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Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 755-766



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Review Essay

Recent Works on Amazonian Indians

Seth Garfield, Bowdoin College


Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850–1933. By Michael Edward Stanfield. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. xvii + 270 pp., introduction, map, bibliography, index.)

Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn. By Robin M. Wright. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. xx + 314 pp., preface, introduction, maps, figures, bibliography, index.)

Makuna: Portrait of an Amazonian People. By Kaj Arhem. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. xi + 172 pp., preface, photographs, bibliography, index.)

The Play of Mirrors: The Representation of Self as Mirrored in the Other. By Sylvia Caiuby Novaes. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. xx + 177 pp., preface, photographs, tables, bibliography, index.)

Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil. By Alcida Rita Ramos. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. x + 326 pp., introduction, illustrations, bibliography, index.)

Several decades ago ethnographers heralded the imminent demise of native lowland South American peoples with the advent of frontier expansion, epidemics, and cultural subordination. Frontiers indeed have expanded violently over the course of the century, commodity booms have rocked indigenous communities, and native cultural scripts have been dramatically transformed. Yet notwithstanding such shocks, the Cassandras have not [End Page 755] been proven correct. Indigenous communities have struggled to modulate socioeconomic integration, and some populations have even rebounded from mid-century demographic lows. How have lowland South American indigenous peoples withstood violence, disease, and cultural conflict? How have they managed to mediate the process of incorporation into the national polity? How can interdisciplinary scholarship enhance our understanding of the historical experience and present-day realities of indigenous peoples? What accounts for enduring discrimination and societal fascination toward Native Americans? These are some of the principal questions that recent works on Amazonian Indians seek to address.

Michael Edward Stanfield’s Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850–1933, examines frontier expansion and geopolitical struggles in the Putumayo region during the quina and rubber booms and their impact on indigenous communities. Between 1907 and 1914, Putumayo was catapulted to international notoriety as accusations surfaced of atrocities committed by the British-registered Peruvian rubber-exporting firm of Casa Arana (rechristened in England as the Peruvian Amazon Company) against its mainly indigenous workforce. The official British investigative report written by Roger Casement and the more recent study by Michael Taussig both explore this dark period, but Stanfield’s book, blending diplomatic history and ethnohistory, seeks to place the geopolitical and interethnic struggles within the Putumayo in historical context.

The demand for rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fueled by transportation revolutions and new technologies in the industrial world, triggered rivalries among Amazonian nations for regional supremacy and competition among tappers or caucheros for access to rubber trees and labor. Amazonia’s historic scarcity of cash (used to import basic goods or reinvested abroad) and its weak internal market bedeviled wage labor and fostered unfree labor systems based on debt peonage. Rubber patróns traded indebted laborers like chattel, while the inheritability of debt obligations ensured that families could be entrapped for generations. Protectionist labor legislation meant little in a region where the will of the patrón reigned and state power was tenuous if not complicitous. Indeed, as Stanfield points out, national governments in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru compacted in the terroristic regime of caucheros and local functionaries as a method to advance territorial ambitions in the borderlands region and justified indigenous exploitation in terms of a civilizing mission. Moreover, the specific nature of the rubber-bearing trees in the Putumayo region (favoring a more mobile extractivist regime) and its great distance from import-export centers (entailing greater dependence on [End Page 756] select patróns) proved highly disadvantageous to native communities and laborers. Whereas the Casement Report reduced native peoples to helpless victims, Stanfield endeavors to explore the political economy and cosmological beliefs of native societies at the time of the rubber boom to elucidate varied forms of sociocultural engagement.

Stanfield argues that the long-standing patterns of intraethnic...

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