Cristobal Gnecco

CRISTOBAL GNECCO, Universidad del Cauca, Popayan, Colombia, was awarded a grant in October 2016 to aid research on ‘The Heritage Meanings of the Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis.’ The principal aim of this research is the description of past and current heritage meanings accorded to the Jesuit missions of the Guarani in Argentina and Paraguay, building in what has been already achieved in Brazil in 2014. These are the main results of the investigation: 1) there is a lack of consensus on the place of the Guarani in the missions, maybe because it is no longer just an academic issue, but rather a political one; yet, the idea that there is a gap between the missionary Guarani and the actual Guarani dominates; 2) the missions have become objects of government: they went from being immaterial symbols to material sign-objects, from national myths to objects of governmentality; 3) the differential reading of the missions by the historiographies of the three countries in which their ruins are found is notorious. In Paraguay the missionary experience was part of the national history being built after the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870). In Argentina, the Missions played an important role in building national, even regional boundaries. In Brazil, the Missions constitute a booty of the frontier wars of the eighteenth century and its ruins were again taken by a rhetorical assault in the 1930s; and 4) since the 1980s a global discourse has been articulated that seeks to build an image of the ruins as tourist commodities and as objects of governmentality geared to economic and ontological policies.