Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America provides a wide array of autobiographical and biographical narrative practices representing a sample of locales in lowland South America, including Ecuador, Brazil, Peru and Chile. Despite their diverse national and intellectual backgrounds, the contributors offer a coherent and convincing exploration into the narrative experiences of lowland South America. They jointly present a vivid picture of temporal conceptualization, modeling of personhood, the realization of interethnic social life, and the hybrid identity of local political figures in these communities.

In addition to an introduction which provides an illuminating overview of the topics to be covered, this edited collection comprises ten chapters organized into four parts. The first part ‘Neither Myth nor History’ tackles the classic issue of temporality, usually dichotomized as either ‘myth’ or ‘history’ in two extremes. Based on their in-depth studies of a variety of local biographies and autobiographies, the three chapters in this section present a reformulation of the central role of personal experiences regarding temporal engagement in local communities. Through various forms of self-presentation, the local people realize their unique conceptualization and expression of both past and future. The second part, ‘Persons within Persons’, is closely related to the notion of temporality. In a similar vein, this issue is also long plagued by a cleft between Western and non-Western conceptualizations of personhood. With a comprehensive account of autobiographical and biographical narratives in the two different contexts, the two chapters illustrates what Bakhtin calls the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ processes involved in the construction of a unique yet relational personhood in lowland South American communities.

Entitled ‘Creating Sociality across Divides’, the third section shifts its attention to the practical effect of autobiographical and biographical narratives about ‘social life’. Targeting both communicative processes and verbal/nonverbal repertoires, the two chapters demonstrate how narrative performances can construct solid interpersonal relationships across social divides. The two studies reveal the significance of power mechanisms and role expectations in interpersonal relationships. In the last part, ‘Hybridity, Dissonance, and Reflection’, the focus is shifted from the constructive function of narrative discourses to the potential stress and cognitive disparity in a multiple and conflicting social world. The three chapters in this part analyze (once) political leaders who usually assumed the intricate role of interethnic narrators. The personal strain and hybrid identity are best expressed in their respective accounts of being a Kawaiwete leader, a Xavante leader and activist, and a twentieth-century Kuikuro intercultural mediator. The narratives of emotional tensions and identity struggles throw new light on the integration of multiple and, perhaps, conflicting models of personhood in specific interethnic networks.

The book offers an enlightening illustration of the functions and values of autobiographical and biographical narratives in constructing and shaping the conceptualization of time, person and social life in lowland South America. It should appeal to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of anthropology, sociology, ethnography and linguistics.