Title
Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place in the Evolution of Identity in Portuguese Amazonia
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
12-2019
Department 1
History
Abstract
This chapter reveals how the vast waterways of equatorial South America facilitated exploration and inter-ethnic contact that led to conflict as well as cooperation and migration. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Portuguese explorers, slave traders, and missionaries moved progressively upriver, descending natives to missions and settlements. Some Indian and African runaways subsequently escaped to riverine forests to evade exploitation. This chapter presents new evidence showing that runaways to remote tributaries would become the supposedly uncontacted “tribes” of twentieth-century ethnographers. Against the backdrop of the eighteenth-century demarcation of Spanish and Portuguese imperial boundaries, the occupation of geographic and ecological zones defined social and cultural identities.
DOI
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199341771.013.24
Recommended Citation
Sommer, Barbara A. "Conflict, Alliance, Mobility, and Place in the Evolution of Identity in Portuguese Amazonia.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Required Publisher's Statement
This article is available on the publisher's website.