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Introduction: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992
- University of Iowa Press
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Jonathan D. Hill Introduction Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992 Cultural anthropologists have generally used the term ethnogenesis to describe the historical emergence of a people who define themselves in relation to a sociocultural and linguistic heritage.l In the following collection of essays, a number of cultural anthropologists are concerned to demonstrate that ethnogenesis can also serve as an analytical tool for developing critical historical approaches to culture as an ongoing process ofconflict and struggle over a people's existence and their positioning within and against a general history ofdomination.2 In this more analytical sense, ethnogenesis is not merely a label for the historical emergence of culturally distinct peoples but a concept encompassing peoples' simultaneously cultural and political struggles to create enduring identities in general contexts of radical change and discontinuity. For all the indigenous and Afro-American peoples whose histories are discussed in the following essays, ethnogenesis can be understood as a creative adaptation to a general history of violent changes-including demographic collapse, forced relocations, enslavement, ethnic soldiering, ethnocide , and genocide-imposed during the historical expansion of colonial and national states in the Americas. Ethnogenesis is a useful concept for exploring the complex interrelations between global and local histories through focusing upon "the dialogues and struggles that form the situated particulars of cultural production" (Tsing 1994: 283). Ethnogenetic processes are intrinsically dynamic and rooted in a people's sense ofhistorical consciousness, or "a reflexive awareness on the part of social actors of their ability to make situational and more lasting adjust- 2 Introduction ments to social orderings ... and an ability to understand that ordering as it is situated in larger, more encompassing spatiotemporal orders that include others who are socially different" (Hill 1988: 7). By defining ethnogenesis as a synthesis of a people's cultural and political struggles to exist as well as their historical consciousness of these struggles, Ethnogenesis in the Americas decisively breaks out of the implicit contrast between static local cultures and dynamic global history. None of the indigenous and Afro-American peoples discussed in the following essays can be understood as isolated local cultures, nor do their entanglements in broader relations of national and global power fully explain or determine the specific forms of ethnogenesis.3 In addition to a people's struggle to exist within a general history characterized by radical, often imposed changes, ethnogenesis is grounded in the conflicts within and among indigenous and Afro-American peoples. In contexts of colonial domination and structures of national power, ethnic groups become internally divided into factions struggling to control access to the dominant society's wealth and power (see Ferguson 1990; Whitehead and Ferguson 1992). Alternatively, factions can develop around the issue of how to cope with the dominant society.4 Both kinds of factionalism can lead to ethnogenesis through a process of resisting not only a dominant social order but also other factions' ways of relating to that dominant order. Similarly, interethnic rivalries among indigenous and Afro-American peoples often formed part of ethnogenesis and ethnocide, especially in cases where competing colonial powers institutionalized such divisions into ethnic soldiering (see Whitehead, this volume). Reconstituting Cultural Identities under Colonial Domination Maroon societies of the circum-Caribbean area, or communities founded by escaped Afro-American slaves, offer what are perhaps the most dramatic illustrations of ethnogenesis in the Americas because of their radically uprooted origins as forced exiles from a great diversity of West, South, and East African societies. The diverse African peoples who founded Maroon societies had very little common ground upon which to embark on their struggles to create new communities, aside from their shared opposition to the inhumanity of colonial plantation societies that reduced Afro-American peoples to animal-like status. Among the Aluku, a Maroon society of inland Surinam and French Guiana , shared historical origins through opposition to institutionalized slavery found expression in the practice of naming social groups according to the specific plantations from which their founding members had fled (see Bilby, this volume). These historically differentiated subgroups of the Aluku remained partially autonomous through the late eighteenth century, even as [3.91.8.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:18 GMT) Introduction 3 their leaders formed political and military alliances in order to fight the Dutch and their local allies, the Ndjuka Maroons. After their military defeat in 1793, the surviving Aluku united into a single ethnic group through worshiping a common set of religious oracles. Ritual and myth provided the central elements of Aluku political...