Jesuit Mission and the Globalization of Knowledge of the Americas: Florian Paucke’s Hin und Her in the Province of ‘Paraquaria’ During the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This article addresses the early globalization phase of the Jesuit Order in America through Florian Paucke’s work Hin und Her.1 Special attention is given to the analysis of the field of tensions underlying the proto-globalization processes of the Spanish empire and the frontier mission, for which three narrative components are considered: ‘Paraquaria’2 and the cartography of the spiritual ‘mission’; a reflection on intercultural stereotypes (indigenous, Spaniards and Germans); and the deconstruction of the autonomist myth of Nicolás I, King of Paraguay. In current research, the history of globalization and its accelerated impact on the economic, political, sociological, juridical and technological sciences, among others, demonstrates the multidisciplinary resonances that this category has attained—not solely in the scholarly field, but also in everyday speech. Thus, the complexity of the components that converge in the conceptualization of globalI am grateful to my colleagues José Carlos Rovira, Claudia Comes and Eva Valero Juan for their kind invitation to take part in the conference “América y los jesuitas expulsos” (Centro de Estudios Literarios Iberoamericanos Mario Benedetti, Universidad de Alicante, September 2015), at which I presented a first version of this article. In addition, I thank Sina Rauschenbach, Roberto Aedo, Enrique Corredera Nilsson and Settimio Presutto for their critical reading and bibliographic recommendations. This article was translated by David Sánchez Cano.  Hereafter, whenever referring to Hin und Her I will quote from the 1959 edition of the ZwettlerCodex 420 and abbreviate these references as HH (see bibliography for an explanation of the abbreviations used).  According to Becker (1987, p. 233, note 15), the province of ‘Paraquaria’ (equally archaic variants of which are ‘Paraquiaria’ or ‘Paracuaria’) included all the territory of the present-day states of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, southern Brazil, and adjoining parts of Bolivia. In 1625, Chile was separated from the Province of Paraquaria and made a Sub-Province of the