Dobrizhoffer, Martín (1717–1791)

Martín Dobrizhoffer (b. 7 September 1717; d. 17 July 1791), Austrian missionary active in Paraguay. Born in the Bohemian town of Friedburg, Dobrizhoffer studied philosophy and physical sciences at the universities of Vienna and Graz. In 1748, after joining the Jesuits, he was sent to the Río de la Plata region in Argentina, where he finished his education at the University of Córdoba. He then went to work for four years among the Mocobí Indians of Santa Fe. From 1754 to 1762 Dobrizhoffer was stationed at the Jesuit settlements of Paraguay, at Santa María la Mayor on the Uruguay River, where he gained considerable fame as a learned man among his colleagues and among the Guaraní Indians.

In 1762, the royal governor at Asunción mandated the establishment of a new mission some fifty leagues to the west in the most inhospitable area of the Chaco. He ordered Dobrizhoffer to take charge of the mission, called Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Timbó. The Austrian's missionary goal there, the conversion of the "wild" Abipón Indians, eluded him. After many bitter experiences, he abandoned Rosario de Timbó in 1765 and was reassigned to San Joaquín, in northern Paraguay.

With the expulsion of the Jesuits two years later, Dobrizhoffer returned to Vienna. There he attracted the attention of the empress Maria Theresa, who begged him to write an account of his life in the New World. These memoirs, published in 1783–1784 as Geschichte der Abiponer, constitute a uniquely detailed examination of Indian-Caucasian relations in the eighteenth-century Chaco.

See alsoMissions: Jesuit Missions (Reducciones) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Martin Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones: An Equestrian People of Paraguay, translated by Sara Coleridge, 3 vols. (1822).

Efraím Cardozo, Historiografía paraguaya (1959), pp. 344-351.

Additional Bibliography

Livi Bacci, Massimo. "The Missions of Paraguay: The Demography of an Experiment." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 (Autumn 2004): 185-224.

                                 Thomas L. Whigham