Mimesis tropical

• Applicant: Dr. Stephan Gregory
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213948042

Starting from Benjamin's proposition that the “mimetic faculty” has a “history” (Benjamin 1980 210), the project aims at a comparative historical analysis of different ‘policies of mimesis’. This refers to the different ways to take mimetic potentials in use, making them a principle of cultural reproduction and expansion, or to contain them and keep them in check. The investigation focuses on the mimetic practices and modes of regulation peculiar to the various colonial systems which from the 16th to the 18th Century have taken hold on Brazilian soil. The choice of the colonial scene is based on the assumption that the specificity of a mimetic order is most likely to be seen when being challenged by an ‘alien’ system of imitation. It is all the more important to keep the power of imitation in manageable tracks. So the different colonial regimes develop their own procedures, media, techniques, and programs to strategically exploit the powers of imitation and, at the same time, to limit its dangers and temptations.The following four complexes are to be examined in terms of their respective policies of mimesis: 1) The Portuguese colonization (from about 1503)The striking impression here is the relatively permissive policy of mixing, the effects of which not only touch the family order and the political sphere, but also the religious and cultural realm. It remains to be seen whether from the comparison of the different effects of adaptation and mixing there will emerge a common pattern, a specifically ‘Portuguese’ mode of regulation of the mimetic. 2) “La France Antarctique” (1555-1567) The short-lived French colonial project in the bay of Rio de Janeiro is rich in highly complex mimetic entanglements. Of particular interest is the eucharistic controversy between Catholic and Calvinist settlers, situated before tropical scenery. The anthropophagy practised by the neighbouring Tupinambá throws a bizarre light on the mimetic promise of the Christian Eucharist: “This is my flesh”.3) The Jesuit system of the “Reduções” (1604-1767)The success of the Jesuit missions and settlements in South America was based on a highly developed ‘mimetic faculty’. This is testified not only by the Jesuit makeover of the indigenous Tupí to a lingua franca called lingua geral, but also by the readiness to adjust the Christian message to the code of the recipients. The consistency of this mediation programme, which shows in church architecture as well as in painting, liturgy, church music, or in the local theater projects, allows to speak of a specifically Jesuit dispositif of colonial mimesis.4) Dutch Brazil (1624-1654)The colonial regime of the Dutch West India Company stands out for its “scientific” orientation. At the level of description of nature as well as on the level of ethnography, there can be found an interest in a ‘realistic’ representation of colonial reality, not least for the purpose of better controllability. Approaching the Brazilian nature with the composition laws and devices of Haarlem landscape painting, the artist Frans Post brings into play the new optical media which will transform the problem of mimetic representation into a question of its technical production.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1867: History and Theory of Mimetic Practices