Diferentes Perspectivas dos Impedimentos de Casamento Tridentino: no Catecismo Tupi de Araújo (1618) e na Vida do índio Lopo de Souza Copaúba

Abstract

The research initially had as premise that the relations between Indians and missionaries in the colonial Amazon constituted a clash of cultures, in which the Jesuit evangelization destroyed the Tupinambá preferential marriages, such as the polygamous form in which the Indians organized their families. The research was guided by Antônio de Araújo's catechism of 1618, in which are the rules of Christian marriage decided at the Council of Trent (1563). One section of the catechism that we emphasized at the beginning of our research was the list of 24 impediments to marriage, of which more than ten prevented traditional marital relations in Tupi groups (polygamy, sorority, levirate, marriage of the maternal uncle to his niece, etc.). But another perspective on the Tridentine marriage impediments in evangelization emerged when we take the lives of the Indians as an object of study. An example is the biography of the Principal of the Village of Maracanã, Lopo de Souza Copaúba, who was arrested by Antônio Vieira in 1661 for marrying his ex-wife's sister and still living with her for more than 20 years, shows that the impediments contained in the catechism were not applied in their entirety and had to be adapted to the reality of evangelization in the Amazon. The objective of the work is to show these different perspectives of the Tridentine marriage impediments, both in the official sources such as the Tupi catechism, and in the accounts of missionaries who told cases of Indians deviating from Christian rules. The theoretical references of the research are the works of Karen Spalding (1972) and James Lockhart (2003). Spalding contributes with the idea of the Indian as non-passive in his relations with the missionary, and Lockhart with his methodology of using institutional sources with care, seeking to complement them with other documents that relate the daily life of the Indians. This author is an invitation to take Araújo's catechism as a text of institutional character and, therefore, not reflecting the results of evangelization among the Indians.