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. In that setting, the line between accompaniment and intrusion has never been simple.
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 Italy and studied engineering in Milan before turning to philosophy and theology.
He liked to recall his first trip to meet the Ayoreo: “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 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.
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 a young Ayoreo captured in 1956 and “used as bait” to lure others. 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.
Zanardini 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.