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In the Brazilian Amazon region, cultural “mixture” is expressed in the interaction of city and hinterland, of Indigenous and Black, of religiosity and politics. By examining the multiple cultural and ethnic threads that traverse this landscape, The Amazonian Puzzle sets out to show how the category of caboclo (a powerful spiritual entity to some, and to others a despised peasant of mixed ancestry) reveals deep currents of ethnic recompositions, religious interpenetration, and social hierarchy. These Amazonian dynamics are explored through the lens of ethnography, sociology, and history.
“Exploring native ontology, the author shows how Indigenous Amazonian concepts of transformation are very strong and help explain the fluidity of the local ideas about mixture in people, resulting in a multiplicity of self-designations whereby people use their presumed identity to gain advantage or deflect possible negative consequences. An excellent book.” • Choice
Véronique Boyer is an anthropologist, a research director at the CNRS, and a member of the American Worlds Laboratory. She has been conducting research in the Brazilian Amazon for over 30 years. She is the author of Expansion évangélique et migrations : la renaissance des perdants (Karthala, 2009).
Foreword
Peter Wade
Chapter 1. Three Brothers, Three Versions of the Same “Mixture”
Chapter 2. Personal Experiences in the Service of Collective Projects
Chapter 3. Local Populations as Caboclos: The Difficult Naming of a Social Formation
Chapter 4. The Caboclo, a Protean Notion: “Traditional Populations” versus Invisible Beings
Chapter 5. The Implicit Nature of the Caboclo or How to Conceive the “Mixture”
Chapter 6. The “Mixture” and Its “Matrices”: Race through the Prism of Culture
Conclusion
References
Index