Idolatria e diferença colonial na concepção da escola jesuítica dirigida aos povos originários brasileiros

Abstract

This research work proposes a study, based on the decolonial theory, about the role that the notion of idolatry assumed in the conception of the school directed to the native peoples that the missionaries of the Society of Jesus implanted in Brazil during the sixteenth century, within the project colonial occupation of Brazil by the Portuguese Crown. Through a bibliographical research with secondary sources of the period, considered as a discursive object, in addition to a content analysis, and the reading of critical texts, the study aims to evaluate the feasibility of using the decolonial theory of the Argentinian thinker Walter Mignolo, who was elaborated from research on colonialism in Spanish America, in the investigation of the history of the school in Colonial Brazil. Mignolo's theory proposes the category of Coloniality as a critical category to Modernity, emphasizing the hierarchy of knowledge, carried out within the colonial system, as a hermeneutic strategy of Western civilization, creating an enunciative position that he calls colonial difference. Regarding the issue of religious idolatry, the analysis of the texts of the period makes visible, in the context of the clash between very contrasting cultures such as the Western and Tupinambá, discursive mechanisms that characterize, in the genesis of the Brazilian school, marks of the colonial difference established between Colony and Metropolis by colonialist system, with the aim of legitimizing the political sovereignty of the European Metropolis and the centrality of the West in the production and reproduction of knowledge. Thus, the work intends to demonstrate the political character of the first school in the country, committed to the task of acculturating the native peoples. In this sense, the study intends to make a contribution to the elaboration of a pluritopic hermeneutic regarding the historical experience of silencing the voices of the native peoples who live in Brazil, as a political maneuver of the European monarchies for the domination of these peoples, using the school as a institutional instrument for the realization of this enterprise.