Spirit over matter

The writings of Manuel Jesús Molina in the margins of Runa

Abstract

In this paper I will address the effect of Runa's reading on an actor not belonging to academic circles but with an impact on the mechanisms of government of the indigenous peoples in Patagonia. I will focus on the marks and annotations made by the Salesian Manuel Jesús Molina on the pages of articles by Imbelloni, Menghin, Llarás Samitier and Hämmerly Dupuy published in Runa between 1949 and 1952. From this marginal Runa manuscript, Molina built his hypotheses on indigenous ethnogenesis in Patagonia and redefined the operation of the civilizing evangelizing missionary device in the newly formed province of Santa Cruz between 1957 and 1980. The objective of this work is to analyze the annotations in the margins of the pages of the magazine as a place of overlap and dispute between the missionary device and the anthropological device regarding an authorized knowledge about the Patagonian indigenous.