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The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. vol. 3: South America, pt. 1

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-2-333

1527-1900

Guillaume Boccara,

Indigenous Cultures and History

Let me begin by congratulating the editors for this impressive volume, which, published almost 50 years after the Handbook of South American Indians, compensates for the lack of a serious scholarly synthesis of the history and ethnology of indigenous societies of South America. However, I wish to emphasize that the editors of this volume do not pretend to offer a substitute for Julian Steward’s edited works (1940s); it is equally important to point out that this Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of South America is located in a radically different intellectual and sociopolitical context than the one that informed the publication of the Handbook. Indeed, new worlds separate these two collections devoted to the peoples and histories of the New World: (1) Editors Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz do not claim to provide an exhaustive account, stating from the very beginning their willingness to construct an “idea-oriented history” (p. 1); (2) the Handbook’s functionalist bias and evolutionism have been swept aside for the benefit of a historical anthropological perspective that aims to restore sociohistorical dimensions of indigenous societies and historicize their devenir; and (3) this History assures readers that political times have changed. Wars of decolonization and struggles against neocolonialism and internal colonialism waged by indigenous groups and others, including new minorities, for recognition of their political rights and respect for their historical memory as well as their sociocultural practices and representations have, indeed, left an indelible impression.One can certainly sense this transformation in the perspective adopted and the choice of topics. This change is also evident in the vocabulary of the contributors and their painstaking efforts to distance themselves from certain outdated notions. Thus in the title of the book, the reference is to “native peoples,” not “Indians,” which permits us to put an end to very long historical contentions and emphasize the autochthony and the rights that should be conferred on the first occupants of the continent. Furthermore, the contributors point out that the term “tribe” is as much ideological as scientific and its genesis lies in the colonial context of domination and ethnification (introduction & chap. 11). They also reprove uni-linear and simplifying typologies (band-tribe-chiefdom-state) and questionable dichotomies (nature/culture; warm societies/cold societies; civilized highlands/savage lowlands). In sum, their goal is to dislodge the mechanisms of symbolic domination in places where they best conceal themselves, namely, in certain seemingly neutral words or binary oppositions that contribute to the production and reproduction of an arbitrary yet particular vision and division of the social world and history whose hegemony is widely contested today. Similarly, it is in this context of political and theoretical vigilance, as defined by the editors, that we need to understand the healthy rejection of notions such as “ethnohistory” (formerly understood as a history of ethnic groups or nations au rabais) or “acculturation” (places individuals in passive and dominated position). Finally, conscious of what it means to pigeonhole ethnic communities and of the tenuous link between language and symbolic power, the editors remind us that the names of many indigenous groups are, in fact, heteronymous, and do not always correspond to the political and cultural realities of Amerindians. Also, they specify that the terms concerning the multiple biological mixing (for example, mamelucos and mestizos) must be understood as sociopolitical classifications and clues that show how societies naturalize, racialize, and root social relations of domination in biological origins.Having made these preliminary remarks, I would like to move on to the first part of volume 3 of the Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Composed of 13 chapters of uneven length, the book covers a period that stretches from the peopling of the Americas to the early colonial period. The first two chapters (theoretical and methodological) represent a reflection on the construction of indigenous histories and ethnographies. Chapters 3–10 provide a detailed analysis of the archaeology and prehistory of South America and the Caribbean. Chapters 11–13 focus on indigenous reactions to the conquest in the Caribbean, Andes, and Brazilian costal regions. Due to space constraints, I will limit my discussion to the central themes around which the essays are organized and comment on the progress in Americanist historical, archaeological, and ethnological research.What is implicit throughout is the effort to restore agency to indigenous people by recognizing them as makers of their own histories, not as mere spectators of historical events. Thus several authors emphasize the cultural creativity of indigenous societies, the complexity of sociohistorical processes since pre-Columbian times (chaps. 4, 5, 7), and indigenous peoples’ capacity to adapt to the profound shock of the arrival of Europeans (chaps. 11–13). This new gaze is not tantamount to negating or minimizing the trauma of the conquest, the amplitude of the disaster (especially demographical), or the de-structuring character of the colonial insti tutions (for example, missions, encomiendas, slave trade, weapons trade). Instead, it aims—starting from the conquest and colonization (p. 871)—to analyze indigenous dynamics in their own temporality (chap. 1) and account for the social action of individuals and groups. An effort to escape from the old historical and anthropological traditions of “disappearing cultures,” to recognize their capacity to adhere to their own history and historicity, without confining native societies to an archaic fate, are some of the characteristic features shared by all the articles that demonstrate a shift in research during the last 30 years. For this purpose, I wish the book had included an introductory chapter on the critical debate of the 1960s and 1970s concerning the intersections of the perspectives and methods of history and ethnology, mainly because the current collaboration of the two disciplines and popularity of a combined approach were not so obvious 30 years ago. The double rupture, on the one hand, with a Eurocentric historiographical tradition and, on the other, with an essentialist