Introduction: Indigenous Creolization, Amerindian Hybridity and the Invention of Authenticity

Abstract

This collection of essays organized by Catherine Alès addresses important issues of the politics of indigenous and non-indigenous identities in Lowland South America through both contemporary ethnography (Alès, Gow, and Halbmayer) and ethnohistory (Harris).They discuss the creolization process with various aspects of specific ethnographic experiences and historical examples to strengthen this initial foray into an ongoing and prevalent process.There are vast differences in missionary activity, government influence, local intra-indigenous socio-cultural relations and programs of non-governmental development and conservation groups in Lowland South America.While the examples analyzed in the following papers reflect these differences and focus on a limited set of missionary activities (Halbmayer for the Yukpa, Alès for the Yanomami, Harris in Colonial Brazil), state politics (Alès for the Yanomami) and NGO´s impacts (Gow among the Piro and Asháninka), each contribution gives a specific insight of what could have more general similarities with others examples in Lowland South America.All the papers show the paradoxes of creolization: transformation and change going hand in hand with the continuous reproduction of indigenous practices and forms of perception.If we take such a diagnosis seriously, contemporary indigenous ways of existence may not be understood by focusing either on change and assimilation or on the continuity of indigenous forms.Something new and innovative is created out of both.In this sense, we apply here the "not much used term creolization in the ethnography of indigenous Amazonian peoples" (Gow).In Lowland South America, relations between Amerindian groups were and are in themselves often marked by a multiplicity and mixture expressed in multilingualism and multilingual regional systems, interethnic marriages, long distance trade and socio-political formations that integrate people with different languages, language families, and cultures.These range from multiethnic and multilinguistic villages in the Guianas under a Waiwai or Tiriyo macro-identity, to North-West Amazonian relations among Tukano groups that were labeled as linguistic exogamy.It also includes villages formed by different language families in the Upper Xingu integrated in a common socio-cultural frame by a commonly shared identification as human beings across the linguistic differences, common rituals, the specialized exchange of products and services, as well as kinship relations.Relations in such multi-lingual systems may, however, also rely on hierarchy, as among the Yekwana and the Yanomami, the Tiriyo and the Akuriyo, or the Naduph and the Tukano groups, and regional systems of exchange may be integrated by forms of warfare and predation and not just trade, exchange, and marriage (Lévi-

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