Beyond the Binary of Divine Presence and Absence in the Colonial Encounter Between the Tupinambá and Jesuit Missionaries in Brazil

I n History and Presence, Robert A. Orsi calls for a broad rethinking of religion and history.In part, his argument relies on an interpretation of how Catholic missionaries viewed Amerindian religious practices in terms of "metaphysics of real presences." 1For Orsi, some North American Catholic groups and Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth-century shared with Amerindians, broadly construed, common or similar views about the nature of the "real" presence of the divine among them.In History and Presence, this assumption is justified by a given colonial narrative in which Catholic missionaries would have "better glimpsed" the "reality of the local gods and their cults." 2 According to Orsi, Catholicism remained "the template for non-European people's idioms of presence." 3 The proposed resemblance between the two "metaphysics of real presence" figuring in American colonial encounters purports to represent the logical religious consequence of two empirical preconditions, namely, (a) the substitution, by missionaries, of Amerindian "gods" for the Christian god, and, (b) the identitarian "anxiety" that missionaries experienced when they would have recognized the "ontological similarities" between Amerindian religions and sixteenthcentury Missionary Catholicism.Differently put, the thesis of the substitution 1

Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History of Colonial Brazil

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