrait of creative indigenous responses, which, against all odds, carved out a significant place in colonial history in ways that can no longer be omitted from the historical register.4In 1587 Portuguese sugar planter and overland explorer Gabriel Soares de Sousa undertook a long journey from Bahia to Madrid, in an effort to garner royal support so that he could search the endless sertão for silver mines. As part of his credentials, he presented Dom Cristóvão de Moura with three manuscripts, offering precious information and perceptive insights on the land, people, and early history of the Portuguese colonies in the Americas.5 The first text, the Roteiro geral: Com largas informações de toda a costa do Brasil, provided a succinct description of the Atlantic coast from the “land of the Caribs,” north of the Amazon river, to the River Platte. The second and certainly the most important text was the Memorial e declaração das grandezas da Bahia de Todos os Santos, de sua fertilidade e das notáveis partes que tem, a meticulous description of the topography, plants, animals, and native populations of Bahia; this text is so rich and evocative in detail that it has come to be known as the greatest work written about Brazil in the sixteenth century.6 The third text constituted a libelous invective against the Jesuits of Bahia, criticizing the missionaries not only for their supposedly rapacious economic activities but also for their unwanted interference in the Indian labor question. In sharp contrast to the other two texts, this text offers a clearer understanding of the historical and political contexts within which Gabriel Soares de Sousa recorded his lasting impressions of the Tupinambá Indians.7Although Soares de Sousa’s account has been widely used since the mid-nineteenth century in the consolidation of a long-standing tradition of Tupi studies in Brazil, surprisingly little has been written about the author himself or the conditions under which he documented his observations. Actually, little is known about this writer beyond what his own writings express, along with the will he penned in 1584, later reproduced by Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen in his critical edition of the text.8 Born in Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century, Gabriel Soares de Sousa set off for the Indies in 1569, possibly headed for the fabled Monomotapa mines in East Africa, in the powerful fleet commanded by Francisco Barreto, former governor of India, who aimed to expel the Muslims from that region and seize the gold mines.9 For reasons unknown and fortunately for him, Soares de Sousa remained in Salvador when the fleet called there, rather than going on to the Estado da India, where other talented writers of his generation went. Gabriel Soares de Sousa and his brother João Coelho de Sousa settled in Brazil, and established a sugar mill along the Jiquiriçá River, near Jaguaripe, an expanding new plantation zone to the south of the Recôncavo. After inheriting charts of the hinterland and a few precious stones from his deceased brother, Soares de Sousa visited Philip II’s (Philip I of Portugal) court in 1586 to secure royal favors and titles. After a considerable waiting period, during which he rewrote his descriptive treatise, he received the lofty commission of Captain-Major and Governor of the Conquest and Discovery of the São Francisco River, with permission to seek and exploit silver mines in the interior. He returned to Brazil in the Flemish vessel Abraham, which was on its way to Bahia to pick up a shipment of sugar and brazilwood. The ship ran aground at the mouth of the Vazabarris river in Sergipe and much of his equipment was lost. After traveling overland to Salvador, Soares de Sousa managed to outfit his expedition with assistance from Governor Dom Francisco de Sousa, a mining enthusiast, and he set off for the São Francisco river. But the mines that had proved so elusive to his brother and to many others for years to come were not to be found, and Gabriel Soares de Sousa died shortly after setting out on his expedition, in the sertão near the headwaters of the Paraguaçu. His bones were sent back to Salvador to be buried in the Benedictine church under a tombstone that reads, “Here lies a sinner,” as Soares de Sousa had stipulated in his will.Although subsequent accounts offer different versions, the circumstances surrounding Soares de Sousa’s death point to the convergence of fact and fiction, illuminating the context informing his text on the Indians of Bahia. According to Frei Vicente do Salvador, Soares de Sousa died near the place of his brother’s death, after falling ill because “the water was bad and the food, made of snakes and lizards, even worse.”10 Another writer, Pedro Barbosa Leal, provided an alternative version by highlighting other perils of the sertão: One night, a conflict erupted between the “tame” Indians and the “heathen from the sertão,” who had recently been introduced to the camp. Soares de Sousa tried to break up the melee, after which all the Indians ran away, leaving the hapless explorers to their own devices in the wilderness, where all eventually died except one practical miner, Marcos Ferreira.11Regardless of its veracity, this story reveals the dual purpose of the journey, involving mining and slaving interests, which was to remain a strong characteristic among expeditions to the interior for years to come.12 Sugar, slavery, and overland exploration thus provided