draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

of Kambeba lived as far downriver as Tefé (Grenand and Grenand 1997:5). 330
9.2 Language and Evangelization in Maynas
Few factors shaped Jesuit missionary activities in the Gobierno de Maynas as much as its tremendous
linguistic diversity. Even today, after almost five centuries of steady language shift, the Peruvian
Department of Loreto is still home to some 23 languages, divided between nine language families
and five linguistic isolates, in a region little larger than Germany ((Solís Fonseca 2002:140)). The
following passage from 1699, drawn from a letter written to his brother by Wenzel Breyer, an
occasional companion of Samuel Fritz, provides a vivid sketch of the linguistic situation in Maynas
and the issues it posed for the Jesuit missionaries.
Hay aquí tantos pueblos y tantas lenguas, que entre la ciudad de S. Francisco de Borja
y el río Napo se encuentran hasta 60 de ellos; sin embargo, toda aquella región se puede
atravesar en 200 horas de camino. Como cada pueblo tiene su propia lengua y un
misionero no puede aprender sino una o dos de ellas, la evangelización necesariamente
se atrasa. Si todos los indios no hablaran más que una lengua, hace tiempo que estos
pueblos podrían haberse convertido al cristianismo.
(Matthei (1969:252), excerpted in Downes (2008:70)) 331
The purpose of this section is to describe how the Jesuits responded and adapted to this linguistically
complex state of affairs, and to situate the production of ecclesiastical texts in the Maynas
Jesuits’ use of indigenous languages in their evangelical efforts.
In the broadest terms, the Jesuits in Maynas pursued a two-pronged strategy in their evangelical
work, where one prong involved the promotion of lenguas generales, especially Quechua, across
diverse linguistic communities, and the second involved the simultaneous use of ‘local languages’ or
lenguas particulares in a number of different ways in the relevant communities (see Solís Fonseca
(2002:53-54) for a discussion of these terms). It is clear that a significant fraction of the Maynas
Jesuits hoped that the promotion of Quechua as a lengua general would allow evangelical work to
be carried out in a single linguistic framework across all the communities in which they worked and,
not incidentally, free them of the obligation to master each local language. But it is equally clear
that the adoption of Quechua by the Amazonian peoples with which the Maynas Jesuits worked was
a slow and halting process at best, requiring evangelical activity to be carried out in the relevant
lenguas particulares.
The Maynas Jesuits approached the challenge posed by the lenguas particulares with a number
of interlocking strategies based either on developing competence in the lengua particular by
330 The downriver location of some Kambeba in Tefé may support Loureiro’s (1978:95) hypothesis that Fritz’s Omagua
settlement of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Anonymous [1731]1922:91) corresponds to the modern Brazilian town
of Fonte Boa. However, the Kambeba of the 20th century appear to have been extremely mobile (see additional
work by Benedito Maciel here: http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/kambeba/), and it is not clear whether
the presence of Kambeba speakers in Tefé is a result of more recent migration.
331 Translation (ours):
Here there are so many villages and so many languages, that between the city of San Francisco de
Borja and the Napo River one finds 60 of them; however, that entire region can be crossed in 200
hours of travel. As each village has its own language and a missionary can only learn but one or two
of them, evangelization is consequently set back. If all the Indians were to speak one language, these
villages would have been converted to Christianity a long time ago.
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