“Contempt for wealths”: elements of the indigenous material culture in João Daniel’s chronicle (18th century)

Abstract

This article explores the Part Two of the first tome of Tesouro Descoberto no Máximo Rio Amazonas, a chronicle written by the jesuit João Daniel during the final years of his life, while he was imprisoned in Portugal, after the expulsion of the jesuits from Portuguese America. The text, of enviable erudition, so much more because it was written from memory, reports all the “wonders” seen or heard by the author while he served as a missionary in the State of Maranhão in the middle of the 18th century. The chronicle combines a detailed description with a complex view of the Indians' ways of life. For this reason, we discussed the logic of existence and sociability of the elements of material culture most frequent in the work, namely, weapons of war, household instruments (domestic utensils) and “blazons of nobility”, which is an interesting contradiction point of colonial discourse of the chronicler.