From Wild Forest to Mission Landscape: Nature and Photography of the Bavarian Capuchins in Southern Chile, 1896–1938

Da floresta selvagem à paisagem missionária: natureza e fotografia dos capuchinhos bávaros no sul do Chile, 1896–1938

Abstract

This article examines the mission of the Bavarian Capuchins in southern Chile from the late nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century from an environmental and visual history perspective. Drawing on the analysis of an extensive photographic corpus produced and circulated by the missionaries themselves, the article argues that photography functioned as a central medium in the missionary construction of nature and landscape in Araucanía. In an initial phase, photographs depicted forests, rivers, and roads as a “wild,” hostile, and morally charged nature, serving to stage missionary sacrifice and authority. Over time, Capuchin visual culture shifted its emphasis toward representing an increasingly ordered and productive environment, conceptualized in the sources as a missionary landscape (Missionslandschaft). The article contends that this visual and semantic transformation was closely tied to the processes of colonization and the so-called “pacification” of Araucanía, discursively conflating the domestication of nature with that of the Indigenous population. From a more-than-human perspective, the study demonstrates that forests, rivers, animals, and roads were not merely passive settings for the mission but constitutive actors in the co-production of nature, evangelization, and territory.