Indigenous Alliance Making: Histories of Agency in Colonial Lowland South America with a focus on Makushi alliance in Guyana (James Andrew Whitaker, University of Southern Mississippi)
Séminaire de l'EREA
Présentation
Since the colonial era, Indigenous people in lowland South America have formed alliances and partnerships with outsiders within an array of different circumstances that range from trade and other forms of economic exchange to missionization, warfare and predation. Drawing on historical encounters from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Guyana, Indigenous Alliance Making: Histories of Agency in Colonial Lowland South America (Whitaker & Harris ed., 2025) examines such cases across the continent. It contributes to a growing historiographical emphasis on Indigenous strategic relations with outsiders and highlights how Indigenous people have sought to steer or even control the content and direction of these relations despite adverse circumstances. This presentation will provide an overview of the book with a particular focus on the final chapter, “Makushi Alliances in Guyana: Partnerships against Predation.” It will focus on how Makushi people strived for mutualistic relations under circumstances variously characterized by symmetrical and asymmetrical dynamics. It will also explore how such ethnohistories can contribute to contemporary ethnographic research with Indigenous groups in Amazonia.
La présentation sera réalisée en anglais.
The EREA (Enseignement et recherche en ethnologie amérindienne) seminar is a flexible discussion space open to the public that aims to stimulate exchanges between Centre researchers, University of Paris Nanterre Department of Anthropology, and invitees from elsewhere. It serves as both a focal point for reflection on ongoing Americanist research and as a platform for doctoral students, post-docs, and associate researchers’ work.
Under the form of individual presentations, thematic cycles, or half-days of study, the seminar provides a complementay research space for meetings, namely the Séminaire d’anthropologie américaniste (SAA) and the Groupe d’enseignement et de recherche sur les Mayas et la Mésoamérique (GERM).
Some sessions are available in replay on Canal U's Erea channel.
Organisation : Valentina Vapnarsky, Philippe Erikson andVincent Hirtzel
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