Article ID: CBB494244460

Iberian Missionaries in God’s Vineyard: Enlarging Humankind and Encompassing the Globe in the Renaissance (2019)

unapi

During the century of colonial expansion by the Iberian monarchies, the presence of the Church alongside the colonizers was not just a logical continuation of the medieval idea of the good prince who was advised and accompanied by men of faith. It also underlined the political dimension of the ‘spiritual conquest’ and the equally political dimension of the cultural practices accompanying it. There are numerous works that have emphasized this with regard to the American continents in particular, where the connection between the forces present, which quickly led to the destruction and subjugation of the local populations, brought about Spanish colonial domination over large swathes of the ‘West Indies’. Those scholars who have concentrated on the ‘East Indies’, and China in particular, have emphasized acculturation or accommodation, highlighting the cultural rather than the political dimension of contact. This article explores the significant asymmetries in the understanding of humankind developed by the missionaries in their analyses of the Americas and the East Indies. These asymmetries stemmed largely from their distinct roles and functions in the process of colonial or imperial contact. I argue that these asymmetries obscure our understanding of what missionaries contributed to the global circulation of knowledge of lands and peoples new to Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, in part by defining ‘savagery’ and locating it mostly in the ‘West Indies’.

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Article Bruce Buchan; Linda Andersson Burnett (2019) Knowing Savagery: Humanity in the Circuits of Colonial Knowledge. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-7). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB494244460/

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Authors & Contributors
Holler, Jacqueline
Sánchez, Antonio
Brendecke, Arndt
José María Moreno Madrid
Cagle, Hugh
Valle, Ivonne del
Concepts
Spain, colonies
Colonialism
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Portugal, colonies
Missionaries and missions
Imperialism
Time Periods
16th century
17th century
18th century
Early modern
15th century
Ming dynasty (China, 1368-1644)
Places
Spain
Portugal
Americas
Tropics
New Spain
Peru
Institutions
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
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