Saeger, James Schofield

views updated

Saeger, James Schofield

PERSONAL:

Education: Ohio State University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—History Department, Lehigh University, 9 W. Packer Ave., Bethlehem, PA 18105-3081. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, professor of history.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Perspectives on Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Essays of the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth Century Studies, Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth Century Studies (Bethlehem, PA), 1977.

The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience, University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

A professor of history, James Schofield Saeger is an ethnohistorian with scholarly interests in Latin America and the native peoples of South America. In The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience, Saeger "gives us the results of his intensive study of Guaycuruan peoples of South America's Gran Chaco," reported Susan Deeds in the Latin American Research Review. With this book he "aims to enhance our understanding of mission effectiveness and of Catholic missions on the frontier," commented David Block in the Journal of Latin American Studies. Saeger notes that in the Chaco region of South America, the dominant group, the Guaycuruans, did not practice subsistence farming, nor were they likely to settle in one place. Instead, they behaved more like nomadic bandits and desperadoes, persisting in a lifestyle of "cattle rustling and kidnapping with their settled aboriginal and European neighbors," Block reported. For the Guaycuruans, established missions in an area symbolized conquest of that area, and they wanted little to do with Europeans except plunder their goods. Saeger, though, finds that by the middle of the 1700s Guaycuruans had come to view the presence of missions as necessary to their survival. The warrior Guaycuruans even went so far as to ask Spanish authorities to establish missions in their regions to help protect their people. "Saeger argues that drastic ecological changes, such as depletion of traditional sources of plant foods such as palms, left the natives few options," according to Robert H. Jackson in the Journal of Social History.

"Saeger carefully marshals his evidence to reveal elements that distinguish the Chaco experience from that of other Spanish missions," Block stated. Among other findings, Saeger discovered that in Guaycuruan areas missions were often started as a sort of peace offering from Spanish settlements to the Guaycuruans, with the hope that local groups would be less apt to raid the missions. He also looks carefully at the social history and attendant change in the missions, providing evidence of why, for example, women found mission life to be not only acceptable but often attractive. "Saeger has written a solid and competent book that benefits from extensive previous ethnohistoric scholarship, and contributes to the growing literature on frontier missions," Jackson attested. Saeger's "most compelling message is not so much the effectiveness of the missions … but the effectiveness of the native people in accommodating to them," Block concluded.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Journal of Latin American Studies, November, 2002, David Block, review of The Chaco Mission Frontier: The Guaycuruan Experience, p. 966.

Journal of Social History, spring, 2002, Robert H. Jackson, review of The Chaco Mission Frontier, p. 767.

Latin American Research Review, June, 2004, Susan Deeds, "Pushing the Borders of Latin American Mission History," review of The Chaco Mission Frontier, p. 211.