Stuart B. Schwartz

New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era)

This chapter examines the processes of ethnogenesis, the ways in which new human groupings came to be, and how they were categorized in colonial cultures. It emphasizes the search for factors contributing to their emergence, or non-emergence, as new peoples sharing belief in their own uniqueness, solidarity, and legitimacy. The chapter then focuses on Afro-Indian people, white captives and mestizaje. By putting mestizos outside both the Indian and the Spanish republics, Spain had made the behavioral correlates of mestizo identity indefinite, and, once mestizaje became advantageous, this slipperiness came back to haunt the law. Archaeological clues and the testimony of native or half-native historians suggest that migration, fission, incorporation, and alliance were taking place among indigenous peoples in the prehispanic scene. The increasing use of color and racial physiognomy was part of the enlightenment trend toward the rationalization and categorization of the physical world, which took on increasing importance in American social definitions.

Testimonies: The Making and Reading of Native South American Historical Sources

This introductory chapter surveys writings that contain native South American versions of the past and problematizes the way they contain them. Its main purpose is to afford readers a feel for native sources diverse viewpoints, their verbal textures, their transformations during editing into non-native genres, and their historiographic promise. The chapter sketches the literature of colonial native testimonies. It explains modern sources in their relation to ethnography and methodological issues about oral tradition, literacy, and the material record. State functionaries normally paid little attention to the realms of belief and symbolism. The earliest Christian missionaries took little interest in Indian belief. It was only in the middle 1560s that an intense native religious ferment, itself provoked by Spanish depredations, stimulated Spanish interest in idolatry. In modern scholarship, testimonies individually edited as myths, folktales, or traditional stories are rarely left to stand in unhistorical simultaneity.

The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century

The enormous cultural and linguistic diversity of lowland South America presented a stiff challenge to sixteenth-century Portuguese observers, in spite of their considerable experience with the intricate political configurations of coastal Africa, South Asia, and the Far East. Most of the coastal societies came to be called Tupi, and their language the lingua geral da cost. In linguistic terms, societies belonging to at least forty distinct language families flourished during the sixteenth century within the present territorial limits of Brazil. The coastal Tupi, speakers of the lingua geral, as well as the southern Guarani, all spoke related dialects of Tupi-Guarani, one of nine known language families in the Tupi trunk. Migration provided the most effective method of combatting the pernicious effects of disease, slavery, and confinement to missions. The challenges of contact and conquest introduced new pressures, which, in the long run, eroded age old patterns and contributed to the decline of indigenous coastal Brazil.

Chiefdoms: The Prevalence and Persistence of “Señoríos Naturales” 1400 to European Conquest

This chapter discusses chiefdoms/senorios in four sections. The first section considers what Europeans saw and reported at contact, and how their views and categorizations of societies correspond to models of sociopolitical organization. The second section discusses the structure and process in Chibcha chiefdoms of the Colombian altiplano. The third section provides a general overview of chiefdoms in regions that remained independent of Inka rule. The fourth section deals with chiefdoms that lost autonomy as they were overrun by the Inka in the fifteenth century and integrated into the empire. Generally, groups that the Spaniards called behetrias would be identified by anthropologists today as egalitarian societies, bands, and tribes. Bands had as their basic unit of organization the nuclear or extended family. A higher level of centralization and expansion, one that involved almost all the communities in Chibcha domain, was characterized by regional alliances of cacicazgos based on politics, kinship, marriage, economic relations, and religious belief and practice.

The Crises And Transformations of Invaded Societies: The Caribbean (1492–1580)

The native populations of the region that the Europeans came to call Caribbean were the first to negotiate the new realities to which this encounter gave rise, as well as to endure the ecological and demographic consequences of that arrival. The Caribbean was thus center stage in the crises and transformations of the indigenous societies of the Americas during the fateful years 1492-1580. By 1500 most of the complex native polities of Espanola had ceased to operate autonomously. The native networks of gold trading that the doradistas so eagerly hoped to intersect ultimately connected both the Caribbean islands and the western coasts of Tierra Firme to the heartland of the Colombian sierras. Dramatic population losses, through either war or disease, provided the demographic context for the emergence of new leaders and new visions of how Amerindian people might respond to the crisis of European invasion.

Black Latin America: Legacies of Slavery, Race, and African Culture

In this fifth and last special issue of the HAHR published under our editorial tenure at Yale, we turn to questions of slavery and race as well as the role of people of African descent in Latin American history. The history of black slavery and, subsequently, of race relations is an aspect of Latin American history that has become a central theme of scholarly activity and has made Latin American historiography increasingly relevant to scholars of other regions of the Americas. Since the days of Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1947), which itself drew on the work of Latin American scholars such as Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz, a comparative approach has, at least, implicitly framed much of the historiography of slavery, race, and racism in the Americas. The early comparisons were often based on a set of implicit epistemological assumptions: there were fundamental differences in the nature of modern race relations between Latin America and North America; variations in the patterns of slavery in the two regions were in some way responsible for the differences in race relations; and that religious, economic, cultural, and political factors determined the trajectory of race relations. In the last 40 years or so, a whole generation of world scholarship has struggled with these questions and challenged these earlier assumptions. These debates have made this one of the most active areas of research in Latin American history. Despite the comparative framework that often organized the research, much of the advancement in the study of these topics has been made in a national or regional context. During the 1960s–80s, national historiographies of slavery and race throughout the Americas developed and deepened, providing new perspectives on the colonial and national experiences of individual countries. Within their national focus, however, these studies were often implicitly informed by methods and techniques used by historians working in other contexts so that even at the local and national levels such studies were framed

The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: The La Plata Basin (1535–1650)

This chapter concerns the early years of invasion in the southeastern part of South America, specifically the vast basin of the Rio de la Plata (sometimes called River Plate). Its scope includes all of Paraguay, as well as Tucuman and Cuyo in modern Argentina. How can we capture the essential characteristics common to the histories of these three areas? Here, as in most other areas of America, indigenous societies that did not build strong centralized power structures, and that consequently lacked tributary or semitributary systems for die production and circulation of surpluses, faced Europeans for whom such systems were the essence of politics. In these cases European conquest did not mean a state takeover of an existing state, as in the Andes or central Mexico, but rather a long and arduous campaign to pacify the territory and build a labor-exploiting system amid native societies of drastically unfamiliar constitution. It was the difficulty of this process, from die European viewpoint, which attached the label marginal to such areas. (To some degree the formerly Inka-ruled areas of Andean Argentina, with their more complex native polities, formed exceptions.) In broad strokes these commonalities create a common history. First, the Spanish found it necessary to overcome nearly every group through armed struggle. Aldiough die presence of a few allies made pan of the job easier, military conquest was still a difficult road for the Europeans to travel. Second, the colonists devised numerous ways to extract surplus by controlling indigenous peoples labor. All of these systems were variations on obligatory personal service diat is, labor levies which crown officials could assign to favored Spaniards or to local industries and other applications. Theoretically die crown tried to hedge personal service with rules distinguishing tributary Indians and tributary age, but regula-