In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Piro, Apurinã, and Campa: Social Dissimilation and Assimilation as Historical Processes in Southwestern Amazonia peter gow Further, it is beyond doubt that since the discovery of the Antilles, inhabited in the sixteenth century by Caribs, whose wives bore witness still, by their special language, to their Arawak origin, that processes of social assimilation and dissimilation are not incompatible with the functioning of Central and South American societies. . . . But, as in the case of the relations between war and trade, the concrete mechanisms of these articulations remained unnoticed for a long time.” —Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Guerra e Comércio entre os Indios da América do Sul” While I was doing fieldwork among the Piro (Yine) and Campa (Asháninka ) people of the Lower Urubamba River in eastern Peru, my understandings of much of what I saw and was told ran along tracks laid down by my reading of the literature.As I have discussed elsewhere,the production of my own data and analyses forced me to radically rethink what I thought I knew about the history of relations between local people and nonindigenous newcomers (Gow 1991, 2001). But this has also been true of my understanding of the relations between Piro and Campa people, which was framed by my sense, derived from my reading, that these relations were very ancient and the product of an in situ differentiation between these two peoples. It has taken me a long time to rethink that issue and to be open to the possibility that the relations between these two peoples may actually be recent. This chapter outlines the process of that rethinking and what it implies. Here I produce a conjectural history of the Urubamba Piro, which sees them splitting away from an ancestral population shared with the Apurinã 06.147-170/H&S 6/4/02, 10:12 AM 147 148 peter gow people of western Brazil and then moving toward and eventually coming into direct and sustained contacts with the Campa and Matsiguenga in the Urubamba area (see map 5,p.10).This historical reconstruction is unashamedly conjectural,although I hope to show that it is both interesting and plausible . I do not believe that, in itself, this historical reconstruction is particularly important.What really concerns me here are two different issues. First, I want to continue the dialogue between the sorts of data collected by ethnographers and the knowledge generated by linguists and archaeologists because this is an important route to historical understandings of contemporary indigenous Amazonian societies. Second, I want to develop analyses of indigenous Amazonian histories that accord with what we are learning about indigenous Amazonian people’s own understandings of sociality. Traces of an Unknown History In the absence of other modes of accessing the pasts of indigenous Amazonian peoples, geographic location and linguistic classifications have played a key role in framing anthropological analyses of these societies.Peoples who speak related languages are assumed to constitute, inherently and unproblematically , natural units for analysis, in a way that has not been held to be true of speakers of unrelated languages. The most obvious example of such a natural unit is the Gê-Bororo peoples, which have produced their own subdiscipline,appropriately called Gêologia in Brazil.Other examples of such natural units are the eastern Tukanoans,Carib speakers,Panoan speakers,and speakers of Tupian languages. The obvious exception here is Arawakan and Maipuran speakers, a lacuna that this volume clearly seeks to redress. I have no desire here to challenge the main heuristic device that underlies such analyses, for I believe that linguistic relationships offer important insights into the unknown pasts of the societies we study. Instead,I want to ask another question of such units: How do they conform to what we know of the sociologics of indigenous Amazonian peoples? One of the main problems with the natural units referred to earlier is that it is far from clear that any of them are genuinely meaningful for indigenous Amazonian peoples. For Europeans, genealogy and shared descent have powerful meanings, whether benign or alarming depending on context and one’s point of view. They refer to socially operant entities, crucial to the building of nation states and supranational alliances and organizations. But if we have learned anything about indigenous Amazonian peoples, it is surely that genealogy and shared descent do not much interest them. Even in the few parts of indigenous Amazonia where we find descent groups, they have little to do with 06.147-170/H&S 6/4/02, 10:12...

Share