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Rethinking the Margins/Thinking from the Margins:
Culture, Power, and Place on the Frontiers of the New
World
Guillame Boccara
a
a
Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France.
Online Publication Date: 01 January 2003
To cite this Article: Boccara, Guillame (2003) 'Rethinking the Margins/Thinking from
the Margins: Culture, Power, and Place on the Frontiers of the New World',
Identities, 10:1, 59 - 81
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59
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 10: 5981, 2003
Copyright 2003 Taylor & Francis
1070-289X/03 $12.00 +.00
DOI: 10.1080/10702890390180714
Rethinking the Margins/Thinking from the Margins:
Culture, Power, and Place on the Frontiers of the
New World
Guillaume Boccara
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Paris, France
In this article, I undertake a critical analysis of the writings that contributed to set up
the foundation for eclipsing Amerindian social dynamics and their complexity. Starting
from a presentation of Jesuit Jos de Acostas classifications of the indigenous
sociopolitical forms, I show that both the evolutionist and discontinuist perspective still
in vogue among some Americanists and the positivist approach of some borderlands
historians tend to perpetuate a conquest culture (the material and symbolic power rela-
tion of domination) while concealing indigenous social dynamics and adaptation strat-
egies. I end the article by presenting some of the perspectives and concepts developed
by a new historical anthropology that seek to re-politicize the production of social and
cultural differences otherwise considered as natural.
Key Words: frontier, Americas, colonial classifications, production of difference,
Mestizo logic
In this essay, I explore the topic of the American frontiers and hinterlands as well
as that of the peoples living therein, taking as my point of departure the sociocul-
tural and sociopolitical categories that have been used and are still used to charac-
terize them. Given the span of the topic, as well as the vast geographical areas
encompassed by the terms frontier land, unconquered or peripheral territory, and
borderlands,
1
I will focus on some typologies, categories, and representational strat-
egies that have tended to endure through the ages. I am alluding, for example, to
the typology advanced by the Jesuit missionary Jos de Acosta (15401600) to-
ward the end of the 16th century,
2
whose traces can still be detected in more recent
studies, such as those by Service, Carneiro, or Redmond. I am also thinking of
dichotomies such as the one that has been established between nomadic and sed-
entary peoples, which has worked since earliest colonial times as a true operator
for sociopolitical and sociocultural demarcation and discrimination, or of the pur-
ported contrast between leaders whose status and power is hereditary and those
whose position in society is due to their services and personal merits.
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I will begin by trying to show, through the presentation of some categories and
classifications commonly used to talk about indigenous peoples in general, and
nonsubjected peoples in particular, that these tend to reify and to simplify indig-
enous realities while being at the same time dependent upon certain implicit con-
cepts regarding the relationships between culture, society, and space that are in-
deed problematic. If we accept that, from the moment of the constitution of colo-
nial definitions regarding Indian nations, up to the determination of indigenous
ethnic groups and cultures during the republican period, the attempt has always
been made to create and to impose a correspondence, by reason or by force, be-
tween a cultural entity and a territory, a language, and a political organization, then
we cannot consider the isomorphism between culture, space, and identity as a given
or as a natural characteristic of every human society, be it primitive or civi-
lized.
In the same way, if we agree that the frontier itself is not an a priori existing
concept, but that it conforms to a transitional time-space of civilization and com-
munication both real and imaginary that has been constructed progressively through
multiple processes of denomination, delimitation, and negotiation, we are forced
to acknowledge the need to account for frontier relations not in terms of contact, or
of zones of contact (Pratt 1992) between two preexisting cultural entities, but as
a process whereby both the others otherness and the colonizers own identity
(Ferguson 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1997) are constructed. As Mignolo put it,
rather than a contact zone, what we have is the violence of border(lands) (2001:
427). The alleged difference between the two sides of the frontier should not rep-
resent, therefore, the point of departure for our historico-antropological investiga-
tions, but rather, the very phenomenon that needs to be explained. To be more
specific, I would not propose that the fundamental problem concerns the ways in
which the so-called Comanches, Apaches, Mapuches, Jumanos, or Miskitus have
been transformed through their multifaceted and extended contact with diverse
colonizing agents, or, conversely, that we should search for the cultural elements
that would allow us to declare that Mapucheness, in its essential aspects, has
been preserved throughout the centuries. What should engage our analysis instead
is the process of production of sociocultural difference in a given sociopolitical
and economic context. In conclusion, rather than engaging in an uncritical recu-
peration of ethnic labels and sociopolitical categories that have taken shape as a
result of centuries of colonialism, we should analyze not only the mechanisms for
the production of difference in a context characterized by asymmetrical social re-
lations but the processes of territorialization of the diverse ethnic entities, as well
as the unforeseen or perverse effects of every social process (be it colonial or
not): what, in the American case, could be called the phenomena of resistance and
spontaneous or antagonistic mestizaje.
