Entretons: light and darkness

Abstract

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This paper proposes reflections about the association between Brazilian indigenous people, catechesis and the literature of the Father José de Anchieta on mission in Brazil. Through reading, analysis and bibliographic research, it is observed that the name of Father José de Anchieta, while associated with the catechesis of the first inhabitants of the colonized land, is also related to the bases of Brazilian literature and, in this sense his writings are distinguished from the writings of other prominent names in the early times of colonization. Making art his main instrument of persuasion, he wrote poems, texts and songs, which he used as a resource for the desired conversion. His way of defending and living with them made him a symbol of the good Jesuit, but his performance in the service of the Catholic ideology to which he was faithful consists of an antagonistic performance to the culture of these people. In this sense, even in the case of the priest from the Canary Islands, who was dear to the tribes for having a vision and way of acting different from most missionaries of the period, the effect of catechesis was of undeniable symbolic violence, in the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, author used as theoretical contribution in this study.