In the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries working in
what is now Brazil were struck by what they called the inconstancy
of the people they met, the indigenous Tupi-speaking tribes of the
Atlantic coast. Though the Indians appeared eager to receive the
Gospel, they also had a tendency to forget the missionaries'
lessons and "revert" to their natural state of war, cannibalism,
and polygamy. This peculiar mixture of acceptance and rejection,
compulsion and forgetfulness was incorrectly understood by the
priests as a sign of the natives' incapacity to believe in anything
durably.
In this pamphlet, world-renowned Brazilian anthropologist
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro situates the Jesuit missionaries'
accounts of the Tupi people in historical perspective, and in the
process draws out some startling and insightful implications of
their perceived inconstancy in relation to anthropological debates
on culture and religion.
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