Jonathan D. Hill

History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992

For the past five centuries, indigenous and African American communities throughout the Americas have fought to maintain and recreate enduring identities under conditions of radical change and discontinuity. The essays in this ground-breaking volume document this cultural creativity - this ethnogenesis - within and against the broader contexts of domination; the authors simultaneously encompass the entanglements of local communities in the webs of national and global power relations as well as peoples unique abilities to gain control over their history and identity. By defining ethnogenesis as the synthesis of peoples cultural and political struggles to exist as well as their historical consciousness of these struggles, History, Power, and Identity breaks out of the implicit contrast between isolated local cultures and dynamic global history. From northeastern plains of North America to Amazonia, colonial and independent states in the Americas interacted with vast multilingual and multicultural networks, resulting in the historical emergence of new ethnic identities and the disappearance of many earlier ones. The importance of African, indigenous American, and European religions, myths, and symbols as historical cornerstones in the building of new ethnic identities emerges as one of the central themes of this convincing collection.

History, Ritual, and Myth: Nineteenth Century Millenarian Movements in the Northwest Amazon

Nineteenth century millenarian movements in the Northwest Amazon region are interpreted through an analysis of the ways in which Venancio Kamiko, an indigenous shaman and millenarian leader of the 1850s, improvised upon the symbolism of indigenous Arawakan myth and ritual to formulate a strategy of resistance to the oppressive political-economic conditions imposed by non-native peoples and institutions. Illustrations of this process include a detailed reconstruction of Venancio Kamikos life and the culmination of his movement in the 1850s, an overview of the history of interethnic relations in the region, a discussion of indigenous mythical concepts and ritual activities that entered into Venancios movement, and spoken narratives about Venancios millenarianism. Venancio Kamikos millenarianism is best understood as a reorientation of indigenous social relations in which the refusal to cooperate with the external, dominating order of the white men became elevated to a sacred cosmological postulate.

Alienated targets military discourse and the disempowerment of indigenous Amazonian peoples in Venezuela

In June through August of 1984, a dispute over land tenure between the Piaroa, an indigenous Amazonian people, and a wealthy Venezuelan colonist escalated from a local conflict into a national controversy over military security and its alleged absence in the Federal Amazon Territory. In the process, high‐ranking government officials and members of the economic elite accused the supporters of Piaroa land rights of participating in an international conspiracy to dismember Venezuelan national sovereignty. These specific processes of disempowerment are not isolated phenomena but part of a long‐term historical process of nation‐state formation in Venezuela that has, in turn, become enmeshed in a broader, hemispheric process of military discourse. Indigenous peoples, organizations and scholars including anthropologists who advocate indigenous rights, and a variety of reformist groups in Latin America have been transformed into alienated targets.

Colonial Transformations in Venezuela

The authors of the articles assembled in this issue represent the broader intellectual and cultural shifts that are currently unfolding in the Venezuelan anthropological community.These changes can be characterized in general terms as an integration of archaeology, history, and ethnology that is informed by critical, historical approaches to culture and power. This theoretical orientation is not expressed in abstract terms; rather, it emerges through a series of richly empirical essays that contribute vital new knowledge and sophisticated interpretations to existing anthropological understandings of the Orinoco Basin and adjacent regions. The essays demonstrate a concern for documenting and interpreting the complexity, ambiguity, and open-endedness of long-term historical processes of interethnic relations. Within this broader framework three general themes are prevalent. First, several authors develop critical, reflexive analyses of primary historical documents, especially from the colonial period. Second, nearly all of the authors document and interpret colonial or more recent historical processes as complex entanglements of materials and meanings leading to the emergence of new patterns of interethnic relations. Third, most of the authors provide critiques of official nationalist histories of Venezuela as an ideological and political erasure of the local and regional histories of indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan peoples. Reflexive, critical analysis of primary historical documents forms a central focus of Rodrigo Navarrete’s essay on the retribalization of the socalled Palenque, or Carib-speaking groups of the Unare Depression in the eastern llanos. Colonial historical sources from the sixteenth century portray the Palenque as a materially wealthy, politically hierarchical society.