Aristotle in the Borderlands: Indians as Categories of Natural Historical Analysis in Colonial Jesuit Accounts of the New World

This paper examines the moral and ethnographic categories of natural historical analysis that helped Jesuits proclaim colonial authority over Indians and land in Spanish America.  Linked closely to narratives of idolatry, wonder, and miraculous conversion, natural historical studies of New World Indians and nature demonstrated efforts to bring the science of Thomistic theology to a more popular literary celebration of Catholic expansion on the Spanish American frontier.  Surveying Jesuit natural historical study from the earliest works of Bernabé Cobo and José de Acosta in the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth-century empirical studies of Joseph Gumilla, José Sánchez Labrador, and Francisco Javier Clavijero, this paper studies the emergence of Jesuit mission science as an institution in the borderlands regions of New Spain, Nueva Granada, and Río de la Plata.  Central to the study of natural history in Jesuit mission science was the role humans played in the Society’s cosmographic and natural historical claims to colonial scientific authority. This paper examines how these constructions of Amerindian identity shifted from a sixteenth-century interest in idolatry and reform to an eighteenth-century science of race.