Building Indigenous Subjectivity: Jesuit Pedagogies of Emotion in the Colonial Andes

Abstract

Transforming the religious outlook of Indigenous populations in the colonial Andes became an imperial undertaking that required more than an external change. In the Andes, the missionary enterprise of the Jesuits created a wholesale design of mechanisms for an effective intervention in the psyche of the Native children of the Andean kurakas. Indoctrinators used the schools of caciques and other missional spaces to direct these young students’ mental and bodily dispositions toward cultural comportment changes. Colonizing Andeans’ innermost realms, the king and the Jesuits expected that out of “idolatrous heathens” would emerge Indians with European customs who embraced and expanded Christianity. To that end, the Jesuits systematically applied the “medicine of the soul,” an assortment of pedagogies employed to set in motion a variety of psychological states to produce a Christian subjectivity that occupied the inner space of Andean children’s lives.