Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing Past Identities from Archaeology, Linguistics, and Ethnohistory
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Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing Past Identities from Archaeology, Linguistics, and Ethnohistory
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Overview
Hornborg and Hill argue that the tendency to link language, culture, and biology--essentialist notions of ethnic identities--is a Eurocentric bias that has characterized largely inaccurate explanations of the distribution of ethnic groups and languages in Amazonia. The evidence, however, suggests a much more fluid relationship among geography, language use, ethnic identity, and genetics. In Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia, leading linguists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists interpret their research from a unique nonessentialist perspective to form a more accurate picture of the ethnolinguistic diversity in this area.
Revealing how ethnic identity construction is constantly in flux, contributors show how such processes can be traced through different ethnic markers such as pottery styles and languages. Scholars and students studying lowland South America will be especially interested, as will anthropologists intrigued by its cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607320951 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 380 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia
Reconstructing Past Identities From Archaeology, Linguistics, and Ethnohistory
By Alf Hornborg, Jonathan D. Hill
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2011 University Press of ColoradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-196-5
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia
Alf Hornborg and Jonathan D. Hill
By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.
— ERIC R. WOLF, EUROPE AND THE PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY (1982:6)
STEPS TOWARD AN ANTI-ESSENTIALIST ANTHROPOLOGY OF AMAZONIA
Attempts to explain the distribution of indigenous languages and ethnic groups in Amazonia since the time of European contact, whether by historians, linguists, or archaeologists, have generally been founded on an essentialist conception of ethnolinguistic groups as more or less bounded, genetically distinct populations that have reached their recent territories through migration. This perception of ethnolinguistic diversity is a phenomenon that itself deserves explanation, as it appears to draw on a Eurocentric experience of nation-building that historically has struggled to integrate territory, language, identity, and biology (cf. Jones 1997). On closer examination, the evidence in Amazonia suggests a much more fluid relation among geography, language use, ethnic identity, and genetics (Hornborg 2005). Correlations of data on the physical geography, linguistics, archaeology, and ethnohistory of Amazonia indicate that ethnolinguistic identities and boundaries have been continuously generated and transformed by shifting conditions such as economic specialization, trade routes, warfare, political alliances, and demography. To understand the emergence, expansion, and decline of cultural identities over the centuries, we thus need to consider the roles of diverse conditioning factors such as ecological diversity, migration, trade, epidemics, conquest, language shifts, marriage patterns, and cultural creativity.
The concept of "ethnicity" that we apply to long-term processes of collective identity formation in Amazonia draws on mainstream definitions within social and cultural anthropology (Barth 1969; Cohen 1978) but may be less familiar to some archaeologists, linguists, and historians. The entry "Ethnicity" in the Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Barnard and Spencer 1996) distinguishes three competing approaches: primordialist, instrumentalist, and constructivist. To simplify a complex and voluminous discussion over the past four decades, we could say that a primordialist approach posits an objective (biological or cultural) essence as fundamental to ethnic identity, while an instrumentalist approach emphasizes ethnicity as a creation of cultural elites in strategic pursuit of power, and a constructivist approach views ethnicity more generally as a form of social organization maintained by contextual, intergroup boundary mechanisms (Sokolovskii and Tishkov 1996). Ethnicity in the last sense is negotiated in the continuous, fluid dialectic between objective sociocultural features and subjective experiences of identity. The three approaches need not be mutually exclusive, Sokolovskii and Tishkov suggest, but the constructivist approach offers the most promising core of an emergent, coherent theory of ethnicity (ibid.). This conclusion would no doubt be endorsed by a majority of cultural anthropologists today. What is novel about the present volume, however, is the ambition to allow this perspective from cultural anthropology and ethnography to fertilize studies of the archaeology and historical linguistics of Amazonia. Although the contributors to Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia represent several disciplines and may employ slightly different definitions of ethnicity (e.g., DeBoer, this volume; Scaramelli and Scaramelli, this volume), they all make serious efforts toward this end.
If ethnicity is understood as a means of communicating a group's distinctness, we need to explore criteria for recognizing expressions of identity in the past use of language, material culture, and other ethnic markers, acknowledging also that such use may be context-specific, and to trace the specific ways in which Amazonian experiences of distinctness and difference have been shaped by spatially distributed circumstances largely defined by the macro-scale logic of economic and political structures. Rather than treat human history in the area as explicable in terms of biogeography, this approach to the archaeology, linguistics, and ethnohistory of ancient Amazonia seeks explanations in social and cultural processes.
