Globalized Religious Aftershock at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century—the Apapocúava-Guaraní Cataclysm and the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Abstract

AbstractThe impact of environmental catastrophes and crises on religion and religious discourses in history and modernity has been described frequently and from different perspectives. However, the interpretations and narratives of scriptless civilizations have remained largely unnoticed. Due to the concrete lack of reliable sources of information, those interpretations and narratives can nowadays only be recorded and processed in the scientific discourse in a fragmentary way. Therefore, this article unfolds along the early work of ethnologist and linguist Curt Unckel (1883–1946), who was called Nimuendajú during his lifetime, the thesis that an indigenous group of the Apapocúava-Guaraní tribe in southeastern Brazil correlated the global information dissemination of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake with cosmological narratives of an impending apocalypse, leading to the decline and cultural degeneration of the group. The article thus demonstrates how cosmologies and world perceptions of an indigenous tribe at the dawn of globalization can be reconstructed and how information about catastrophic events from the news was processed with immediate local changes by a scriptless culture on the Brazilian frontier in the early twentieth century. In doing so, this article examines the role of media and communication in globalized modernity and how media literacy influences religious perception.