Indigenous Alliance Making

Histories of Agency in Colonial Lowland South America

James Andrew Whitaker, Mark Harris

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780816555024, 9780816555901
• eBook ISBN: 9780816555031
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

During the colonial and postcolonial eras, local people in lowland South America experienced exploitation from outsiders. But as new kinds of societies emerged from engagements between outside and Indigenous communities, Indigenous Amazonians formed strategic alliances to defend livelihoods, territory, and symbolic values, as well as to curb exploitation, predation, and threats.

The contributors in Indigenous Alliance Making bring together historical analyses with anthropological investigations to explore the organizational patterns, goals, and strategies through which Indigenous people have intentionally created various alliances, partnerships, and similar relations with outsiders in lowland South America. Emphasizing class, ethnicity, gender, and race, the chapters bring new dimensions to understanding a vital but understudied region.

Through missions, war, and broader conflict, as well as marriage and kinship, local people aimed to maintain control even as personal and collective transformations unfolded. This volume explores the formation of diverse historical relations across regional societies within past and contemporary contexts and contributes to a growing historiographical turn among anthropologists and historians that foregrounds agency in past and present understandings of Indigenous peoples' engagements with others in lowland South America.

Contributors 
Marta Amoroso
Elisa Frühauf Garcia
Mark Harris
Kris Lane
Camila Loureiro Dias
Cecilia McCallum
Gary Van Valen
Aparecida Vilaça
James Andrew Whitaker

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Allies and Partners in Anthropological and Historical Perspectives
• 1. António Vieira Among the Indigenous People of the Serra de Ibiapaba: Sovereignty and Diplomacy
• 2. “These Fathers Make Us People”: Mojo Ideas of Humanity and the Encounter with the Jesuits
• 3. Indigenous Women in the Early Years of Brazilian Colonial Society: History and Uses of the Past
• 4. “Outsiders”: Contributions Toward an Ethnographic Theory of Acculturation
• 5. Friends and Enemies: Reflections on the Sindagua Wars of Barbacoas, Colombia, c. 1597–1635
• 6. Makushi Alliances in Guyana: Partnerships Against Predation
• Afterword: Alliances and Partnerships Today
• Contributors
• Index