EN NOMBRE DE DIOS. LA EMPRESA MISIONERA FRENTE A LA ALTERIDAD

En nombre de Dios In the “Introduction” to the book En nombre de Dios. La empresa misionera frente a la alteridad, Flavia Cuturi points out how along the last decades cultural anthropology has acknowledged that the theories, the conceptual instruments and methods worked out in the West to define and face alterity have a significant debt to the cognitive and practical experiences of missionary action. Anthropologists’ interest in the politics of evangelization goes beyond the social and cognitive processes (sometimes labelled under the category of “syncretism”) that those politics triggered. Missionary enterprise has started and enacted specific linguistic and cultural dynamics with critical consequences on political and identitarian phenomena. Behind many aspects, the history of everyday missionary action reveals the politics and strategies implemented in communicating missionaries’ own interpretations of the Christian message. The essay by Flavia Cuturi “Reductio ad unam linguam. La violencia protectora en la reductiones jesuitas”, on the Jesuit Missions in the Chiquitania region (Eastern Bolivia) introduces to the border reality of the last missions established right before the suppression of the Jesuit Order. Chiquitano Missions represent exemplar processes of reduction already experienced in other regions, that included both politics of language and communication, through their “reduction” to grammar, and the settlement of Indigenous people from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds to live in shared hamlets. The essay is gounded on both field research (1994) in the villages founded by Jesuits, and on historical data. In the book, edited by Flavia Cuturi, there are essays by historians, musicologist, linguist, anthropologists: G. Imbruglia, J. Herczog, G. Di Fiore, A. Colajanni, M. Gnerre, C. Mattalucci, D. Bendo Soupou. The book is a traslation of the italian edition: "In nome di Dio. L'impresa missionaria di fronte all'alterità" (2004)