Keep on Changing: Recent Trends in Amazonian Anthropology

Abstract

In this article I review several recent books to consider how anthropologists have approached questions of cosmology, history, and social transformation in Amazonia. Several of these engage a now well-established tradition in presenting indigenous ontologies as radical alternatives to Western concepts of agency and history. In contrast to the discontinuities described in the “New History” of Amazonia, anthropologists tend to approach social transformation as the extension of an enduring symbolic economy of alterity. I argue that the “New Amazonian Ethnography” would benefit from an openness to understanding radical social change beyond questions of continuity.