Research Catalog

Title

Mission culture on the upper Amazon : native tradition, Jesuit enterprise & secular policy in Moxos, 1660-1880 / David Block.

Author

Block, David, 1945-2021.

Publication

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [1994], ©1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xiii, 240 pages : illustrations, maps; 24 cm

Summary

• 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 syntheses that ensued

Subject

• Jesuits > Missions > Moxos
• Mojo Indians > Missions
• Indians of South America > Missions > Moxos
• Moxos (Bolivia) > History
• Beni (Bolivia) > History

Note

• Based on the author's PH.D. thesis.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-226) and index.

Contents

1. The Setting -- 2. The Jesuit Century -- 3. The Missions -- 4. Mission Indians: Gentiles and Neophytes -- 5. The Missionaries: Fathers and Brothers -- 6. Mission Culture under Spanish Rule -- 7. Moxos to Beni: The Dissolution of Mission Culture -- Appendix: Sources of Demographic Data on Moxos Settlements, 1683-1882.

ISBN

0803212321 (alk. paper)

LCCN

93024620

OCLC

• 28184172
• ocm28184172

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries