Jesuit Dynamics among the Inca. What was the Society before Contact like?

Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject History - America, grade: 100, Arizona State University, course: Latin American History, language: English, abstract: Where this study about the Jesuit orders dynamics among the Inca wants to go is beyond race and the casta system, although these will be unavoidable and important aspects of the research. More prominently featured will be aspects such as trade, labor, production, consumption, daily lives, gender, social interaction, what society was like before contact, what was introduced, what was taken away, and what was the final product. The correlation or contest between micro and macro identity will be observed.

Across three centuries, beginning in 1567, the Jesuit order had a substantial political and socio-economic presence in the Andean regions of Latin America. Less than four decades after Saint Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society to spread the faith by the "sword of the word", the first Jesuits entered South America by the request of King Philip II of Spain, altering the chemistry of a continent and two competing empires.