Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas (review)

In 2002 Nicholas Robins published his reinterpretation of the Great Andean Rebellion of 1780–1782 (Genocide and Millenialism in Upper Peru), casting his analysis within a genocide studies framework, combining this with a forthrightly ethnohistorical approach. The stress he laid on the nature of political violence, the internal contradictions or “antinomies” within movements, and millenarian and revitalization movements—all viewed through the ethnological eye—proved especially fruitful. He now returns to the theme of the “genocidal impulse” in the Americas and especially to “genocide from below” or “subaltern genocide,” a subset of genocide studies currently much in fashion. Critics of the use of genocide to describe mass political violence in the Americas are obliged to explain why the violence of these mass movements conforms exactly with modern definitions of genocide, not least Rafael Lemkin’s definition, which was incorporated by the United Nations when it established genocide as an international crime. Latin Americanists are perhaps too prone to see their field as one of both exceptionalism and particularism. Robins’ work on rebellions more securely locates Latin American rebellions within the wider context of transnational and comparative history. Genocide from below is perpetrated by those exploited others who had reached the end of their patience. Attacks by natives on colonial “occupiers” can be an instructive ‘laboratory’ for the study of genocide, and its potential is fully realized here. These were violent anti-colonial movements with pronounced exterminatory intentions.

The present study analyzes three remarkable movements: the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico, the 1780–1783 Great Rebellion in the Andes, and the 1847 Caste War of Yucatan. These were, for Robins, “both millennial and extirpatory in their inspiration, means, and objectives” (p. 2). They were archetypal nativist movements, though perhaps revitalization might be a more appropriate term: as Robins is at pains to point out, “other racial and ethnic groups were generally found among both insurgents and defenders of the Spanish crown, fighting both as conscripts and as volunteers” (p. 3). This anomaly is insufficiently recognized in studies of Spanish American rebellions; the presence of mixed cadres and foot soldiers has the effect of dissolving the royalist-patriot divide and more usefully focuses minds upon the local causes of political disaffection and insurrection. Indians, castes, and creoles fought on both sides, as conscripts as well as volunteers, even in ostensibly genocidal movements. Robins highlights such antinomies (“the idea that two things can be both in opposition and true”) and attempts to explain them to the extent possible: there were some unlikely alliances on both sides, and many religious and cultural manifestations appear to have been highly creative.

Analysis of the ways in which religious fervor and political violence feed upon one another, like fuel to a flame, has not often received the attention it merits in Latin American and North American historiography. The movements under discussion in this book all bore significant millennial characteristics, including belief in prophesies, harking back to Golden Ages, and the ushering in of a new order or new age. This millennial context helps explain the importance of the charismatic leadership that was vital to the relative success (if only short-term) and organization of the movements. It also accounts for the strength of insurgent leadership. Leaders of revitalization movements often quickly lose their rapport with followers; the leaders of these insurrections maintained their authority over their followers even as their movements faltered and collapsed, notwithstanding internecine tensions.

Robins’ study is characterized by the rigorous deployment of statistically significant empirical data, combined with conceptual sophistication and methodological awareness. His previous published research on Andean history also convincingly deployed anthropological approaches, especially as regards to millenarian movements, and an awareness of what he called the antinomies of rebellion, the apparent discrepancies and contradictions within social movements; this required a sensitivity in reading historical discourse that is unsurpassed, and rarely rivaled, in the work of his peers. He stresses the use of...