« Poraka ? C’est comme nourrir celui qui a tué notre mère… » Parenté, pouvoir et partage dans les missions guarani du Paraguay (xviiie siècle) à l’aune de l’ethnologie et de la lexicographie diachronique

Abstract

This article examines the different meanings carried by the term poraka in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay. By crossing historical sources and contemporary ethnological works, we show that it designates both the hunting and the sharing of game. If the analysis of the Jesuit dictionaries shows that the missionaries try to privilege the technical dimension of the term, namely the supply of halieutic and cynegetic resources, an unpublished monolingual Guarani manuscript produced in the missions in the 18th-century shows that in daily language it designates the social dimension, the sharing of the game. In addition, the manuscript highlights the persisting tension, a century after the foundation of the missions, between the traditional Guaraní kinship system, and the Christian one, based on the nuclear family. The transformations of the meaning of the term poraka could thus reflect an effort by the Jesuits to modify the practices of sharing, reoriented towards the nuclear family. The article therefore proposes to examine kinship in the reductions through the sharing of game, an approach widely used in ethnology but unprecedented in the study of the Jesuit missions of Paraguay.

Keywords

• historical lexicography
• Guarani
• Jesuit missions of Paraguay
• meat sharing
• hunting
• colonial America