The present article deals with theoretical-methodological questions of a doctoral research that applied the Foucauldian approach to the 16th-century Jesuit Letters. The research recovers important notions of Foucault's work, such as genealogy, power, knowledge, descent, and emergence, not as a simple literature survey, but as a way to problematize the object under investigation. With that, we have done of Foucault what he described having done of Nietzsche: a toolbox to help thinking about a problem that the philosopher himself did not investigate. In this way, the article seeks to show how the author devised a genealogical history of education based on the following question: what was the pedagogy with which the Western apprentice was educated before the "discovery" of Brazil, and how could this pedagogy be applied, denied, and adapted in colonial Brazil in the confrontation between Jesuits, Europeans, and Indians? It brings forward the notion of gathering someone else's child - a procedure employed by the Jesuits to recruit and educate the children of the heathen in 16th-century Portuguese America. Methodologically, it reveals the discursive/enunciative regularities of the Jesuit Letters (especially in the reports of Father Manuel da Nóbrega), which means taking them as something that crosses a domain of possible structures and unities, and thereby makes them appear as concrete contents in time and space. In other words, the study establishes how, in these letters, a given procedure for the act of teaching is imposed onto the educative practices of the 16th century.
Jesuits; Foucauldian genealogy; Gathering; Pedagogical discourse