Native Brazil. Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1900 ed. by Hal Langfur (review)

Since the publication of História dos índios no Brasil (1992), edited by the anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, there has been a “return of the natives” in the historiography of Brazil. Together, anthropologists and historians have made this a joint project, both by their collaboration and by their conceptual and methodological influence on each other’s work. The work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Hélène Clastres, and the late John Monteiro signaled a new and profound turn in ethnohistorical studies of Brazil’s indigenous peoples, and while much of this work concentrated on the coastal Tupi speakers, a new generation of scholarship began to expand the geographical and ethnological focus to include the Brazilian west and north and to study many non-Tupian peoples who had often been left out of the historiography.

Native Brazil is a rich sampling of the new directions in the history of Brazil’s indigenous peoples. Edited by Hal Langfur, whose own book on the penetration of the Rio Doce and Minas Gerais and the resistance of the Botocudos was very much part of the new historiography, this book presents work by some (but not all) of the leading scholars in the new ethnohistory of Brazil. Like the field itself, it devotes much space to previously understudied areas of Amazonia and the sertão of interior Brazil and it expands the chronological boundaries beyond the colonial era to include the nineteenth century.

The book starts off with a strong essay by Alida Metcalf on the Jesuit missions of the sixteenth century that emphasizes their instability and their demographic decline over time. While Metcalf does not address the function of the missions to turn Indians into useful subjects and workers, she does parallel the work of Charlotte Castelnau-L’Estoile in catching the ad hoc nature of the mission system and the commitment of the Jesuits to it despite its failures. The following essay by Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida takes a different approach to mission history by examining how indigenous peoples in the area of Rio de Janeiro used the aldeias as a basis for establishing claims to land. Through a number of suits over land, she is able to demonstrate how native peoples turned to the legal and institutional frameworks of colonial society to become actors in their own defense. This is a view of the missions not from the viewpoint of their creators, but from that of their residents.

The book then turns from the coast to the interior with a sweeping synoptic essay by the late Neil Whitehead on the colonial intrusions and transformation of the Amazon valley from 1500–1900. In broad strokes, Whitehead examines the themes of imperial rivalries and competition for the region and their effects on groups like the Mura, Mundurucú, Kayapó and Xavante, and argues that the nature of the colonial contact determined the survival and continuity of native peoples into the twentieth century. This macrolevel overview of a vast region is then followed by finely crafted, close-grain essays. Barbara Sommer examines the role of indigenous “nobles” or chiefs as leaders and intermediaries between native peoples and the colonial regime, particularly in the Directory period when, under the marquis of Pombal, there was a secularization of the missions. This is a theme that Karen Spalding introduced to the study of colonial Peru in the 1970s, and while there were distinct differences between the status of indigenous nobilities in highland Peru and the Amazonian lowlands, Sommer’s work, like that of Rita Heloisa de Almeida (O direitorio dos Indios, 1997) or Angela Domingues (Quando os índios eram vasallos, 2002), shows considerable initiative and adaptability by indigenous peoples to the colonial situation. She also discusses how identities and ethnicities were transformed in the process of adaptation, integration, and ethnogenesis and she makes the important point that “disappearance of ethnic references should not be confused...