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Neil Lancelot Whitehead Ethnogenesis and Ethnocide in the European Occupation of Native Surinam, 1499-1681 On the broad canvas of the native history of the Americas the Guianas region presents a number of social situations and cultural innovations that are relatively rare in other areas and often unfamiliar in the contemporary ethnography. Significant political contrasts between the trading-plantation settlements made by the Dutch, English, and French in this region and the territorial and evangelical ambitions of the Spanish and Portuguese in the rest of South America flow over into the relationships that were established between Amerindian leaders and the European colonizers, especially during the first century of contact (see also Whitehead 1993b). The importance of these contrasting processes in Iberian and non-Iberian colonial occupation stems from the fact that such contrasts were critical to the ultimate survival, or destruction, of the different ethnic formations that were originally encountered in this area (see Whitehead 1992). By "ethnic formations " I mean to indicate the range of native political structures, economic systems, and cultural practices that went together to define the ethnicity of any particular group. By retaining this unitary framework for historical analysis it is possible to obviate various intractable theoretical problems as to sociopolitical typology, and we may then speak of the processes of ethnogenesis (and ethnocide), as well as the secondary phenomenon of tribaIization (see Whitehead 1992). Moreover, this allows us to avoid the well-worn narrative trope of the clash of discrete, insulated "cultures," which produces a caricature ofactual historical process and event. These historical processes ofethnic formation (ethnogenesis) thus involved Europeans, Africans, and Amerindi- The European Occupation of Native Surinam 21 ans, and the groupings that emerged in the first decades of contact are therefore distinct from those that were initially encountered. It was in reference to these new social formations, and in view ofthe demise of earlier, precontact ones, that we may speak of ethnogenesis and ethnocide. This fundamentally means that new group identitieswere created and old ones fell into disuse, not necessarily that persons were themselves destroyed or born. Although the question of the demographic impact of these processes is obviously important (see Whitehead 1988 for a discussion ofthe Karina case), this essay is principally concerned with the historical context of how selfrepresentation and the definition of others work as synergetic processes for the formation ofgroup identity. It has been proposed that the Guianas generally have formed a retreat area for Amerindian groups that were threatened by the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies to the south and north. While this is certainly the case for the eighteenth century onward, it has been mistakenly assumed that much the same can be said of the earlier period. In fact, much had already changed among the Amerindians ofthis region between 1499 and 1681. Those ethnic groups that we have come to know from the later colonial records and more modern ethnographic accounts, such as the Carib, Arawak, Wayana, Trio, and others, are not nearly so prominent in the sixteenth-century descriptions , if they are evident at all. This was only partly due to the fact that the Europeans had an incomplete knowledge ofthe interior regions and relates as much to the fact that the ethnic and cultural composition of native Surinam has also undergone some 500 years ofhistorical evolution. Just as the modern states of Europe and the Americas are in some cases recent and unstable creations , so too the ethnic character of the peoples of modern Surinam have emerged from earlier ethnic formations, and for this reason it is not possible to simply project these modern ethnographic paradigms back into the past. This consideration is underlined by the recent work on the human ecology of Amazonia (Denevan 1992; Posey and Balee 1989; Roosevelt 1989). It will be the purpose of this chapter to outline the historical conditions of this transformation of native Surinam, a process that can be summarized as resulting in a reduction ofcultural variety and a general reorientation ofnative political and economic systems toward the coast and away from the uplands and their contacts with the Amazon Basin. As a result of these twin political and economic pressures the range of ethnic self-ascription increasingly narrowed into either Carib or Arawak identities or allegiances. At the same time this process of indigenous identity re-formation was impacted by the direct efforts of the European colonizers to actively promote stable ethnic groupings with whom they could profitably interact, as in the use of...

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