'This book is your book'. Jesuit linguistic policy and indigenous individual reading (Paraguay, 18th Century)

BOIDIN, CAPUCINE; CERNO, LEONARDO; VEGA, FABIÁN

ETHNOHISTORY

Duke University Press

Lugar: Durham; Año: 2020

0014-1801

When in the 1970s Bartomeu Melià established Guaraní philology, it wasstill somewhat bold to state that Indigenous people wrote or read on their owninitiative (Melià 2003 [1969]). These were thought to be able merely to imitate, that is to copy letters and?read out loud? to others without understanding what they were reading. Today,study of the corpus written in Guaraní, whether in the Jesuit or post-Jesuitera, which totals about five thousand pages and is one of the largest in theIndigenous languages of colonial South America, increasingly brings to light thelevel of literate culture reached by the Indigenous elites.There is some debate among the specialists regardingthe level of Indigenous involvement and autonomy in the writing and reading ofthese texts (Melià 2002; Thun, Cerno, and Obermeier 2015; Adoue, Orantin, andBoidin 2015; Brignon 2016). It has even been asserted that ?there is noindication that the Indians read thetexts? produced in the missionary context (Rodríguez-Alcalá 2010: 26). And noone has certainly ever contemplated the possibility that the Indigenous peopleread books on their own (and perhaps to themselves). An analysis of the still non translated Guarani book Ara poruaguĭyey haba (1759?1760), begs the need,however, to review these assumptions about literate indigenouspractices in the missions. Bydiscussing the authorship of the book and the printing process, the format, the print run, its expository structure, andthe cautionary notice given to the readers, we will demonstrate that Ara poru was published for Indigenouspeople to practice the Ignatian spiritual exercises, not only collectively butalso through individual reading.