the setting for Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s treatise on Bahia. Indeed, both the Roteiro and the Memorial reflected his long experience as a plantation owner and explorer, complementary activities in an age when the bulk of the slave population was composed of Indians captured in the surrounding backlands.13 In addition to the slave population, Soares de Sousa also knew the mission Indians well, as they provided manpower for his expeditions to the sertão and occasional labor on the plantation. Therefore, most of the historical and descriptive information presented in his account derived from this specific colonial context, as his indigenous informants were in fact “colonial Indians.” Soares de Sousa was very concerned about the quality of the information he provided and claimed that his description of the Tupinambá was based on “information taken from the oldest Indians.”Clearly, this revelation was more than a passing comment. It becomes all the more significant if we consider that an important part of his account on the Tupinambá was set in an almost memorialistic tone, as if their people’s integrity and independence were a thing of the past. Indeed, one of the author’s main narrative objectives was to justify Portuguese domination, placing it in a historical sequence of conquest cycles, beginning with the most ancient “heathen caste,” namely, the Tapuia. In the remote past, the Tapuia were expelled from the coast by the Tupinaé, a Tupi group, “who came from the backlands in search of the reputed abundance of the land and sea of this province.” After many generations, “when the Tupinambá learned of the greatness and fertility of this land,” this new group invaded the lands of the Tupinaé, “destroying their villages and fields, killing those who resisted, sparing no one, until they managed to expel the Tupinaé from the edge of the sea.” Finally Soares de Sousa remarked, “Thus the Tupinambá have remained lords of this province of Bahia for many years, waging war against their enemies with great effort, until the arrival of the Portuguese; this information was taken from Tupinambás and Tupinaés, in whose memory these stories pass from generation to generation.” Defeated, it seemed as though the Tupinambá were left with only memories of their greatness.14Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s first task was to try and make sense of the perplexing diversity that made the Brazilian coast so hard to describe.15 Like many other sixteenth-century descriptions of indigenous populations, Soares de Sousa’s treatise initially established a broad division between two generic categories, namely, Tupi and Tapuia. While the Tupinambá, described in delightful detail in the most interesting part of his account, provided the basic model for Tupi society, his characterization of the Tapuia was far more vague: “Since the Tapuias are so many and so divided in bands, customs, and languages, in order to say much about them one would have to collect purposely and carefully much information about their divisions, life, and customs; although, at present this is not possible.”16 Basically relying on Tupi informants, early writers such as Soares de Sousa projected Tapuia groups as the antithesis of Tupi society by describing them in negative terms.However, in his description of the Aimoré, the author introduced an interesting twist, suggesting that the basic difference in the life and customs of these Indians had an historical basis:While he managed to put together a rather detailed description of their barbarous ways, Soares de Sousa recognized the limitations of his presentation, and almost classified them as non-humans, because they ate “human flesh as food, unlike other heathens who only ate to avenge their enemies.” In sum, the author set them apart once and for all “since they are such devious enemies of all humankind, it was not possible to learn more about their life and customs.”18In establishing basic categories for different segments of the indigenous population, Soares de Sousa played off various possible references. The most obvious approach was to establish a contrast with European institutions and describe indigenous society more in terms of what it lacked than what it displayed. Repeating a common saying widely disseminated a decade earlier by grammatician Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, Soares de Sousa provided a variant to the “sem fé, sem lei, sem rei” rhyme. While favorably impressed by the “graciousness” of Tupi speech, he observed that “they lack three letters, namely, f, l, and r, in their alphabets.” The letter “f” referred to faith, meaning that the Tupinambás lacked religion altogether, but, worse yet, “even those born among Christians and indoctrinated by the Jesuit fathers do not believe in God our Lord.” In addition, Soares de Sousa wrote that they did not pronounce the letter “l” because “they had no law to keep” and each person lived “to the sound of his own will.” Finally, the absence of the letter “r” denoted that they had no king (rei) or anyone else to obey, and “even sons did not obey their fathers.”19 Thus wavering between inconstancy and insubordination, characteristics also stressed by the Jesuits in their accounts, Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s Indians showed little promise as colonial subjects though, paradoxically, it was in this condition that most of the Indians he knew actually lived.20In addition to the Tupi/Tapuia