Although indigenous Amazonia is one of the linguistically most diverse regions of the world, and home to several large language families (Map 1.1) and numerous isolates, many of the chapters in this book discuss the special significance of the Arawak language family. The Arawakan languages of South America at the time of Columbus represented the most widely dispersed linguistic family on the continent, ranging from Cuba to Paraguay. The processes by which this family expanded in prehistory are probably an important factor in understanding the long-term trajectories of several other linguistic groups in Amazonia (see Hornborg and Eriksen, this volume). The expansion of Arawakan languages has generally been attributed to riverine migrations of prehistoric populations through Amazonia and was explained by the archaeologist Donald Lathrap (1970) as a consequence of these populations' adoption of manioc horticulture, which would have provided a demographic advantage in territorial competition with non-horticulturalists. However, this basically biogeographical model of the Arawak expansion in terms of simple demographic displacement does not consider what social and cultural theory might have to suggest on the matter. An anthropologically informed account would need to consider sociocultural factors such as language shifts, multilingualism, intermarriage, politics, prestige, and the strategic construction of cultural identity (ethnogenesis), particularly along the major rivers that have been posited as corridors of migration but that were more obviously trade routes conspicuously often dominated by Arawak-speaking traders. The Arawakan "migrations" definitely involved some movement of people, but probably in a smaller-scale and different way than previously postulated. Several kinds of theoretical and empirical arguments converge in suggesting that the widely dispersed Arawakan dialects encountered by Europeans may be testimony not so much to prehistoric population movements as to the integration of a regional trade network spanning most of the Amazon basin and linking it to the Andes and to the Caribbean. In fact, ritual chants and oral history among current-day Arawak speakers in the northwest Amazon preserve much of the ancient cartographic knowledge that this long-distance trade must have entailed (Hill, this volume).
The Tupían language family was also widely dispersed (Noelli 2008), and its dispersal in central and western Amazonia after AD 1000 may largely have followed routes established by the preexisting, Arawak-dominated trade network. The extent to which this widespread language shift signified displacement of biological populations or their cultural assimilation is unclear, but there are ethnohistorical indications of both kinds of processes (cf. Brochado 1984:402–403; Santos-Granero, this volume). The question remains whether the resemblance between polychrome pottery styles from the far eastern and far western margins of Amazonia, noted by Lowie and Kroeber in the 1940s (DeBoer, this volume), should be taken as indicative primarily of demic migration or long-distance communication. This question is very much the same as that regarding resemblances, identified decades earlier by Nordenskiöld, between pottery styles from the far northern and far southern extremes of tropical lowland South America. These far-flung resemblances inspired Lathrap (1970) to propose his famous model resorting to demic migration, which in various versions continues to dominate the field, but which the current authors find less convincing than processes of ethnogenesis and long-distance communication.
To reconceptualize the culture history of Amazonia along these lines, there are at least two pervasive biases to overcome. One has already been mentioned, that is, the inclination to think of "peoples" as coherent, bounded populations with a common language, culture, and identity. Another and equally crippling bias is the assumption that the indigenous societies of Amazonia have always been few, small, and simple. Both these biases are products of world history: the first a reflection of European experiences of nationalism, the second of the state of Amazonian societies when studied by Europeans since the seventeenth century. Although the very earliest reports of European explorers of Amazonia (e.g., Carvajal 1934 [1542]) describe dense and extensive indigenous settlements along the riverbanks, the first undisputedly reliable accounts date from a period preceded by more than a century of devastating epidemics and slave-raiding, when the aboriginal population had been reduced to a small fraction (perhaps only 5 percent) of its former size and its social organization disintegrated into isolated villages of refugees pushed into marginal habitats. These circumstances, although a result of the historical encounter with Europeans, were interpreted by Europeans as determined by the oppressive climate and poor soils of the tropical rainforest.
Both these biases (cultural essentialism and environmental determinism) are very obvious in the influential Handbook of South American Indians compiled by the anthropologist Julian H. Steward (1950) in the mid-twentieth century (Steward and Faron 1959). Not only do Steward's maps suggest more or less neatly bounded ethnolinguistic categories plotted onto geographical space, but his categories of "culture types" in Amazonia are explicitly defined as simple, fragmented, and irremediably constrained by the tropical rainforest environment. This interpretation of the native cultures of Amazonia has been particularly entrenched through the publications of archaeologist Betty J. Meggers (e.g., 1971). The mainstream assumption that climate and ecology represented an absolute limitation on aboriginal cultural development in Amazonia has been persuasively challenged by several anthropologists (e.g., Carneiro 1995; Balée 1998) and archaeologists (e.g., Roosevelt 1994; Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 1999) but continues to retard reconceptualizations of prehistoric social processes in the area that posit large sedentary settlements, hierarchical political structures, long-distance trade, and intensive cultivation.
