The bell, the plane and the hoe

Presentation

Okoga apovo ava reko ramõguarãma. Written three hundred years ago, several hundred kilometers north of Buenos Aires, these few Guaraní words purport to instruct the reader on "the behavior men should adopt when working in the fields". Topping one of the eighty-eight chapters of a recently discovered labor catechism produced in the early XVIII^e century in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, they illustrate the problems engendered by the encounter between the Guaranis and the Indian missionaries who came to evangelize them.

Often described by their contemporaries, from the missionaries themselves to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, as a realized utopia in which work was as well-ordered as religious life, the missions were in fact the seat of intense agricultural and craft production. Over a hundred thousand Indians cultivated wheat and cotton, raised livestock, built large churches and manufactured tools, statues, musical instruments and even astronomical telescopes. However, the radically different Indian and European practices and representations of work provoked a number of conflicts illustrated by missionary chronicles, which judged the Guaranis as lazy and endowed with little intelligence.

La cloche, le rabot et la houe, based on the unpublished translation of several chapters of the Luján Manuscript and combining fictional historical reconstruction with an analysis of social practices and relations at work, aims to both deconstruct these prejudices and show how the collaboration, but also the oppositions, between Indians and Jesuits gave birth to the co-construction of this singular space, the object of all fantasies to this day, in America as in Europe.

Author

Mickaël Orantin is a doctoral student in anthropology at IHEAL-CREDA under the supervision of Capucine Boidin and Denis Merklen. He specializes in labor in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay (XVII^e-XVIII^e centuries).

238 pages
16 x 24 cm
Publication: 17/09/2020
ISBN: 9782858313525