Humility and Laziness: The Two Faces of the Poor in Paraguay’s Early Modern Jesuit Missions?

Abstract

Early modern European monarchies responded to structural poverty with a series of welfare programs while also implementing repressive measures against the poor. Perceived during the late Middle Ages as virtuous Christians accepting their fate with humility, the poor of the early modern period were accused of vagrancy and immoral laziness, thus posing a threat to the social order. In contrast, in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chronicles of the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, hardly any mention is made of the material deprivation of Indians. A catechism of work in Guaraní intended to moralize the Indians’ labor, however, reveals that poverty was at the core of the missionaries’ concerns. Through an analysis of the Guaraní lexicon in connection with poverty, this article demonstrates that destitution in the missions was a daily problem. The article also shows how the term poriahu, glossing the word “poor,” covered only part of the meaning of the same word in Europe, where it had positive connotations, having been passed down by medieval tradition. In parallel, stigmatizing representations of the “bad pauper” were set apart and constructed around particular glosses, such as that of “vagrant” or “lazy.” This separation allowed for the development of an assistance policy that responded to the needs of all missionary Indians and was indispensable for the sustainability of the missions.