Description
Book Synopsis 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.
Table of Contents Foreword
Peter Wade
Introduction
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