dichotomy, other sets of polar opposites emerged to introduce some order to an otherwise confusing and unpredictable situation. The colonial context produced other important dualities; for example, the povoado (settlement)/sertão (wilderness) dichotomy was more than a spatial reference, making a distinction between two separate worlds, one ordered by law and government, the other having no such legal or moral constraints. A good example of this difference comes from the experience of mameluco (mixed-blood) backwoodsmen who wavered between the rigid order of the colonial settlement and the unbridled freedom of the sertão.21 The distinction between Christian Indians and gentios provided another crucial division, often with quite ambiguous implications. Gentio, usually rendered as “heathen” in English, initially emerged as a third category within a religious classification, to refer to someone who was neither Christian nor Muslim. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese used this term to describe both Hindus in South Asia, with their rich and often baffling (to the Europeans) religious traditions, as well as different native peoples in Africa and South America, considered to have no religion at all. Although the semantic context gradually shifted to the opposition between converted and non-converted or yet-to-be-converted natives, Gabriel Soares de Sousa adopted this distinction in his text, with some skepticism. In his chapter on Garcia d’Ávila, he mentioned the Jesuit mission of Santo Antônio, inhabited by “free Tupinambá Indians” (índios forros), who in spite of their conversion, “are so barbarous that not one to this day lives as a Christian.”22He made this point even clearer in his harsh criticism of the Jesuits. While the first missionaries made easy converts, baptizing “thousands each day,” this proved illusory, since “it was just as easy for [the Indians] to return to their heathenish ways, and they all went back to the sertão, running away from their teachings . . . and while they once had control of over more than 50 villages with these Christian Indians, today they have no more than three villages, and these are practically filled with new people.”23 Although he did not make specific mention of this in his text, Soares de Sousa possibly was referring to the Santidade cults organized by Tupinambás who had run away from the Jesuits and the colonists during this period, affecting especially the plantation zone around Jaguaripe, near his plantation.24 But he also must have known about other forms of resistance, a theme he tended to gloss as a natural property of Indians independent from the colonial condition, including the mass migrations such as the one described by a Jesuit in the 1580s, attributing the following speech to a native headman:We must leave, we must leave before these Portuguese arrive … We are not fleeing from the church or your Company, for if you wish to join us, we will live with you in the forests and backlands … But these Portuguese do not leave us alone, and if so few who are among us already seize our brothers, what else can we expect when the rest arrive, but to see ourselves, our wives and our children enslaved?25While the Tupinambá represented, to a certain extent, a unifying category from a linguistic and cultural point of view, sixteenth-century observers also had to explain the pronounced disputes between different Tupi segments. When introducing the Potiguar, Soares de Sousa found it difficult to distinguish them from the Tupinambá: “They speak the same language as the Tupinambá and Caeté; they have the same customs and heathenish ways… . They sing, dance, eat and drink on the same order as the Tupinambá.”26 While making a distinction between Tupinikin and Tupinambá, Soares de Sousa was forced to admit that “And even though the Tupinikin and Tupinambá are enemies, between them there is no greater difference in language and customs than that between the residents of Lisbon and those of Beira.” Dealing with the Tupinaé, later on, Soares de Sousa drew a slightly different comparison, stating that their language was as different from the Tupinambá’s as the difference between Entre Douro e Minho and Lisbon, which was to say that the latter spoke a “more polished” form. In his attempt to explain this paradox of affinity and difference, the author considered that “because the name of these two heathen castes is so similar it seems quite clear that they were a single people in olden days, which is what the old [Tupinambás] say.” The reason they split apart is that each group held the others as enemies “whom they eat by the mouthful and never tire of killing each other in continuous wars.”27The use of the term “caste” to describe different indigenous groups deserves a brief comment. Various sixteenth-century Portuguese narratives classified indigenous populations along the Brazilian coast as distinct “castes,” a direct appropriation of the terminology used in South Asia and widely disseminated through accounts going back as far as Duarte Barbosa and Tomé Pires.28 Soares de Sousa was no stranger to this oriental literature, it would appear, since at one point in his account he drew an explicit comparison between tobacco use among Amerindians and the chewing of betel leaves in South Asia.29 Although several Portuguese writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made specific reference to the Hindu varnas in their discussions of caste, the term took on a more