Even though what I have just stated would appear to have been already ac-
cepted by a great many Americanist ethnohistorians, we will see, nevertheless,
through the presentation of some concrete examples, that for numerous scholars it
G. Boccara 60
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is still hard to break with the concept of the ethnic group in order to re-create
connections and re-politicize and re-historicize the diverse processes of identity
and sociocultural construction.
In the first part of this essay, and with the goal to illustrate what has just been
proposed in general terms, I will present the sociopolitical typology established by
Acosta, and will then analyze the vision and division of the American sociocul-
tural world that the Jesuit helped to create (along with others, obviously). I will
then proceed to a brief presentation of the classifications and stages of human
evolution proposed by some anthropologists and will then question both the ap-
propriateness and the supposedly innovative character of typologies such as band-
tribe-chiefdom-state, which in so many ways remind us of the horde-behetra
3
-
empire (horda-behetra-imperio) trilogy of Acosta. I would like then to pause in
order to analyze the concept of chiefdom, so much currently in fashion. I will
finish this critical revision with the presentation of a text written by a specialist in
borderland histories, namely David Weber, and will attempt to show the ways in
which this author remains trapped within the order of traditional colonial and an-
thropological discourse. The final part of this article will be dedicated to the pre-
sentation of recent historico-anthropological works whose approaches tend, in my
opinion, in the direction of an amplification of our sociological imagination, and
that will allow us to account for historical processes that, at a local or regional
level, have led toward increased forms of complexity.
Jos De Acosta: Culture, space, and politics in the New World
If I dwell on an author as famous as Acosta, it is not in order to praise one of the
first ethnologists of the New World through a presentation of his well-known and
well-recognized sociopolitical classifications, but in order precisely to meditate
on the implications of the Jesuit missionarys probable position among the earliest
ethnologists of the New World. I will not dwell here on the question of how Acosta,
throughout his work, contributes to make the strange into the familiar and the
unintelligible into the understood, to borrow a formula from Stuart Schwartz (1994:
3). I should mention here that the fact that I am interested in the elaboration of
political and cultural classifications by the Jesuit does not mean that I consider the
analysis of colonial representations to be enough to account, by itself, for the subtle-
ties and complexities of the interactions between Indians and Europeans. Finally,
in concentrating throughout this study on the categories devised by Acosta, I do
not intend to suggest that his vision concerning indigenous realities was rigid or
static or that it did not change as a result of his field work. What I am trying to do
here is to examine the nature of the knowledge produced by Acosta and to estab-
lish continuities between the colonial past, ethnology, and our present academic
climate. In sum, my concern is to trace the existing continuities between colonial
and postcolonial anthropological procedures as regards the apprehension and con-
struction of otherness without going into the question of interrelations, media-
Rethinking the Margins 61
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tions, or adjustments (Schwartz 1994) or discussing representational machines
or the uses of symbolic technology (Greenblatt 1991).
My project here falls rather on the side of those undertaken by Carmen Bernand
and Serge Gruzinski (1988) or Jos Rabasa (2000).What I mean to say is that even
ifas Anthony Pagden showed in his seminal work (1982)in La Historia Natu-
ral y Moral de las Indias and De Procuranda Indorum Salute Acosta insists on the
unity of the human species, puts a high premium on the value of empirical knowl-
edge, advocates a historical explanation for cultural difference, emphasizes the
role of social determinations in the construction of the individual, launches a com-
prehensive analysis of the Amerindian world taking into account the numberless
variety of rites and customs among the Indian peoples, and constructs a model for
the cultural evolution of humanity, what really interests me here is the kind of
knowledge produced through the Jesuits classifications: that is, the way in which
the territorialization of a certain number of sociocultural indigenous units and the
segmentation of the totality of the worlds space (thinking here specifically of the
case of the New World) have been transacted.
