graphical Knowledge, Alterity Tensions and Martyrology’s Theatres in Jesuitical Cartographies of the New World

Abstract

Based on a Jesuitical cartographic work about the Mojos region, I aim to analyze how the XVIII century Jesuitical cartographies have embodied some practices and tropes of geographical representation from precedents centuries. For doing this, in the first part I analyze territorial knowledge for make visible porosity between multiples forms (scientific, popular, theological) of geographical knowledge. Secondly, I analyze some tropes of the alterities and the representation of «the others» in order to see how Jesuit oeuvres have placed the alterity in European cultural universe. In the third part, I place the martyrs’ representations in a larger context of mise en scène, in order to show how this cartographical work reproduces the world like a theater of the universal Jesuitical enterprise.