Colonial Transformations in Venezuela

The authors of the articles assembled in this issue represent the broader intellectual and cultural shifts that are currently unfolding in the Venezuelan anthropological community. These changes can be characterized in general terms as an integration of archaeology, history, and ethnology that is informed by critical, historical approaches to culture and power. This theoretical orientation is not expressed in abstract terms; rather, it emerges through a series of richly empirical essays that contribute vital new knowledge and sophisticated interpretations to existing anthropological understandings of the Orinoco Basin and adjacent regions.

The essays demonstrate a concern for documenting and interpreting the complexity, ambiguity, and open-endedness of long-term historical processes of interethnic relations. Within this broader framework three general themes are prevalent. First, several authors develop critical, reflexive analyses of primary historical documents, especially from the colonial period. Second, nearly all of the authors document and interpret colonial or more recent historical processes as complex entanglements of materials and meanings leading to the emergence of new patterns of interethnic relations. Third, most of the authors provide critiques of official nationalist histories of Venezuela as an ideological and political erasure of the local and regional histories of indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan peoples.

Reflexive, critical analysis of primary historical documents forms a central focus of Rodrigo Navarrete’s essay on the retribalization of the so-called Palenque, or Carib-speaking groups of the Unare Depression in the eastern llanos. Colonial historical sources from the sixteenth century portray the Palenque as a materially wealthy, politically hierarchical society. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, historical documents paint a very different picture of the Palenque as a society that was totally lacking in hierarchical forms of organization. Navarrete questions the validity of this apparently black-and-white contrast between early and late colonial periods by analyzing the underlying political, economic, and cultural motivations that favored an exaggerated portrayal of hierarchy and wealth in the early colonial sources. From a Eurocentric perspective the shifting of Palenque social organization from larger, more hierarchical political communities to smaller, more egalitarian ones can be read as a simple process of indigenous deculturation in response to the increasing domination of European colonial powers in northern South America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Navarrete’s essay seeks to provide an alternative historical model in which changes in Palenque social organization are understood at least in part as a result of the native society’s active negotiations within a complex colonial arena. Rather than merely a glass half empty, Palenque retribalization during the colonial period can be viewed as a glass half full. The restructuring meant not only a loss of larger, more hierarchical forms but also the gaining of strategically valuable flexibility in terms of the indigenous society’s access to new forms of wealth and power.

In a similar manner, H. Dieter Heinen and Alvaro García-Castro enter their judgment into recent and ongoing controversies about the size, density, and degree of political hierarchy among indigenous populations of the lower Orinoco during the late pre-Hispanic period. The authors acknowledge that archaeological evidence and early historical sources support the conclusion that pre-Hispanic populations were larger and more interconnected than contemporary indigenous peoples of the region. However, they caution against exaggerated, or inflated, estimates of pre-Hispanic populations through close attention to the actual wording of early colonial sources and by contextualizing these accounts within the relatively low size and density of European populations after their bottoming out in 1500.

In her essay on the Afro-Venezuelan community of Aripao, Berta E. Pérez confronts a different problem with written historical records from the colonial period. In this case the challenge is not so much one of critiquing cultural and other biases of colonial writers as finding innovative ways to recover important historical knowledge that either never entered into, or was lost from, the written records. Perez starts by linking contemporary oral histories of the Aripaeño to a specific...