{"title":"The Uprooting of Indigenous Women’s Horticultural Practices in Brazil, 1500–1650","authors":"Jessica O’Leary","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtac047","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the land now known as Brazil, Indigenous women were responsible for cultivating and preparing a tuberous root called mandioca (cassava). Following the arrival of Europeans in 1500, mandioca replaced wheat bread to become the staple carbohydrate in settlers’ diets. Travellers’ accounts between 1500 and 1550 describe how Indigenous women taught settlers to prepare the tubers for consumption through the use of special tools and processes of soaking, drying and pulverizing. However, with the arrival of the Jesuits, European sources began to elide or problematize knowledge among Indigenous women that did not cohere with Christian normative values. By the mid seventeenth century, naturalists were no longer acknowledging the original female informants who had taught Europeans how to identify and cultivate the plant. In line with recent scholarship on the history of science and medicine in colonial contexts, a close reading of the sources reflects the importance of Indigenous knowledges to imperial expansion, on the one hand, and the interactive nature of cross-cultural knowledge sharing that became hidden by early modern European epistemological practices. Drawing on a broad body of colonial documentation, this article examines how European representations of the cultivation of mandioca identified, exploited, assimilated, suppressed and, finally, alienated Indigenous women’s knowledges from their original holders between 1500 and 1650.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Past & Present","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac047","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract In the land now known as Brazil, Indigenous women were responsible for cultivating and preparing a tuberous root called mandioca (cassava). Following the arrival of Europeans in 1500, mandioca replaced wheat bread to become the staple carbohydrate in settlers’ diets. Travellers’ accounts between 1500 and 1550 describe how Indigenous women taught settlers to prepare the tubers for consumption through the use of special tools and processes of soaking, drying and pulverizing. However, with the arrival of the Jesuits, European sources began to elide or problematize knowledge among Indigenous women that did not cohere with Christian normative values. By the mid seventeenth century, naturalists were no longer acknowledging the original female informants who had taught Europeans how to identify and cultivate the plant. In line with recent scholarship on the history of science and medicine in colonial contexts, a close reading of the sources reflects the importance of Indigenous knowledges to imperial expansion, on the one hand, and the interactive nature of cross-cultural knowledge sharing that became hidden by early modern European epistemological practices. Drawing on a broad body of colonial documentation, this article examines how European representations of the cultivation of mandioca identified, exploited, assimilated, suppressed and, finally, alienated Indigenous women’s knowledges from their original holders between 1500 and 1650.
期刊介绍:
Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world. The journal offers: •A wide variety of scholarly and original articles on historical, social and cultural change in all parts of the world. •Four issues a year, each containing five or six major articles plus occasional debates and review essays. •Challenging work by young historians as well as seminal articles by internationally regarded scholars. •A range of articles that appeal to specialists and non-specialists, and communicate the results of the most recent historical research in a readable and lively form. •A forum for debate, encouraging productive controversy.