“Trato da perpétua tormenta”: a conversão nos sertões de dentro e os escritos de Luigi Vincenzo Mamiani della Rovere sobre os Kiriri (1666-1699)

Abstract

In the second half of the 17th century, after the Portuguese Restoration, the settlement of the countryside of the Portuguese America was intensified. The process, defined in the documents as “expansion to the inward paths”, had as one of its goals the building of settlements and formation of alliances, in order to assure the safety of the commercial access to the routes of the cattle breeders, which stretched from Bahia to Piauí. A second goal was the formation of a group of natives that could repress the settling of quilombos on the impenetrable routes of the countryside. Once again, the religious orders were entrusted with the tasks of organizing the settlements, disciplining the natives and providing work force to build the roads in the countryside. The tutelage of the Kiriri nation, which was located on the south shore of the São Francisco river, was given to the priests of the Company of Jesus. During this period of reorganization of the colonial domains and beginning of new settlements, an important corpus of documents was produced. These documents tell of natives’ pleas, news about the settlements, description of different spaces and the need of elaborating new instruments that could help the communication. In order to answer these pleas, linguistic studies were performed, with the intent of systemazing and creating normatives of the local languages and, thus, make both communication and the desired conversions possible. On this thesis, we analyze both this documentation, as the two works that tried to create a normative for the Kiriri language, the Catecismo da Doutrina Christãa na Lingua Brasilica da Nação Kiriri and the Arte de Grammatica da Lingua Brasilica da naçam Kiriri. Both were written by the priest Ludovico Vicenzo Mamiani Della Rovere and were used in the Mirandela, Saco dos Morcegos, Natuba and Geru settlements during the second half of the 17th century, with the aim of presenting and discussing the conversion strategies employed by the missionaries who worked with the Kiriri, as well as the process of cultural translation that the Catechism and Grammar show.