Indigenous Alliance Making

James Andrew Whitaker is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is also an honorary research fellow at the University of St Andrews.Mark Harris is a professor of historical anthropology at Monash University and an honorary professorial research fellow at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the Brazilian Amazon and what makes it a place of global significance.

“This volume offers a timely and important intervention into the narratives and understandings of lowland South America’s Indigenous peoples’ historical encounters with outsiders. In putting Indigenous peoples’ own perspectives to the fore, the volume offers a much-needed antidote to the narratives of domination and conquest that continue to privilege non-Indigenous accounts and obscure the agency of Indigenous peoples and their cultures.”—Evan Killick, co-editor of The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives“This book contributes diverse empirical evidence of Indigenous agency in shaping politics across lowland South America during colonial times. Whether it is Indigenous women shaping political alliances through marriage in Brazil, ontologies in translation in the politics of conversion in the Bolivian Amazon, or ethnogenesis to contest Spanish incursions in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia, the authors illustrate many forms in which Indigenous peoples strategically engaged with outsiders to define the emergence of modern South America.”—Manuela Picq, co-author of Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State