A historical anthropology of indigenous peoples in the Amazon: Challenges and perspectives

Abstract (English)

In the anthropological literature still circulating in English, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon are identified as tribes from the lowlands of South America. Far from the Andes mountain range, marginal to the ancient Inca Empire, they are often imagined as micro-societies embedded in the largest tropical forest in the world and on the margins of global history. A privileged example of past humanities, a convenient laboratory for exoticism and the exclusively synchronic investigation of primitive ontologies. (For a critique of this, see Wolf, 1982; Amselle, 1979; Bensa, 2006).
In contrast, the Amazon has been linked to the global economy for five centuries, and its lands and natural resources have been intensely disputed by colonial powers. Religious missions from different nations and faiths have been established there since the 16th century (Hemming, 1978). For a long time, it was the site of rubber production for the international market, and more recently, logging, mineral exploration and agribusiness have profoundly changed the forms of sociability, conceptions and political horizons of these peoples (Davies, 1978 and Garfield, 2013).
The anthropologies developed in these countries in the second half of the 20th century did not in any way ignore the colonial situation concretely experienced by indigenous peoples and carried out a critique of the theories and methods that were hegemonic in the dominant anthropologies at the time. Important studies were carried out, among others, by Brazilian (Ribeiro, 1970; Cardoso de Oliveira, 1978), Colombian (Fals-Borda, 2009, Peruvian (Arguedas, 1975) and Latin American (Gonzalez Casanova, 1968; Stavenhagen, 1972 and Casimir, 1980) anthropologists. The separation between anthropology and history was reviewed and criticized (Pacheco de Oliveira & Quintero, 2020). In dialogue and stimulated by innovative formulations that have occurred among anthropologists and historians throughout world (Bloch, 1975; Roseberry, 1989; Trouillot, 1991, Chakrabarty, 1992; Mbembé, 2002; Bensa, 2006; Gledhill, 2009) an historical anthropological approach to amazonian indigenou peoples and brazilian history was proposed (Pacheco de Oliveira, 2019 and 2022) aiming to study in particular the impact of power on culture and also reflect on the relationships between researcher and researched in the process of knowledge production.