At the meeting, Mickael Orantin, a researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-Paris), presented his work entitled “Society and work in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay (17th-18th centuries): cross perspectives from history and anthropology”.

During the meeting, the comparative study of indigenous work in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay and the Amazon was discussed. Orantin presented the Luján Manuscript, a 300-page document written in Guaraní, which describes daily life in the Paraguayan missions. This manuscript offers a detailed and unprecedented look into the social and economic organization of these missionary complexes, which existed from 1609 to 1768, reaching 30 units with a population of up to 140,000 in 1732. The missions were one of the largest urban concentrations in colonial America. Each mission, seeking self-sufficiency, was managed with diversified activities that included agriculture, livestock and handicrafts.

Studying the manuscript reveals that the Jesuit chronicles, although often discredited, provide a detailed reconstruction of daily life and work in the missions. The social and sexual division of labor, where men were responsible for agricultural activities and women for domestic chores, was a common practice, reflecting the spatial organization of these missions. Analysis of this material allows comparisons to be made with indigenous work in the Amazon, serving as a starting point for understanding how different forms of labor and social organization were shaped by colonial interactions with native populations in various regions of South America. The Amazonian context, in turn, was marked by the greater mobility of indigenous populations and diversity of the methods in which work was organized. Even so, the Jesuit missions in Paraguay offer a comparative parameter, since they implemented an organizational model developed by the Jesuits in the 16th century and adopted, with varying degrees of success, in various regions and by other missionary orders.