generic meaning, identifying different societies or social segments as discrete units, each possessing critically different cultural markers, commonly grouped as usos e costumes (practices and cus toms). Within the colonial space, however, the specific limits and characteristics of such discrete and often endogamous structures were constantly challenged by European expansion, as soldiers, traders, and royal agents became increasingly entwined in native societies either through marriage or less formal arrangements with indigenous women.Written at a time of rapid and decisive transformations that especially affected indigenous peoples living in or near colonial settlements, Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s account of the Tupinambá sought to negotiate images of precolonial greatness and post-conquest decomposition.30 Based on information passed on by settled, enslaved, and Christianized Indians, these descriptions provide an emic view of Tupinambá society, filtered through the lens of colonialism. Nonetheless, establishing an example to be followed by ethnographers in the centuries to come, Soares de Sousa’s text sought to abstract the Tupinambá from this context, as if the Europeans had not encountered them. However, at the same time, his account contains many elements suggesting that this image of the Tupinambá, although reasserting precolonial traditions and structures, also had something to do with the very real conditions of colonial expansion. Thus the description of Tupinambá lifeways and “customs” emerged from the colonial constructions made not only by the Portuguese but by the Tupinambá themselves. In a certain sense, then, the Memorial stood apart from other sixteenth-century accounts that sought to project first-contact situations, which, according to Neil Whitehead, had more to do with the “self-representation of ‘discoverers’” or conquerors than the actual interaction between the author-observer and his native subjects.31 Although he presented himself as a discoverer of uncharted lands and much desired mineral wealth, Soares de Sousa’s native subjects were, above all, Indians who had been in contact with Europeans for quite some time.Indeed, though apparently somewhat embarrassed, the author made this point more explicitly in dealing with the presence of mixed-bloods among the Tupinambá, recognizing that “although what this chapter contains may seem irrelevant, it seemed to be the decent thing to do in writing about this, in order to understand the Tupinambá’s nature and conditions better.”32 A closer reading of this chapter, however, reveals a constant fear that colonial writers entertained with regard to miscegenation: Soares de Sousa seemed less concerned with the impact that the whites and their mixed descendants had on the Tupinambá than with the prospect that whites could also become savages.In seeking to “understand the Tupinambá’s nature and conditions” from this perspective, Soares de Sousa implicitly captured the need to recognize that indigenous peoples were caught up in a historical web, where the definition of separate identities proved both flexible and variable.33 The Potiguar, Tupinikin, Tememinó, and Tupinaé were all Tupinambá in a certain sense, but in the colonial context they clearly were not. Therefore, in order to understand this “indigenous Brazil,” one must first review the methods used by successive generations of chroniclers, historians, and ethnographers who sought to isolate, essentialize, and freeze indigenous populations into fixed, stable ethnic groups, as if the profile of ethnic differences we know today had already existed centuries before the discovery— or invention—of the Indians.A long and intricate process, the invention of an indigenous Brazil involved the development of a broad repertoire of ethnic denominations and social categories capable of classifying and making comprehensible the rich array of languages and cultures previously unknown to the Europeans. More than that, the framework that emerged was to condition relations between Europeans and natives, not only because it informed Indian policy and legislation, but especially because it established a series of representations and expectations upon which these relations came to be based. Hence, the new ethnic divisions described by colonial reports during the second half of the sixteenth century mirrored not only European desires and projections but also the adjustments and aspirations of different indigenous peoples who sought—each in their own way—to deal with the new challenges brought on by the advance of colonial domination.In spite of the wide interest they must have inspired at the time they were produced, Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s writings remained unpublished for centuries. However, like so many other historical and descriptive treatises written in Portuguese about Brazil during the colonial period, Soares de Sousa’s texts circulated in manuscript copies, and different parts were either paraphrased or outright plagiarized by other writers. When preparing his definitive edition of the text in the nineteenth century, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen identified seventeen different copies in various European libraries and archives, both public and private.34 Indeed, with the exception of accounts published in several European languages primarily for a non-Portuguese audience, the only major work on Brazil originally written in Portuguese