ABSTRACT
Amazonas is a long epic novel that is remarkable for its precise use of ethnographic information and for its adoption of the indigenous perspective as a vantage point from which to scrutinize the long history of the conquest and colonization of South America by Europeans from c. 1530 to c. 1930. Episodes depicted include the devastation of the pre-Columbian civilization of Cundinamarca and key phases in the estabishment and eventual dismantling of the Jesuit settlements (the reducciones) in south Brazil and Paraguay; but the action begins in a remote area of the upper Amazon basin, the Uaupès, which was known to European explorers in the period around 1900 as an evident place of refuge for highly diverse ethnic groups. This chapter considers the uses Döblin makes of observations and analyses he found in Alfred Métraux’s 1928 study of the religion of the Tupinambá, the 1914 report on the belief system of the Apapocúva-Guaraní by Curt Nimuendajú Unkel, and accounts by the explorers Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Henri Coudreau. It argues that Döblin’s depictions of indigenous cultures transcend stereotypical European images of native South Americans by virtue of the close attention he paid to the best available ethnographic evidence.
