THE SOCIETY OF JESUS IN THE AMERICAS, ITS WRITING AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION.
The Society of Jesus is distinguished from other religious orders by a form of writing intended to shape a Memory meant to govern those subjects with whom it entered into relation within the framework of its pedagogical-evangelical practice; likewise, this writing was conceived, from its origins, to compose a vade mecum that would record the actions carried out in the ‘Four Parts of the World’ by Ignatius’s brethren — knowledge intended to support a better administration of missionary practice. Within this broad body of documents we must also consider a significant portion of restricted, private writing, intended to be known only by certain members of the Order and therefore published, to this day, only partially; rounding out this body of documents are various illustrations and engravings that accompany the different documentary pieces preserved in archives which, beyond the Memory of the Society of Jesus, display the spatial distribution of a device of power intended, from its beginnings, to become global.
Within this varied set of pieces of information, and within them as a whole bearing a logic that still requires research capable of articulating analytical levels within the construction of that globality, it is possible to find reading keys that make it possible to unpack the shaping of a global ethnographic imagination regarding the various indigenous populations, with their respective local manifestations and re-significations that occurred over time.
Our symposium therefore calls on researchers to present completed or ongoing work that makes it possible to explore the reach and reconfigurations of a writing that shaped many of the ideal expressions, in the sense proposed by Kant, of what it meant to be indigenous in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In this way, the symposium hopes to build a body of knowledge anchored in a true ‘game of ladders’ that not only recovers the shaping of that Memory and global ethnographic imagination; our ultimate goal is to present new possible lines of research to be debated from a critical stance toward Jesuit writing.