to be published in the sixteenth century was Pero Magalhães Gândavo’s História da província de Santa Cruz, printed in 1576. This stood in stark contrast to the abundant literature on Spanish America and even to the writings published in Portuguese during the sixteenth century on the peoples and customs of Asia, in addition to numerous conquest narratives and political chronicles describing the exploits of Portuguese adventurers and administrators in the East.Cast into a temporary oblivion, Soares de Sousa’s writings resurfaced in the early nineteenth century, initially as part of Frei Veloso’s vast and eclectic collection of previously unpublished or rare works printed at the famous Arco do Cego publishing house. Incomplete, this first edition also failed to attribute the work to its real author. The first complete edition of the work appeared in 1825, published by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Lisbon in its ambitious project of compiling travel narratives and other writings in a vast collection on Portuguese overseas possessions. Adopting the title Notícias do Brasil, the Academy of Sciences edition was so sloppily edited that Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen decided to write a long exercise in historical criticism, which not only proved that Soares de Sousa was the author but also pointed out the need for a new critical and annotated version through a comparison of the different manuscript copies.35Varnhagen’s interest in Soares de Sousa’s text went far beyond this strict academic exercise, however. As one of the main members of Brazil’s Historical and Geographical Institute, founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1838, Varnhagen spearheaded a generation of intellectuals and statesmen dedicated to constructing a national historical tradition from the ground up. Within this collective project, the Institute’s quarterly journal featured many previously unpublished—and some previously unwritten—colonial accounts, with special attention dedicated to descriptions of indigenous societies, especially the coastal Tupi.36Indeed, one of the main challenges faced by those involved in composing a national history involved finding, recovering, and publishing accounts relating the historical and ethnographic background to indigenous societies, hidden in dusty archives for the most part located overseas. Burdened by the image of a backward, uncivilized, highly miscegenated slave society, the Institute’s members sought to reconcile their New World origins with the civilizing principles guiding nineteenth-century nation states.37 Lacking the spectacular ruins of ancient civilizations—a problem discussed in some of their early meetings—and facing an open conflict with existing native societies, the elite generation that grew up with the Emperor Dom Pedro II himself began to develop a national mythography that placed the noble, valiant, and (especially) extinct coastal Tupi at center stage.The Institute’s journal was not the only vehicle to take on this task, as the many literary and political reviews that agitated the intellectual life of the new nation also published accounts recently unearthed in European archives. During these same years, the development of ethnographic knowledge was accompanied by an emerging national literature: poets and novelists anchored their Indianist works on a growing familiarity with ethnography, but simultaneously echoed perceptions and themes pursued by historians and other non-fiction writers. This same concern for a solid documentary base was evident in Varnhagen’s pioneering work, História geral do Brasil, a multivolume edition that began to be published in 1854.38Though this constituted the country’s first major historiographical statement in Portuguese, it followed important foreign precedents, such as Robert Southey’s History of Brazil and Ferdinand Denis’s writings on Brazil, both of whom used different manuscript versions of Soares de Sousa’s description of the Tupinambá, though both of them failed to recognize who the author was.39 In each of these works, the historical Tupinambá grew in stature and began to constitute a strong contrast between the Indians occupying the Atlantic seaboard at the genesis of Brazilian nationality and the contemporary Indians who stood in the way of civilization.From Varnhagen’s point of view, the role that Indians were to play in this project seemed rather clear from the start, as he explicitly subscribed to Carl Friedrich von Martius’s pessimistic attitude towards native Brazilians. In 1847 von Martius had won a contest promoted by the Historical and Geographical Institute on “How to Write the History of Brazil.” Partial to eighteenth-century theories on the decadence and decrepitude of American natives, von Martius considered the Brazilian Indians to be populations that soon would cease to exist. The “current Brazilian Indian,” he wrote, “is nothing more than the residue of a very ancient though lost history.”40 His pessimism was even more explicit in an earlier text and he prophesied that “there can be no doubt that the American is about to disappear. Other peoples will live on when those unfortunate New World peoples will be enveloped in an eternal sleep.”41Varnhagen’s “aversion to Brazilian populations” (in the words of his nemesis João Francisco Lisboa) certainly had something to do with his theoretical leanings, but it also reflected his ow
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