Histories and Historicities in Amazonia (review)

This book is a welcome addition to serious scholarship directed at the uniting of history, historicity, ethnohistory, ethnology and ethnography that stems from the research and writings, among many others, of David Guss, Jonathan Hill, Richard Price, Marshall Sahlins, Lawrence Sullivan, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Jan Vansina. It represents a culling of a session of the American Society for Ethnohistory held in London, Ontario, in 2000, with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The fusion of ethnography and historicity of relatively unknown peoples involves serious incursion into indigenous cosmology, with a critical, interpretive eye to archaeology as well as the aforementioned topics. The authors in this book endeavor to bridge the many chasms that come to us from western scholarship aimed at Amazonia and her peoples, and in so doing reinforce a developing platform on which to continue to build necessary intersubdisciplinary relationships centered reflexively on "self-presentation on the stage of a global modernity" (xix).

Editor Whitehead, whose pioneering work has brought this very journal in its serious international dimensions to new heights of interdisciplinary interest and scholarly integrity, provides an excellent introduction, wherein he appropriately and ironically calls Amazonia, "the epitome of a place where we may yet find 'people without history'" (vii). Denial of "history" to the world's peoples, with Amazonia as its epitome, ranges among our forebears from Robert Lowie to Julian H. Steward and Betty Meggers to Claude Lévi-Strauss, with whom models of cultural diffusion from "high" to "low" cultures, multilineal sociocultural evolution from one level to another and its companion deevolution, and the structuralist "hot" and "cold" societies, respectively, have led scholars astray from the serious ethnographic-linguistic ventures of uncovering the real histories and historicities of "Amazonian" people. The quotation marks around "Amazonia" denote the fact that these papers are predominantly from the Guiana (Guayana) Shield and Orinocan drainage region of Venezuela-Guyana-Brazil, the northeast sector of Greater Amazonia.

Landscape emerges in this work as a key unity to tie indigenous (and other) historicities to Euroamerican-written histories and the conjunctures of the two. Topography for Amazonian people eschews the western separation of time (history) and space (geography) and instead forever generates dynamic times-spaces that constitute multiple (and overlapping and interpenetrating) ethnoscapes and moral topographies.

These features are a genius loci, the spirit of the place, which is then exorcized or used to legitimate external cartographies. In this way Western mapping becomes a means of historical disempowerment as it remakes aboriginal emplacement in the landscape by transculturating key symbols and physical contexts

(xv).

From mythic separations of earth, underearth, and sky come the events that create time itself, which range from the acts of cultural heroes such as the Ye'kuana Kuyujani (Domingo Medina, chapter 1) and the Warekena Kuwai and Amaru (Sylvia Vidal, chapter 2). From mythic times-spaces and beginning times-places come the historical conjunctures of interindigenous conflicts and conquest and colonial overlays, each of which left its indelible mark in indigenous (and other) historiography. Examples include Patamuna topography (Whitehead, chapter 3), Aripaeño Maroon territoriality (Pérez, chapter 4), Wapishana debt peonage and rebellion (Nádia Farage, chapter 5), and Guajá foraging (Loretta Cormier, chapter 6).

Salient dimensions of all of these essays, highlighted especially by Medina and Mary Riley (chapter 7) are those of human rights, signaled by the quote from the introduction. Until the rich and powerful—and the development-oriented organizations with putative control over native territories—come to realize that real people have real histories embedded in landscapes, memory, and the very architecture of their bodies, houses, communities, and structured regions, indigenous social systems of Amazonia will be misunderstood and disabused of their rights of usufruct and human dignity bound up in the quality of their lives and identity poetics and politics. To the credit of...