- Missionaries in South America have often brought schooling and support alongside coercion, acculturation, and lasting harm, especially in Indigenous communities where the legacy of “contact” remains contested.
- Father José (Giuseppe) Zanardini, an Italian-born Salesian priest and anthropologist, arrived in Paraguay in 1978 and spent decades working among Indigenous peoples, particularly the Ayoreo of the Gran Chaco.
- He combined pastoral work with scholarship and education initiatives, including support for Indigenous schooling and documentation of language and culture, while advocating for a more open church approach to Indigenous spirituality.
- His story sits uneasily within a wider history of mission-driven disruption and abuse, raising the enduring question of whether a single life of listening can meaningfully offset the institutions that sent him
For much of South America’s history, the arrival of a missionary has carried two reputations at once. One is charitable: a figure with medicine, schooling, and a language of human dignity that can be useful in a state that is often absent. The other is coercive: an agent of conversion and acculturation, sometimes entangled with land seizures, forced settlement, and abuses that Indigenous communities still live with. Among the peoples of the Gran Chaco, the story of “contact” is still unfolding, with some groups settled and others choosing isolation. In that setting, the line between accompaniment and intrusion has never been simple.
Anthropology, too, has had its double role. At its best it records languages, histories, and ways of seeing that outsiders once dismissed as obstacles to “progress.” At its worst it becomes another instrument for ordering Indigenous people into categories designed by others. The most careful scholars learn to doubt their own categories. They also learn that a field notebook can outlast a sermon.
That tension framed the life of Father José (Giuseppe) Zanardini, a Salesian priest and anthropologist who arrived in Paraguay in 1978 and spent decades working among Indigenous communities, especially the Ayoreo in the Chaco. He died on January 19th 2026, aged 83.
Zanardini was born in Brescia, Italy, in 1942. He studied engineering in Milan before turning to philosophy and theology. The Salesians chose him for Paraguay, and he chose, in turn, to study anthropology, completing a doctorate in social anthropology in England. He would later lead the Anthropological Studies Center at the Catholic University of Asunción for 22 years and teach at other institutions. A later academic work on the Ayoreo describes him, simply, as “based in Paraguay since 1978,” and credits him with “indispensable contributions” to research on the Ayoreo people.
He often told his own origin story in a way that cut against missionary self-importance. Recalling his first trip to meet the Ayoreo, he said: “I took a boat that, after three days of travel, brought me to the Paraguay River so I could meet the Ayoreo people. When I arrived, I fell into the river and everyone burst out laughing.” It was not a parable of conquest. It was closer to an admission of clumsiness, and of being received on someone else’s terms.
Those terms were set by an Ayoreo shaman who told him: “If you want to stay with us, you must learn many things.” Zanardini said later: “That (advice) has helped me far more than all my studies. From that moment on, I learned to listen to them.” Listening became his preferred defense of a vocation that, in other hands, has too often meant speaking for others.
He lived for years in Indigenous villages, promoting social projects, founding schools, and launching community radio stations. He worked through CONAPI, the bishops’ coordination for Indigenous pastoral ministry, and helped shape what church leaders described as a “new pastoral approach” that took Indigenous spirituality seriously rather than treating it as a problem to be solved. In a country whose education policies long had an assimilationist cast, the push toward intercultural schooling demanded allies and institutions. Zanardini appears as a contributor to a CEADUC/CONAPI volume on Indigenous intercultural education, and as part of the teaching team for a university-level specialized training program aimed at strengthening Indigenous educators.
Yet the broader mission landscape around the Ayoreo offers no room for romanticism. A study on religious missions and Ayoreo cultural transformation notes that the Misión a las Nuevas Tribus “caused ethnocultural devastation in several communities.”
It also describes the Salesians’ own history of seeking out the Ayoreo in the late 1950s, including the case of Iquebi, a young Ayoreo captured in 1956 and “utilizado como cebo” (“used as bait”) to lure others toward mission life and the ‘faith’. That is the archive in which any missionary anthropologist must be judged, including the ones who tried to do better than the system they joined.
Indigenous testimony about missions can be blunt about loss. One quotation used in the same study, attributed to Mateo Sobode, reads: “La naturaleza nos envía señales de peligro o de encuentros violentos. Misioneros blancos nos sacaron de nuestro paraíso. Y me pregunto ¿cuál fue nuestro pecado?” (“Nature sends us signs of danger or violent encounters. White missionaries pulled us from our paradise. And I ask myself: what was our sin?”)
Zanardini’s defenders would argue that he spent his life trying to replace that history with a different relationship: one built on learning, collaboration, and respect. He himself rejected the old colonial claim that Indigenous people lacked God, law, or kings. “Instead, they possess beautiful and important wisdom and are more spiritual than we are,” he said.
The measure of such a life is not whether it resolves the Church’s contradictions. It cannot. It is whether, in a place where outsiders have so often taken without asking, one outsider managed to do more asking than taking. In his account, the shaman’s condition still stood: if you want to stay, you must learn many things.
Credits
