Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (review)

This is a book that has already won the Bancroft, Parkman, and Turner prizes—an unprecedented trifecta for any book on American history. It has also garnered an assortment of other book prizes, including the American Society for Ethnohistory's own Ermine Wheeler-Vogelin award. Given this parade of accolades, the significant question to ask is less whether it is good or not—surely we can trust our colleagues sufficiently to assume that it is—but what has made this book so compelling to so many readers in a variety of fields? Indeed, we might ask how it is that this book has found such a large and admiring audience at this particular moment, and what it says about the field of ethnohistory and its future. We can trace the history of any field by what books are considered canonical at a given time. We can even point to certain works as turning points in a field as well as in relation to the general reading public, and it seems clear that Captives and Cousins is well on its way to attaining a similar must-read status to that which books such as E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class or Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures had in a previous generation of graduate students and scholars in history and anthropology, and that in some ways defined those generations. In the historiography of ethnohistory, we are at such a turning point.

In one sense, the popularity of the book is easily explained. Captives and Cousins is meticulously researched and written in a lively, narrative style far removed from the plodding academic prose learned in graduate school and usually forgotten, if at all, only late in life. Moreover, it broadens our perspective on the colonial Southwest in several important respects. Brooks views the region in terms of a vast social field of relations involving various native groups, the Spanish (and later Mexicans), and finally the Americans, over the course of four centuries. In a particularly compelling move—and one that may help to explain the book's timeliness—he looks for a precedent in the reconquista, the history of the Iberian Peninsula between the founding and the fall of the Kingdom of Granada. Not only did this situation provide a sort of general analogue to the southwest borderlands—in which differences in religion become like a magnetic field, sorting actors irrevocably into one or another sphere and providing an organizing principle for both cognition and action—but specific ideas and practices are also imported by the Spanish into this novel but analogous state of affairs.

Primary among these imports is, of course, the institution of captivity that served to define relations between groups in both historical contexts. In Iberia, captives were taken and forced to undergo religious conversion in what was viewed as an act of charity toward them. To a Christian, to be of lowly status in a Christian kingdom was preferable to being an exalted Moor, and vice versa. As the practice of forced conversion was transposed to the Southwest, the basic justification remained the same, although it became less bipolar and more multipolar, for it operated against the backdrop of indigenous captive slavery as it was practiced, for instance, between the Athabaskan and Puebloan groups.

This book has something important to say about the practice of indigenous captive slavery that is different from what has come before. For instance, Leland Donald's Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of America is an important contribution to our understanding of the sheer scale of captive slavery in that region, but it is wedded to a simplistic materialism that takes the significance of the practice as self-evident or perhaps as beside...