In Amazonian Routes, an important contribution to recent Amazonian scholarship that places native peoples at the center of their own history, Roller highlights mobility in its multiple forms as a key to understanding how Indians sustained their communities under Portuguese rule during the second half of the eighteenth century. The proposal is paradoxical because crown administrators and many later historians saw the opposite: the movement from place to place of diverse indigenous groups drew from the bureaucrats condemnations of “inconstancy,” their catchword for moral weakness. Scholars conventionally blamed an oppressive colonial regime for promoting the very rootlessness it condemned. Accordingly, forced population relocation and flight from punishing labor regimes explained the Indians’ perpetual motion, whether in despair or resistance.
Roller argues instead that mobility complemented community formation and strengthened cultural resilience. It epitomized how Indians “adapted to new, colonial ideas and practices and often made them their own” (p. 3). That such flexibility could occur at a time of rapidly consolidating state power has implication beyond the extensive Amazon basin.
The study scrutinizes the Directorate period, the final four decades of the century, when the crown, spurred by geopolitical and economic concerns, secularized mission villages and imposed legislative reforms aimed at incorporating the region's inhabitants more firmly as productive, tithe-paying, Europeanized vassals. Thus integrated and concentrated in urban nuclei, they would be more “useful” to the state. The geographic scope encompasses the two sprawling captaincies of the basin, Grão-Pará and, deeper in the interior, São José do Rio Negro. If the Directorate regime entailed obligations, it also offered opportunities. Drawing on an impressive array of village-level sources, most of them official but some capturing native voices in the form of testimonies and petitions, Roller explores how such opportunities often hinged on travel along navigable routes from one site to another, even as the state worked to corral the local population.
Fulfilling their obligation to perform services for the state, many village Indians joined annual expeditions collecting cacao, sarsaparilla, aromatic bark, resins, oils, and other products, the famed drogas do sertão (literally, wilderness drugs). Reports from these expeditions provide testimony from native crewmen that Roller uses to great advantage in recounting with uncommon concreteness descriptions of daily life far upriver. Some Indians chose this type of labor over others because it promised more autonomy, potential earnings through a thriving contraband trade, and the chance to visit distant family and friends in other settlements. Other Indians voluntarily took active roles in state-sponsored descimentos (descents), another type of long-distance activity whereby officials sought to contact still-independent groups deep in the forest, persuading or pressuring them to resettle in Directorate villages. By Roller's account, even the temporary absenteeism of some village Indians and the determination of others to live permanently outside these population centers, which authorities complained about incessantly, no longer looks like the unambiguous resistance of earlier scholarly interpretations. The author shows how such conduct could signal attempts to shape rather than reject incorporation into the colonial world.
Roller skillfully avoids the twin pitfalls of underestimating and exaggeration, in regard to both the coerciveness of colonial rule and the autonomy of subaltern subjects who contended with its impositions. The indigenous protagonists of her story lived in ways that could be at once itinerant on the water and grounded in fixed communities. These Indians were “pragmatic,” “strategic,” “ideologically flexible,” and able to “accept compromises” (p. 206). When the colonial system promised advantages for individuals or communities, they engaged it cautiously and adeptly. On such terms, the unfolding of regional processes in the Portuguese Amazon can be compared profitably with similar processes in much of the rest of colonial Latin America.
Roller draws frequent parallels with and insights from peasant and native histories of Spanish America. If the work is less attentive to commonalities with other regions of Brazil, it provides rich material for future scholars to explore these connections. As such, this probing study will help correct the exceptionalism that has long characterized historical writing on the region.
