From Utopia to Reality. Indigenous Conceptions of Space in the Jesuits Missions of South America

WILDE, GUILLERMO

New Haven

Conferencia; Rethinking Space in Latin American History; 2014

Yale University

The characteristics of missions? urban organization are almost unknown during the seventeenth century. In any case, missions? urban organization aimed to gradually impose a new conception of society, based on the principles of rationality and hierarchy. I will try to show that in the formation of mission space the interaction between Jesuits and Indians was not all about domination or resistance. A mission town was neither a Foucauldian Panopticon nor a free ?land without evil?, but rather the result of a tense process in which both Jesuits and Indians, as non-homogeneous actors, took part. argue that mission space cannot be reduced to the urban or architectural stylistic structure or even the physical territory of a mission town. It is the symbolic construction that organizes daily life and bodily practices. Moreover, mission space defines what could be operationally described as a ?visual regime? (or a ?regime of perception?) in which both Jesuit priests and indigenous actors actively participated.