Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1880 - Hardcover

Block, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803212321 ISBN 13: 9780803212329

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1994

Synopsis

Until recently, historians of the Christian missions in the New World have seen Missionaries either as saints and martyrs or as brutal disrupters and oppressors. Both the apologists and detractors of mission enterprise have concentrated solely on the missionaries, regarding the native populations either as childlike beneficiaries or as mutely suffering victims. With the growth of ethnohistory as a field of research, new research has sought to reconstruct the situations, the reactions, and the strategies of native groups, thereby seeing the native peoples of the Americas as active agents in their own history.

In Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon, David Block describes the formation of a new society in the Moxos region of the Amazon Basin, in what is now northern, or lowland, Bolivia. This society began with the arrival of the Jesuits in the region. The mutual synthesis that became Jesuit mission culture followed, with Moxos Indian cultural survival and adaptation continuing after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. With the cataclysmic onset of the rubber boom, the entire region was plunged into a period of severe exploitation and conflict that persists to this day. Block’s nuanced treatment of the mission encounter—one extending over a large time period—permits a balanced understanding of the mission enterprise, native response, and the cultural synthesis that ensued.

About this title

About the Author

David Block is an Ibero-American bibliographer at Cornell University Library. His articles have appeared in numerous journals. This is his first book.

Review

"This is a work which will set the standard for mission studies for some time to come."—Erick Langer, Carnegie Mellon University (Erick Langer )

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0803212321
• ISBN 13: 9780803212329
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240