This lucidly written book charts the roles played by intermediaries, or “go-betweens” as Metcalf calls them, in the first century of Portuguese colonization in Brazil. It covers a wide array of “go-betweens,” from “ordinary sailors, banished criminals, translators, chroniclers, and mapmakers” through animals and pathogens to Jesuit missionaries and visionary-messianic runaway slaves. By analyzing the roles of such “go-betweens” in specific moments, the book underscores how earlier encounters in the Mediterranean and West Africa served as templates for Brazilian colonization. Yet it also suggests how the emergence of new social categories, including—most crucially for her argument—the mamelucos (descendants of Portuguese-indigenous unions) fundamentally shaped colonial interactions in Brazil. For example, in a fascinating discussion of privatized colonization (ch. 3), Metcalf shows how the command of Tupi eloquent speech styles, on the one hand, and of Portuguese commercial interests (especially the demand for Brazilwood and slaves), on the other, made mamelucos powerful agents in the coastal colonies. As she explains, mamelucos and other intermediaries helped articulate both structures of practice and ideological assumptions about the nature of interaction, value, exchange, and reciprocity that were constitutive of colonial Brazilian society.

Go-Betweens offers many empirical insights. Yet it would have benefited from a more explicit comparative framework to explore how, for example, mamelucos' transactional practices conformed to or differed from those of mestizos in other early colonial contexts, including Spanish America, Southeast Asia, Goa, and West Africa. Similarly, Metcalf's discussion of Jesuit attempts to bring about the conversion of indigenous peoples in Bahia through the use of children as interpreters begs comparison with missionary translation projects in other early colonial settings (Rafael's study of Tagalog conversion and Zupanov's of Portuguese-Tamil translations come to mind). Metcalf notes that Jesuit correspondence with powerful figures in Europe “influence[d] European perceptions of Brazil” (p. 89) but she does not spell out the nature of this influence. She first suggests, “Jesuits were some of the most powerful go-betweens of the sixteenth century” (90), but later insists that the Jesuits were far less successful than mamelucos in shaping the ultimate trajectory of colonial Brazilian society (256–57, passim). What, then, were the unique aspects of Brazilian colonialism that made it less susceptible to enduring Jesuit impact than, say, Goa or Manila? Moreover, in noting that “translating Christianity required more than the simple exchange of one set of words for another” (99), Metcalf touches on but does not clearly analyze a crucial aspect of the colonial encounter—the transformations of “Christianity” itself. Throughout the book, Metcalf frequently juxtaposes “Brazilian” and “Portuguese,” “indigenous” and “European,” without fully considering how these categories were reconstituted throughout the period.

Still, the book makes a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the early processes by which indigeneity and Catholic orthodoxy were articulated and objectified, for example in mamelucos' attention to “dances and customs” as indigenous ancestral legacies that might be lost with the migration to Jesuit villages (251). In this context, Metcalf's tripartite typology (building on Georg Simmel and Stephen Greenblatt) of physical/biological, transactional, and representational “go-betweens,” raises important questions about these categories' mutual constitution and dialectical relationship to specific sites and practices of mediation. Thus Metcalf's meticulously researched book sheds much light on the processes by which “cultural difference” became a sine qua non of colonial social relations, and underscores the oft ignored role of intermediaries in such processes.