Europeans and Indigenous People in Portuguese America: Perspectives on Interculturality

Abstract

In this article we intend to analyse, from a historical perspective, aspects of the cultural intercourses experienced between the Old World and the New World, discovered and invented at the dawn of modern times. The European expansion and the formation of colonial empires from the sixteenth century onwards led to the creation of transnational markets, diversified socio-political relations and, above all, cultural dynamics involving Europeans, Africans, Asians and indigenous populations of the New World, especially in Portuguese America, which raised religious and scientific concerns in intellectual circles of the time. We focus on cultural transits, especially from manifestations of the sacred. We understand religion as an aspect of culture, forming meanings, representations, discourses and practices, according to the theoretical perspective of Cultural History, formulated by Roger Chartier (1990). Cultural Studies have provoked an intense academic debate in various areas of knowledge, and have recently been broadening in the historians' workshop, enabling more refined approaches to daily life, to the socio-cultural relations between individuals and the various social groups which constitute societies, breaking with methodological paradigms which privileged only political and macroeconomic aspects. As for the concept of Interculturalism, conceived in the context of multicultural European nations from the 1970s onwards, it should be noted that it was initially used in Anthropology, Educational Sciences, Literary and Linguistic Studies and Communication as a response to the demands of cultural diversity provided by a globalised world, in permanent tension between local and global, regional and national. 2 The category interculturality carries in

its core the difficulty of observing it in the concrete relations between different peoples and cultures that have maintained throughout human history relations of subalternity, colonial projects, ethnocentric visions and practices. However, in the midst of a hegemonic thought of domination or cultural imperialism, it is possible to observe and highlight in the experiences lived by cultural agents, that such hegemonic vision was made more flexible, or rearranged in sharing, coexistence, exchanges and encounters between different groups. In "intercultural dialogue, the exchange is not only of knowledge, but also between different cultures, that is, between different universes of meaning and, to a great extent, incommensurable" (SANTOS, 1997, p.23). In literary studies, the concept of interculturality has been frequently worked on. Analyzing the literary work of Jorge Amado, Rita Godet highlighted its relevance in understanding the diverse cultural references that formed the Brazilian reality and how the Bahian author imbued with an "intercultural ethic", suggests "a rearticulation of knowledge that bets on a process of cultural recomposition capable of generating a new composite identity" (GODET, 2014, p.30). Therefore it is a polysemic concept, suitable for the search of an interdisciplinary knowledge such as Cultural Studies. Having as hermeneutic key that religion is culture, we argue that in the difficult dialogue between Europeans and indigenous people in the Brazilian colonial territory, religiosity was fundamental, as a mediation between two distinct and strange universes and contexts: the cultural Renaissance of the 16th century experienced in Europe and the inauguration of the experience lived by Brazilian indigenous people of living with the other, absolutely strange, after 1500 with the occupation of the territory by the Portuguese monarchy. In Portuguese America, the Catholic Church played an important role, based on a vision of Christianity, an attempt at homogenisation and religious and cultural exclusivism, but reformed Christians also came into contact with the indigenous population and recorded representations based on their experiences in Brazilian colonial territory in the second half of the 16th century. We analyse the similarities and divergences in Catholic and Protestant thought regarding the religiosity of indigenous groups, as well as the attempts at catechization developed among the indigenous communities. We intend to analyse the interculturality in the religious field of Portuguese America in the first century of colonisation, based on 16th century chroniclers, such as Jean de Léry, a French Calvinist and the Catholic Friar André de Thevet, who circulated in Guanabara and Hans Staden, a German Lutheran, who visited Pernambuco and São Vicente.