ABSTRACT

Amazonia’s territories of geography and imagination map onto twin centers of gravity in anthropology: indigenous people and human relations with nature. Amazonian scholarship played a key role in anthropological debates over core disciplinary categories: culture, subjectivity, hybridity, indigeneity, local–global interactions, nature and culture, and ethical issues in research and advocacy. One of the biggest “Big Surprises” late in the twentieth century was the dramatic rise of activism and public assertiveness by indigenous people worldwide. By late in the 1980s Amazonian anthropology was moving beyond the divide between structuralism/social analysis and cultural ecology, with work examining human relations with nature as complex interweavings of the physical, biological, ecological, cognitive, social, and symbolic. Anthropological scholarship coalesced around three focal themes: indigenous agency, nature/culture, and alterity and the body. Two key concepts, alterity and the body, emerged to make sense of the organization of native Amazonian social life across many domains and dissimilar social structures.