ethnological tradition was accompanied by a constant effort to reflect on theoretical and epistemological issues regarding a path to follow to account for the history of people who were then called “primitive,” “without history,” or “without writing,” which reflected their status as “vanquished,” “dominated,” and “subjugated.” The earlier debate on the relationship between structures and empirical reality, on the one hand, and between structures and historical times, on the other hand, showed that it was possible to grasp the devenir of so-called traditional societies while acknowledging the existence of a structural rationality independent of time. By examining ethnohistory in both its historical and anthropological sense within the very same interpretative movement, these harsh debates permitted Americanist historical anthropology to build upon solid foundations. (See, for example, Nathan Wachtel, Le retour des ancêtres: Les indiens Urus de Bolivie XX–XVI siècle [Paris: Gallimard, 1990].) Such a synthesis at the beginning of the book—for example, Frank Salomon’s article on the indigenous historicities and Sabine McCormack’s piece on European ethnographies of the early conquest period—would have allowed the contributors to steer clear of the theories of social change so heavily focused on the social processes that they ended up overlooking the importance of structures.The publication of this volume provides the opportunity to break free from a number of stereotypes and reductive analytical frameworks that previously limited and biased research for several years. In archaeology and prehistory, as in history and anthropology, one can observe the extent to which previous interpretations were marked by an implicit ethnology that tended to equate a culture with a particular language, territory, political unit, and monolithic identity, while simultaneously establishing an implicit hierarchy among societies and among cultures. However, we now know that this does not reflect the Amerindian reality: first, as demonstrated by the contributors, indigenous political forms are in a constant state of flux; second, multiethnicity and multilingualism are integral features of indigenous sociocultural landscapes; and, finally, the process of cultural transfer does not always take place in a unilateral way from an assumed center to the periphery. Arguing along similar lines, Izumi Shimada has shown that “the horizon-based conception of Andean prehistory has promoted compartmentalized archaeological research focused on specific regional cultures or cultural horizon rather than sustained regional studies that elucidate long-term historical developments and evolutionary processes” (p. 488). The cultural areas, archaeological regions, and the related core/margin dichotomy accentuated the stasis while identifying in a totally arbitrary manner the “apparent stylistic homogeneity with political unity” (p. 358). Similarly, Ana Roosevelt shows that the civilized highlands/savage lowlands dichotomy does not have any serious archaeological foundation: on the one hand, “the tropical lowlands of Greater Amazonia were colonized at least as early as the Andes and were the hearth of significant cultural developments and innovations” (p. 309); on the other hand, contrary to the image of an Amazonia as a “poor environment for human occupation … that inhibited population growth and cultural development” (p. 308), recent works have documented the presence of strong chiefdoms in the floodplains, breaking free from the stereotypes of the lowlands inhabited by egalitarian societies without chiefs and surplus production. We encounter a similar rupture with the reductive image of the South American ethnical landscape in the critique of the colonial classification and typologies elaborated by Neil Whitehead and John Monteiro. The former shows that the contrasted opposition between Carib and Arawak found in the early colonial texts does not refer to the existence of ethnic groups and cultures that would have possessed certain fixed cultural attributes. This rigid distinction between two indigenous ensembles is political and exogenous. The term Carib functions, indeed, as a colonial category that strategically and symbolically delimited the enemy’s socioterritorial entity and defined warlike peoples who had not already been subjugated but whom the colonial agents sought to enslave. Thus indigenous groups and identities are the products of ethnification (external forces) as well as ethnogenesis (internal dynamics). A similar critique of the sources is essential to account for the realities of indigenous societies of the Brazilian coast. According to Monteiro, “the Tupi-Tapuya dichotomy may have helped the Portuguese organize their perception of the cultural configurations of indigenous in Brazil, but it also masked an ethnic complexity that remains difficult to sort out to this day” (p. 976). As Whitehead rightly points out, “a less dualistic, more polythetic conceptualization of native society and polity in the Caribbean seems fundamental to any advance in the historiography and ethnology of the region” (p. 873).Another theme that permeates the book concerns the examination or reexam ination of indigenous peoples’ sociopolitical forms and their dynamics. Several authors suggest that we develop a close critique of the categories in colonial sources and revise traditional political typologies. Thus according to Karen Spalding, contrary to the image of a “highly stratified social system in which access to authority was restricted to a specific group of people who could be defined and codified according to European notions of hereditary authority,” the process of legitimation of the kurakas’ authority in the Andes must have been negotiated and contested. Similarly, it is important to reinterpret the functioning of the Inka empire, not as a monolithic state but rather as a network of asymmetrical relations, ritually sanctioned and reproduced through diversity (pp. 922–23). Roosevelt and Juan and Judith Villamarín urge us to rethink the complexity and diversity of the sociopolitical forms in the lowlands and on the northern and southern frontiers of the Inka empire. According to these scholars, chiefdom was the most widespread political form in the subcontinent at the time of the arrival of the Europeans; it has been so since the beginning of our era. At the end of their essays on “complex cultures” (p. 341) that range from the Colombian altiplano to southern Chile, passing through the central Andes and the Lowlands, these authors conclude that the political form of chiefdoms varied greatly. Indeed, classified in that broad category of chiefdom are