The Making of Brazilian Amazonian Societies

Mark Harris is Professor and head of the School of Philosophical, Historical and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He is also an honorary research fellow at the University of St Andrews. His book Life on the Amazon won the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs Prize, and Rebellion on the Amazon received an Honourable Mention for the Warren Dean Memorial Prize.

'This fabulous book takes the risk of situating itself in a watery and fluid space of improbable mediations to recount the formation of Amazonian riverbank societies in the 17th and 18th centuries. A must-read.' Carlos Fausto, author of Art Effects: Image, Agency and Ritual in Amazonia

• Introduction; 1. Indigenous worlds on the Amazon river and the origins of the European sphere in the sixteenth century; 2. Colonial space and fluvial patterns: invaded territories of the eastern Amazon in the early seventeenth century; 3. Coming out the forests? Indigenous territories in the lower Xingu and Tocantins in the mid seventeenth century; 4. The making of the Sertão: indigenous regional networks in the late seventeenth century; 5. Riverine village and indigenous regional networks in the early eighteenth century; 6. Family, marriage and place in the riverine communities near the lower Amazon river; 7. 'In the forest we don't accept the grace of God': the spatialisation of Amazonian shamanism; Conclusion. The Sertão made Belém.