Jeronimo’s declaration of independence: Piro accounts of slavery and freedom

This chapter provides an ethnographic account and analysis of slavery and freedom among the Piro (Yine) people of the Bajo Urubamba River in Peruvian Amazonia. The words “slavery” and “freedom” are so powerful within Euro-American liberal thought that their uses by indigenous people in Peruvian Amazonia seem transparent. Slavery is evil, freedom is good. But there are very few accounts of what indigenous Amazonian people might make of such concepts, especially in the light of their political philosophies of collective (Clastres) and personal (Overing) autonomy.