Monasticism, Sexuality, and Violence in New World Ethnography: Claude D'Abbeville's Tupinamba Encounter, 1612–15

This paper explores the interrelations between natural history, cosmology and ethnography in the French expedition to Maranhão, Brazil in 1612, part of the short-lived colony of La France Equinoxial.  Using Claude D’Abbeville’s Histoire de la mission des pères capucins en l'isle de Maragnan et terres circonvoisines (Paris, 1613) as well as his letters and the writings of others associated with the expedition, it argues that the intertwined networks of individuals, communities and ideas -- monastic, theological, cosmological and naturalist – within which D’Abbeville worked are inseparable from the resulting ethnography of the Tupinambà. D’Abbeville’s account has both been used as an unproblematic source for reconstructing Tupi culture, and derided for its simplistic taxonomy and transparent colonial, missionary agenda, but it has yet to be interpreted in the context of seventeenth-century naturalist interpretation on the New World colonial frontier.  Drawing on the burgeoning francophone genre of New World natural history writing popularized by André Thevet and Jean de Léry, D’Abbeville made the relationship between natural kinds and their environment the centerpiece of both his botanical and ethnographic analyses.  Rooted in Franciscan theology and in the communal practices of the Capucin order, this new environmental interpretive framework drove D’Abbeville’s interpretation of the roles of politics, sexuality and violence in Tupi culture and in the colonial encounter itself.  D’Abbeville’s account of the Tupi was crucial in the development of the theologically embedded, proto-scientific ethnography that became a cornerstone of French colonial encounters, from the Jesuits in New France to the popular interpretation of Tahiti at the end of the eighteenth century.