Indigenous Alliance Making: Histories of Agency in Colonial Lowland South America

by James Andrew Whitaker (Editor), Mark Harris (Editor)

Overview

During the colonial and postcolonial eras, local people in lowland South America experienced exploitation from outsiders. But as new kinds of societies emerged from engagements between outside and Indigenous communities, Indigenous Amazonians formed strategic alliances to defend livelihoods, territory, and symbolic values, as well as to curb exploitation, predation, and threats.

The contributors in Indigenous Alliance Making bring together historical analyses with anthropological investigations to explore the organizational patterns, goals, and strategies through which Indigenous people have intentionally created various alliances, partnerships, and similar relations with outsiders in lowland South America. Emphasizing class, ethnicity, gender, and race, the chapters bring new dimensions to understanding a vital but understudied region.

Through missions, war, and broader conflict, as well as marriage and kinship, local people aimed to maintain control even as personal and collective transformations unfolded. This volume explores the formation of diverse historical relations across regional societies within past and contemporary contexts and contributes to a growing historiographical turn among anthropologists and historians that foregrounds agency in past and present understandings of Indigenous peoples’ engagements with others in lowland South America.

Contributors 
Marta Amoroso
Elisa Frühauf Garcia
Mark Harris
Kris Lane
Camila Loureiro Dias
Cecilia McCallum
Gary Van Valen
Aparecida Vilaça
James Andrew Whitaker

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816555024
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	10/14/2025
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

James Andrew Whitaker is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is also an honorary research fellow at the University of St Andrews.

Mark Harris is a professor of historical anthropology at Monash University and an honorary professorial research fellow at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the Brazilian Amazon and what makes it a place of global significance.

Editorial Reviews

This volume offers a timely and important intervention into the narratives and understandings of lowland South America’s Indigenous peoples’ historical encounters with outsiders. In putting Indigenous peoples’ own perspectives to the fore, the volume offers a much-needed antidote to the narratives of domination and conquest that continue to privilege non-Indigenous accounts and obscure the agency of Indigenous peoples and their cultures.”—Evan Killick, co-editor of The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives

“This book contributes diverse empirical evidence of Indigenous agency in shaping politics across lowland South America during colonial times. Whether it is Indigenous women shaping political alliances through marriage in Brazil, ontologies in translation in the politics of conversion in the Bolivian Amazon, or ethnogenesis to contest Spanish incursions in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia, the authors illustrate many forms in which Indigenous peoples strategically engaged with outsiders to define the emergence of modern South America.”—Manuela Lavinas Picq, co-author of Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State

From the Publisher