Colony, Cult and Culture
author's note
Author's Note for the North-American Edition
Alfredo Bosi
In writing “Colony, Cult and Culture” as an introduction to Dialética da colonização, the challenge I faced consisted in creating a space of convergence that would bring together some of the conceptual planes that are fundamental to the process of colonization. In this search for a common denominator capable of including the diversity of historical elements involved in this process without reducing them to the unity of an abstract term, I was aided by the very etymology of the words colony and colonization.
As the reader will perceive in the opening pages of the essay, both words have as their root the Latin verb colo, from which the terms colony, cult and culture all derive. These are not mere lexical coincidences, but actual historical dimensions that interact with one another throughout the colonial period, and which may be recognized even today in postcolonial societies. The general idea that underlies these three dimensions is that of labor—physical, moral and intellectual.
The colonizer is he who takes control of a foreign land and by means of force, technique, and skill, conquers it, exploits it, cultivates it, and dominates it politically; in sum, he exercises all the powers brought together in the verb colo, whose deverbal noun form is colony. In the interest of an accurate understanding of this process, economics and other social sciences may be called upon to research the material conditions that governed colonization. This assignment has already been successfully accomplished by some of our best historians, among them Capistrano de Abreu, Caio Prado Jr., Celso Furtado, Raymundo Faoro, and Jacob Gorender. I used their work in my own as an indispensable reference for any study of our economic and political formation.
There is, of course, no colonizing agent without a past or without memory. Conquerors did not spring forth from an atemporal zero-degree point. They brought with them in their caravels beliefs that conditioned their attitudes toward the native populations they came to dominate, when they did not destroy them altogether. Together with the sword and the blunderbuss came the cross and the Bible. The Iberian, English and French colonies were populated by men who practiced either a popular and still medieval Catholicism or its counter-reformist version, or a puritanical Protestantism in revolt against Anglican hegemony. Monotheism brought them together as Christians opposed to “indigenous paganism,” though they were divided into active or passive contemporaries of the Inquisition, the Reformation, or the Counter-Reformation, and by the religious wars fought during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How can one understand José de Anchieta's Latin and Tupi plays or the sermons of Father Antônio Vieira (both missionaries and Jesuit writers whom I studied in individual chapters of Dialética da colonização) without examining in depth the peculiar quality of the Medieval and later Baroque Catholic cult? How can one arbitrarily separate the missionary spirit from the project of colonization? How is it possible to separate colony-as-cultivation from colony-as-cult? How can their spaces of convergence and divergence be detected?
A parallel question may be directed to scholars of Anglo-Saxon colonization in the United States: how can this process be understood without exploring the religious and moral lives of the Puritans established there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? In the Old as in the New World, and particularly during this period—prior to the Industrial Revolution and full-blown bourgeois hegemony—the relations between the economic structure and religious ideas and practices were so interconnected that they can only be entirely separated in the context of specialized (and, in truth, one-sided) academic studies.
The third dimension of the colonization process entails the development of a secular culture, heralded from the Renaissance forward and polemically advanced beginning in the Enlightenment. The word culture derives from the future participle of the verb colo and points toward the notion of a project: what must be cultivated, what must be built; that is, a set of virtual ideas and values that are a given in the minds and the wills of a certain social and intellectual group. This dimension became a fundamental component of the process of independence led by the New World's propertied classes and lettered elites, component that shaped the model of political rupture with the colonizing metropolis. Liberal European culture was the ideological cement binding together the emancipatory battles that broke out in all of Latin America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Later, with the Republic proclaimed, positivist principles would inspire a politics of order and progress, which the leaders of the Revolution of 1930 in Brazil went on to translate into the forms of centralized government and state-led industrialization.
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As the historian takes into consideration the multiple expressions of a given period's symbolic universe, his attention is drawn to the existence of diverging and, when taken to the limit, contradictory tendencies of thought and of pathos. The conventional historicism that dominated the literary histories of the nineteenth century transformed those authors and works that departed from their period's standard style into exceptions or singular manifestations of backwardness or deviation (the attardés and égarés discussed by Gustave Lanson in his important history of French literature); in the best of cases, it celebrated the anticipatory qualities of some precursors.
In contrast to pure historicism, the dialectical vision of culture, adopting a Hegelian-Marxian approach, recognizes in the coexisting contradictions of every worldview the very dynamic of a history made up of tensions between dominant ideologies and the forces of resistance. Or, in Hegelian terms, it detects the tensions between the affirmative thrust of the thesis and the negative force of the antithesis. As long as this method is not automatized into a facile game of affirmations, negations and sublations, it can offer a fruitful way for dealing with diversity and the conflicts inherent to each social formation in each of its historical moments. This is the most
general meaning of the term “dialectic,” as featured in the title of the book whose introduction the English-language reader now has in hand.
In the chapter “Olhar em retrospecto” (A Retrospective Glance), which closes Dialética da colonização, I synthesized the results of my research and my reflections on the book's object of study in these terms: “Colonization is a process that is at once material and symbolic. The economic practices of its agents are linked to their means of survival, to their memory, to their ways of representing themselves and others, and ultimately, to their desires and hopes. To put it another way: there is no colonial condition without a weaving together of cults, of ideologies and of cultures. The relations between these fundamental dimensions (which Marxism summarized at the levels of infra- and superstructure) are modified, throughout time, by positive determinants of adjustment, reproduction and continuity. Situations arise, however, in which it is the asymmetries and, in extreme cases, the ruptures that appear before the historian and anthropologist of colonial life.” The dialectical approach teaches us that we should pay just as much attention to moments of tension and change as to states of equilibrium and adjustment. Diachrony is only possible because synchrony is neither homogeneous nor static.
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The corpus from which the examples considered in my book were taken belongs entirely to the history of Brazilian culture and, in several cases, to the history of the ideologies, counter-ideologies, and utopias constituted throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods. Insofar as each one of these complexes of symbols and values was of interest to the social groups that participated in the historical drama (here I draw on the strong meaning given by Habermas to the term interest), and given the extent to which respective ideologies and counter-ideologies played an effective role in this same drama, one may affirm that superstructural phenomena always occupy a place in the history of a people. It is the understanding of this place that draws the eye of the scholar of colonization.
I hope that my discussion is sufficiently clear, as well as instructive whenever possible, so that the text that follows may be understood by readers who are unfamiliar with Brazilian cultural and literary history. I am grateful to Robert Patrick Newcomb, the translator of this essay, who took on the sometimes difficult task of composing in English what I attempted to say in Portuguese. To Victor K. Mendes, who thought it opportune to make my text available to scholars interested in Brazil, and to Pedro Meira Monteiro, whose intellectual generosity was responsible for this edition, my heartfelt thanks.
Institute for Advanced Studies, University of São Paulo
December 2007