Arts, Crafts and Schools in the Missionary Action of the Jesuits and the Ancestral Knowledge of the Original Peoples of Brazil

Abstract

This paper deals with the first crafts brought by the Portuguese colonization, so that in the tropics living conditions similar to those they had in Europe were created and thus favoring the economic and cultural organization that the colonizers needed. By means of the letters inscribed in the study of Serafim Leite, it accesses reports and testimonies of the Jesuits of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, to understand the transposition of arts and crafts from Europe to colonial Brazil and the adoption of the arts and crafts of the so-called indigenous who suffered this colonizing action. It uses documentary and historiographical sources of the Society of Jesus, alongside interpretive studies on its action in the construction of the Brazilian colony. It reveals that such technical intertwining explains more vividly how Brazil was made in its beginnings, before it came to be configured as a patriarchal and slave society, as well as what it means socially today, when it exposes a fragile structure of nation and cultural identity too much. controversial.