The Centrality of Peripheries: The Orinoco Ilustrado and Imperial-Enlightened Knowledge

Jesuits in Hispanic America during the eighteenth century have typically been addressed both as promoters of science and civilization and as precursors of the independence movements. In her book on Orinoco Ilustrado (1741–45) by the Jesuit missionary Joseph Gumilla, Margaret Ewalt departs from the second reading, but not from the first perspective, to which she offers a novel assessment by directly connecting the Jesuits with the Enlightenment, thereby contradicting critiques that have refused to see significant Spanish contributions to this intellectual movement. By rhetorically analyzing Orinoco Illustrado, and studying the historical context within which Gumilla was working, Ewalt, like Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Ruth Hill (among others), demonstrates the existence of an “eclectic, Catholic Enlightenment” (13).

Ewalt’s contribution is particularly important given that she is working on an early Enlightenment period, the first half of the eighteenth century, while providing a long-awaited first general study of Orinoco Ilustrado, arguably the most influential description of the region through which the Orinoco River runs, and also one of the most important chronicles of its time, a work that was to be amply consulted and quoted by other Jesuits as well as by many scientific travelers such as Charles Marie de La Condamine, Jorge Juan, Antonio de Úlloa, and Alexander von Humboldt. As Ewalt points out in her conclusions, the many editions and translations of Gumilla’s text in its own time and up until ours make it required reading not only because of how it deals with the construction of national identities, but also for what it contributes to universal science and knowledge. In fact, by referring to the way Humboldt’s work has eclipsed the texts and knowledge of “Amerindians, criollos, and clerics,” which the famous traveler read and which, unlike his writings, are “insufficiently cited” (181), Ewalt suggests something akin to the “piracy of knowledge” that, according to Ralph Bauer, was the common strategy whereby other countries and languages appropriated knowledge produced in Spanish.¹

Ewalt emphasizes an alternative Enlightenment that, without discarding emotion or God, implied, nonetheless, the extension of reason. In the third chapter, which deals with the relationships between Gumilla and the inhabitants of the Orinoco region, Ewalt studies the experiments and demonstrations he carried out in order to persuade the Indians that the sun was not a god, and to explain to them the causes and harmless character of eclipses. This chapter shows how the expansion of Catholicism transformed the Orinoco Amerindians’ “perceptions of the world” and introduced Western, scientific rationality (120). Precisely because of this, Gumilla’s supposed mediation between Amerindian and European knowledge is not wholly convincing. Despite Ewalt’s wish to emphasize the dialogue between the two and the way Gumilla’s knowledge changes in response to what he sees and learns in the Orinoco, in her analysis, the region’s inhabitants appear submissive, passive receivers of the Enlightenment and evangelization.

Nevertheless, this is precisely what permits Ewalt to demonstrate the importance and complexity of the Jesuits’ chronicles and actions, central not only to evangelizing an entire continent but also to developing an economy and a science intertwined with European imperialism. The second chapter examines the context in which Orinoco Ilustrado was written, and it is excellently developed; the author is on target in characterizing it as a series of maps that respond to varied interests. “As a whole,” Ewalt says, Gumilla’s text “can be read as one expansive textual map that enlightens his readers, charting not only the region’s human and natural resources, but also the Jesuits’ and Spain’s previous successes and future possibilities in New Granada” (65). The chapter focuses on Gumilla’s ideas for defending the frontiers of the empire against British and French pirates, Portuguese and Dutch slave traders, while preserving the Jesuits’ interests in the face of those of other religious orders. In this way, as seen in many other eighteenth-century century Jesuit texts, Orinoco Ilustrado not only...