Although the second of the above-mentioned biases now appears to be increasingly transcended by archaeological discoveries, notably of extensive and deep deposits of dark, anthropogenic soils (Lehmann et al. 2003; Glaser and Woods 2004; Woods et al. 2009), the first continues to pose a formidable obstacle. Thus, even researchers determined to rewrite the culture history of Amazonia in terms of hierarchical polities and regional interaction tend to treat ethnolinguistic categories such as "Arawak" as denoting a genealogically definable "people" whose ancient movements over the continent can be traced by arrows on maps. While such cartographic exercises are no doubt valid for the dispersal of languages, it is important to distinguish between linguistic diffusion and demic migration. Whether the homeland of proto-Arawakan can be identified as the northwest or the southwest Amazon, the subsequent dispersal of Arawakan dialects to the Caribbean, the mouth of the Amazon, and the Andes requires a more sophisticated explanation than the notion that Arawak-speaking peoples simply moved across the landscape.
There are several reasons to question such a simple notion of migration. The Arawak speakers were not expanding into empty space, like their Palaeoindian ancestors moving into the New World from Siberia or the first hominids leaving Africa. They were generally surrounded on all sides by other ethnolinguistic groups, some of whom had been living in Amazonia for thousands of years. Rather than assuming that these neighbors were displaced or annihilated by the Arawak expansion, we should consider it more likely that they were largely assimilated. Multilingualism and language shifts have been extensively documented over much of Amazonia in recent centuries (Schmidt 1917:19–21; Sorensen 1974 [1967]; Jackson 1983; Campbell 1997:23; Aikhenvald 1999, 2002), and we have no reason to think that they were not equally common in pre-Columbian times. Arawak-speaking groups studied by ethnographers show a conspicuous interest in forging marital and other alliances with neighboring groups along the rivers (cf. Gow 1991; Hill 1993, 1996), generating far-flung networks of amicably interconnected communities united by kinship, trade, and an elaborate ceremonial life. This inclination toward regional integration was the pivotal innovation of proto-Arawakan traders, which set in motion a contagious process of communication and unification echoing similar processes that on other continents have been called "the Neolithic revolution." Here as elsewhere, regional integration and trade stimulated local stratification, settlement growth, intensified production, and ethnicity, but the most obvious medium of integration is rarely recognized as such: a common, prestigious language serving as a mark of identity.
By the end of the first millennium AD, dialects of Arawak languages were spoken along most of the major rivers from the mouth of the Orinoco and Amazon to the headwaters of the Purús and Madeira. This distribution pattern suggests not so much that Arawakan "peoples" were able to displace all other groups along these ancient communication routes, as conventional migration theory would have it, but that a proto-Arawakan language once may have served as a lingua franca from the Caribbean to Bolivia. To date, there has been no genetic research suggesting that Arawak speakers in Colombia are biologically more closely related to Arawak speakers in Bolivia than to their non-Arawak (e.g., Tukano-speaking) neighbors (cf. Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994:341). Considering the preference for linguistic exogamy in the northwest Amazon (Sorensen 1974 [1967]; Jackson 1983), the very idea seems highly unlikely. On the other hand, there has been linguistic research showing that Arawakan languages often show greater structural similarities to their non-Arawak neighbors (e.g., Tukano, Pano) than to each other (Aikhenvald and Dixon 1998). All this adds up to something quite different from "migration" in any conventional sense.
Intriguingly, the German anthropologist Max Schmidt (1917) already in the early twentieth century seems to have understood that the Arawakan expansion was not so much a matter of demic migration as a process of ethnic identity construction that did not generally rely on the movements of substantial populations. He made several observations on indigenous language shifts (e.g., among the Kaua and Chané) and explicitly noted that Arawak served as a trade language in the northwest Amazon. Schmidt emphasized the role of elite gift exchange and male exogamy, suggesting that the outward movement of small groups of prestigious, Arawak-speaking men would have sufficed to account for the diffusion of an Arawakan identity (ibid., 36–61). This early, non-essentialist understanding of linguistic dispersal in Amazonia, however, was soon to be replaced by the blunter analytical tools of Julian Steward's cultural ecology.
TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO ANCIENT ETHNICITY: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS
The reconceptualization of Arawakan "migrations" that we have sketched here has emerged not only from a reconsideration of the various kinds of data mentioned above but more fundamentally from modern anthropological theory on the kinds of social processes underlying the construction and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. The point of departure for such theory is usually the seminal contribution of the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969). Archaeologists and historical linguists would have much to gain in their attempts to account for past processes of ethnolinguistic diversification from acquainting themselves with Barth's framework. Following Barth, the general understanding of ethnicity now prevalent in anthropology is that a population's experience of cultural distinctness is generated by its position within a larger field of interacting socioecological niches. Specialized production of certain kinds of foodstuffs, utensils, or other trade goods, often congruent with a particular ecological habitat, thus contributes to the demarcation of a specific ethnic identity. This identity does not exist on its own but always in relation to those of other ethnolinguistic groups with which it remains in continuous interaction. Ethnic identity is thus simultaneously externally attributed, internally experienced, and above all communicated.
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