societies with “paramount chiefs and multiple levels of political hierarchy” and others with “independent regional chiefs with fewer political levels” (p. 577). Nevertheless, at least a couple of features might distinguish those señoríos, curacazgos, or cacicazgos from other Amerindian political forms (behetrías and imperios, according to period terminology): first, their noteworthy capacity for sociopolitical and ecological adaptation (p. 655); second, the breadth and significance of their trade networks and multiethnic alliances (pp. 329, 594–612). Although these analyses serve to break free from the outdated schemata of indigenous societies perceived as cultural monads, they seem to respond to the previous reductive model, namely, Steward’s, with another typology, no less simplifying. Actually, Stewardian and colonial classifications remain almost untouched. As Carlos Fausto recently observed (see his Os índio antes do Brasil [Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2000])—in line with works that question Roosevelt’s ecological determinism and her tendency to oversimplify much more complex realities—“our interrogations must aim to reconstruct the local and regional prehistorical processes through which more complex social forms emerged in the continent”; he also remarked on the uncritical use of the notion of cacicazgo by arguing that “we must be careful not to interpret the data through a typological mould devoid of any complexity. Integration, regionalization, and complexification take place in several ways and we need to expand our sociological imagination to better understand these processes.” Therefore it is advisable to proceed with great caution, as the Villamaríns themselves recognize, in the face of the variation of spatial and temporal distribution, as well as in the complexity of the chiefdoms; it is important to pay attention to particular local histories and regions or sociocultural interraction and trace out the broad patterns of evolving process (p. 628). A focus on the processes and an awareness of the hasty typologies should not, however, lead us to ignore the structures because, as showed by Monteiro (regarding the role of the warfare-cannibal complex among the Tupi), Whitehead (on the indigenous conceptualization of the circulation of gold items and women in the Greater and Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean coast), and Spalding (concerning the Inka interpretation of the Spanish presence), even if the social forms and cosmologies are a product of a particular history, the history of the indigenous groups is also the result of an être-au-monde, mediated by sociocultural forms (see Carlos Fausto, Inimigos fiéis: História, guerra examanismo na Amazônia [São Paulo: Edisup, 2001]).Another aspect that merits attention is the contributors’ consideration of intermediation zones, mestizaje, and the emergence of new worlds in the New World. The great majority of the authors distance themselves from the simplistic vision of the conquest and colonization as a binary opposition between two monolithic groups: Indians and Europeans. Monteiro points out the importance of cultural brokers (“generation of mixed offspring”) in the relations between indigenous peoples and the Portuguese (p. 991) as well as the role of the mamelucos (“half-breeds”) in the slavery forays (pp. 1008–9). He observes that mestizaje often informed millenarianism and that upheavals were not related to race matters, as in the recent revised case of the Santidade de Jaguaripe (p. 1013). Spalding also emphasizes the centrality of the Euro-indigenous relationship in colonial dynamics after the collapse of the Inka empire. She notes that “Andean leaders use Spaniards to buttress or advance their positions in their own societies” and that “they participated actively in European markets” (p. 906). Whitehead insists, finally, on the multiple processes of ethnification and ethnogenesis through the emergence of colonial tribes in the “tribal zones,” the transformation of chiefdoms into tribes in the zones under the colonial yoke, and the process of ethnic recomposition in the hinterlands (pp. 893–95).The authors systematically point their fingers at false archaisms: Isolated and locked indigenous societies, considered by the travelers and first ethnologists of the nineteenth century as the archetype of the primitive pristine and monocultural societies, were the products of a long history of conflict, tribalization, and mestizaje that began with the arrival of the colonial powers (chaps. 4, 11); it would be erroneous to view the Amazonia as an immense natural and virgin space, especially since research on late prehistoric complex societies has shown that the “forest of Amazonia still bears the stamp of these societies’ intensive occupations” (p. 332). Salomon’s analysis of the transformations linked to the transcription of indigenous peoples’ memories urges us to be cautious while using documents that supposedly convey indigenous voices, even if we can detect in them the survival of ancient themes and mechanisms.In sum, this book, which features the work of some of the best Americanists who seek to rethink the history of indigenous peoples as well as their relationship with History, is located in the renewal of perspectives and problematics of the current Americanist research in particular, and anthropology in general. Even if some formulae and hypotheses seemingly flatter postmodern multiculturalism—especially in MacCormack’s piece—this excellent synthesis provides a yardstick to measure how much work still needs to be done. As the collective recognizes, many aspects of the indigenous population’s history and prehistory remain in the dark. We are just beginning to grasp the mechanism of mestizaje and the processes of ethnogenesis and ethnification that developed in many places of the colonial Americas. This volume of The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas will undoubtedly contribute to the rescue of so-called traditional societies from their archaic fate mainly because it shows that (1) before the European irruption in their history, indigenous societies experienced a long and complex history, (2) despite the tremendous destruction imposed by colonization, indigenous societies developed multiple strategies of resistance and adaptation, (3) indigenous resistance does not refer merely to the preservation of pre-Hispanic tradition, rather it is the product of specific conjunctures of structural determinants, historical events, and social praxis, and (4) it is no longer possible to overlook “Indian histories” in current and future efforts to reconstruct the “histories of Indians.”