Description: Amazonia presents the contemporary scholar with myriad challenges. What does it consist of, and what are its limits? In this interdisciplinary book, Mark Harris examines the formation of Brazilian Amazonian societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing predominantly on the Eastern Amazon, what is today the states of Pará and Amapá in Brazil. His aim is to demonstrate how the region emerged through the activities and movements of Indigenous societies with diverse languages, cultures, individuals of mixed heritage, and impoverished European and African people from various nations. Rarely are these approaches and people examined together, but this comprehensive history insightfully illustrates that the Brazilian Amazon consists of all these communities and their struggles and highlights the ways the Amazon has been defended through partnership and alliance across ethnic identities.
Brief description: Mark Harris is Professor and head of the School of Philosophical, Historical and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He is also an honorary research fellow at the University of St Andrews. His book Life on the Amazon won the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs Prize, and Rebellion on the Amazon received an Honourable Mention for the Warren Dean Memorial Prize.
Review Quotes: 'This fabulous book takes the risk of situating itself in a watery and fluid space of improbable mediations to recount the formation of Amazonian riverbank societies in the 17th and 18th centuries. A must-read.' Carlos Fausto, author of Art Effects: Image, Agency and Ritual in Amazonia