Fifteen Eighty Four

How did Indigenous people in the New World understand their encounters with Europeans during the colonial era? This question is at the centre of ongoing debates among anthropologists and historians and its answers vary as much as the differences between the groups involved in these historical encounters. The topic can be expanded to include questions about the frameworks through which Indigenous groups have understood their subsequent relations with various outsiders, as well as the ways in which these frameworks may have changed over time and how they may relate to Indigenous peoples’ engagements with other-than-human beings.

My new book, The Shamanism of Eco-Tourism: History and Ontology among the Makushi in Guyana, explores how Makushi groups in Guyana (formerly British Guiana) conceptualised and understood their relations with outsiders (particularly Europeans and North Americans) within the specific contexts of Anglican missionisation during the 19th century and eco-tourism during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In both of these contexts, Makushi groups have worked to form strategic and mutualistic alliances with outsiders, which involves the use of frameworks derived from shamanic practices of creating cooperative relations with spirits. The resulting partnerships that emerge in these cases provide a means for acquiring various desiderata (including material goods, connexions, and new forms of knowledge), curbing external predation (ranging from past slaving raids to more recent extractivism), and facilitating transformations that allow for new perspectives and opportunities at both the individual and community levels.

Combining ethnography and ethnohistory, this book describes my arrival and subsequent experiences in the Makushi village of Surama with a view to these broader historical contexts. It positions my local fieldwork within the ongoing history of Makushi engagements with outsiders. The chapters move back-and-forth between historical relations with missionaries, as well as other colonial figures, and contemporary relations with eco-tourists, consultants, NGOs, and anthropologists. The chapters provide insights into how some Makushi people historically understand their relations with outsiders and why they continue to seek external allies and to form strategic partnerships through the use of specific forms of reciprocity and hospitality.

Recognising the abundant cultural and historical diversity of the region, this book does not claim that all Indigenous groups (or even all Makushi people) in lowland South America (Amazonia) share the same conceptual or relational frameworks. However, it does point to relevant comparative cases involving other regional Indigenous groups. The book contributes to debates concerning how Indigenous peoples in Amazonia and other parts of the world understand their past and present encounters with outsiders in relation to what has been called “cosmologies of contact” (Albert and Ramos 2002). It builds upon a growing field of scholarship examining how Amazonian Indigenous groups have understood and conceptualised missionaries, missionisation, and Christian conversion in various contexts (Castelnau-L’Estoile 2006; Collomb 2011; Grotti 2022; Vilaça 2010; Viveiros de Castro 2011), as well as how they have often engaged with outsiders as a means of acquiring both material and immaterial resources (Conklin 2010; Conklin and Graham 1995). It expands this field to examine more recent circumstances surrounding eco-tourism, which has until now been largely neglected in these debates. The book contributes to broader anthropological conversations concerning the various symmetrical and asymmetrical forms that social relations have taken within, between, and beyond Indigenous peoples in Amazonia (Costa 2017; Costa and Fausto 2010; Fausto 2012). It also builds upon a growing historiographical turn towards agency and intentionality in Amazonian historiography by emphasising the ways that Makushi people were often active versus passive participants in their encounters with Europeans (Roller 2021; Van Valen 2013).

At a much broader level, this book illustrates the enduring resilience and ingenuity of the Makushi and other Indigenous groups throughout the New World. It shows how Makushi people have developed sophisticated approaches for strategic engagement and intervention within a range of high stakes scenarios. Although often threatened, oppressed, and attacked by forces of colonisation, they have sought to address various security dilemmas, to meet material needs, and to pursue complex projects of self-transformation through their engagements with outsiders. With this in mind, The Shamanism of Eco-Tourism goes beyond Amazonian ethnology and highlights the capacity of humanity both to survive and to strive for better worlds even under the most difficult and trying of circumstances.

References:

Albert, Bruce and Alcida Rita Ramos (eds). 2002. Pacificando o branco: cosmologias do contato no Norte Amazônico. São Paulo: UNESP.

Castelnau-L’Estoile, Charlotte de. 2006. The Uses of Shamanism: Evangelizing Strategies and Missionary Models in Seventeenth-Century Brazil. In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, edited by John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, 616-637. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Collomb, Gérard. 2011. Missionnaires ou chamanes? Malentendus et traduction culturelle dans les missions Jésuites en Guyane. In Guyane: histoire & mémoire: la Guyane au temps de l’esclavage, discours, pratiques et représentations, edited by Jean-Pierre Bacot and Jaqueline Zonzon, 435-455. Guyane: Ibis Rouge.

Conklin, Beth. 2010. For Love or Money? Indigenous Materialism and Humanitarian Agendas. In Editing Eden: A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia, edited by Frank Hutchins and Patrick Wilson, 127-150. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Conklin, Beth and Laura Graham. 1995. The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics. American Anthropologist 97: 695-710.

Costa, Luiz. 2017. The Owners of Kinship: Asymmetrical Relations in Indigenous Amazonia. Chicago: Hau Books.

Costa, Luiz and Carlos Fausto. 2010. The Return of the Animists: Recent Studies of Amazonian Ontologies. Religion and Society 1: 89-109.

Fausto, Carlos. 2012. Too Many Owners: Mastery and Ownership in Amazonia. In Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia, edited by Marc Brightman, Vanessa Elisa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva, 29-47. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Grotti, Vanessa Elisa. 2022. Nurturing the Other: First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia. London: Berghahn.

Roller, Heather F. 2021. Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Van Valen, Gary. 2013. Indigenous Agency in the Amazon: The Mojos in Liberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842-1932. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Vilaça, Aparecida. 2010. Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia. Durham: Duke University Press.

Vilaça, Aparecida. 2016. Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16th-Century Brazil. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.