Nonstandard lexicon in a Jesuit-Guaraní medicine manuscript

LEONARDO CERNO

Congreso; 9th International Congress on Traditional Asian Medicines; 2017

Medical practices often develops in contexts oflinguistic and cultural diversity, and many of the documents produced incolonial settings results of a double contribution made both from the nativeand the dominant culture. This paper points the importance of linguistic perspectivein researching texts of colonial medicine. For this goal we focus in the Pohã Ñana manuscript, which is probablythe most important Materia Medica writtenin the vernacular language in the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay at the 18thCentury. Defining our problem in the general frame of interculturalcommunication, our analysis deals on two main dimensions: 1) the process ofwriting in a context of native linguistic diversity, and 2) the correspondencesbetween the language of the foreign author and that of the native readers orhearers of the texts. The specific problems which typically exist in workingwith linguistic sources would be summarized at the end. Pohã Ñana is the Guarani translation of a Spanish treatise written inSpanish by Marcos Vilodas. It presents a paradigmatic case of the colonialmedicine in America in the sense their content and language accuse features ofa hybridization with native Indian culture. In turn, the text is part of acollection of Guarani documents written by Jesuits under a particular languagepolicy. Our findings point to define the relevance of linguistic perspectiveand its specificity and complementarity within other perspectives such as the historicaland the ethnological ones.