Indigenous Alliance Making, ed. by J. Whitaker & M. Harris (2025)

During the colonial and postcolonial eras, local people in lowland South America experienced exploitation from outsiders. But as new kinds of societies emerged from engagements between outside and Indigenous communities, Indigenous Amazonians formed strategic alliances to defend livelihoods, territory, and symbolic values, as well as to curb exploitation, predation, and threats. The contributors in Indigenous Alliance Making bring together historical analyses with anthropological investigations to explore the organizational patterns, goals, and strategies through which Indigenous people have intentionally created various alliances, partnerships, and similar relations with outsiders in lowland South America. Emphasizing class, ethnicity, gender, and race, the chapters bring new dimensions to understanding a vital but understudied region. Through missions, war, and broader conflict, as well as marriage and kinship, local people aimed to maintain control even as personal and collective transformations unfolded. This volume explores the formation of diverse historical relations across regional societies within past and contemporary contexts, and it contributes to a growing historiographical turn among anthropologists and historians that foregrounds agency in past and present understandings of Indigenous peoples’ engagements with others in lowland South America.

Please email James Whitaker (jwhitake@tulane.edu) and Mark Harris (mark.harris@monash.edu).if you might be interested in using the book in a course (whether in anthropology or history) or if you otherwise have any questions 

Available at: https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/indigenous-alliance-making. Scheduled to be published in October of 2025: 30% OFF with code AZFLR 

Contributors

Marta Amoroso, Elisa Frühauf Garcia, Mark Harris, Kris Lane, Camila Loureiro Dias, Cecilia McCallum, Gary Van Valen, Aparecida Vilaça, James Andrew Whitaker

About the editors

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. He is the author of The Shamanism of Eco-Tourism: History and Ontology among the Makushi in Guyana. 

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.