In their battle to conquer Tupinambá souls, early missionaries found their greatest adversaries among the Caraíbas, or great shamans, whom sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources describe as the devil’s emissaries. These same sources, however, also employ the terms "holiness" and "prophet" in their translation of the indigenous word "Caraíba". This article seeks to explain this apparent contradiction by placing missionary accounts within the historical and cultural contexts in which they were produced. This allows us to identify the semantic field upon which the evangelizing West based its reading and translation of indigenous "otherness", through the use of religious terms.
Indians; shamanism; missionaries