4
Let us then proceed to the presenta-
tion of the typology created by Acosta, who was, as we know, the father of the
missionary enterprise in the Peruvian Virreinato.
In the Historia Natural, as well as in De Procuranda,
5
the Jesuit mentions three
different kinds of barbarians, it being possible to differentiate the latter kind from
the more civilized class of individual insofar as the former deviate from the path
of straight reason and from the common practices of men (Acosta 1984 [1588]:
61).
6
In both typologies, whose contents and criteria vary, as we will see, one can
easily observe the intimate connection established between forms of government,
rites and customs, and forms of communication.
The first class of barbarians mentioned in De Procuranda comprises those na-
tions that have a stable political regime of government, public laws, fortified
cities, magistrates, a prosperous and well-organized commerce, and, what is most
important, well-known use of the written arts (Acosta 1984 [1588]: 63).
7
No In-
dian nations whatsoever fall under the first category. It is within the second class
of barbarians that the first Americans are to be found, namely, the Mexicans and
the Peruvians, but also the Chileans (Tucapalenses and Araucanos). These barbar-
ians have their own regime of government, habitual and fixed settlements where
they maintain their public administration, their military leaders, and a certain splen-
dor of religious observance (Acosta 1984 [1588]: 63). As I have just mentioned,
this second class includes not only the Inca and Mexica empires but also the
lesser kingdoms and principalities that have chieftains, do not wander about like
beasts, have an appointed leader and judge, and live in cities (Acosta 1984 [1588]:
65).
8
According to Acosta, and I insist on this point because we will encounter
again the same idea in typologies 400 years later, this second category, particu-
larly the subgroup comprised by Tucapalenses, Araucanos, and others, constitutes,
in the words of the Jesuit, a very widespread class (Acosta 1984 [1588]: 65).
9
In
the section of De Procuranda dedicated to false titles of dominion over the Indi-
G. Boccara 62
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ans (Los falsos ttulos de dominio sobre los indios), Acosta mentions the tyranny
of the Incas and speaks again of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of political
regimes of peoples that live without a legitimate prince to rule themwhich is
what the Spaniards call behetras (Acosta 1984 [1588]: 399).
10
The third category
of barbarian appears to be as wide and approximate as the second one, for, accord-
ing to the Jesuit, it is impossible to say the number of towns and regions that it
comprises in this New World (Acosta 1984 [1588]: 67). Under it fall
savage men, resembling beasts, who hardly have human feelings. Without king, with-
out law, without covenants, without magistrates nor fixed government regimes, shifting
their settlements from time to time, and, even when they are settled in one place,
their dwellings rather resemble the caves of savage beasts or the stables of common
animals.
11
Thus, Acosta wrote about a class of nations among which we will find the num-
berless herds (innumerables manadas; Acosta 1984 [1588]: 67) of chunchos,
chiriguanas, moxos, a good part of the inhabitants of Brazil and all of the ones in
Florida, the moscas from Nueva Granada, and those who inhabit the vast country-
side near the immense Paraguay river. In all, we observe, and I reprise this point
once again, that of all the groups that inhabit unconquered, or even unknown,
territories are here defined as savages. It should not surprise us, then, that Acosta
finishes his enumeration by saying that these men and semi-men (Acosta 1984
[1588]: 69) of the jungle occupy the infinite space that separates the two oceans,
a space not yet thoroughly explored, but whose existence is assured in all cer-
tainty (Acosta 1984 [1588]: 69).
In the Historia Natural, Acosta again establishes a tripartite division among
barbarian peoples, but now insists much more on the forms of government and
modifies the content of each of the categories. At the summit, he places the em-
pires of the Mexicans and the Incas (Acosta 1991 [1590]: 415); next follow the
behetras, which, as he writes, constitute the greatest part of this new orb (Acosta
1991 [1590]: 376); in the last place comes the third class, where all govern and
command. The nations belonging to the second class are the following: the
Araucanos and the Tucapel Indians, who appear to have fallen one step in the
ranking; the Indians of Nueva Granada (note how they have gone up in the world
ranking); and the Indians from Guatemala, all from Florida and from Brazil. It is
important to note that the order in which Acosta lists the Indian nations belonging
to this second class is not arbitrary, for in passing from the Araucanos to the Indi-
ans of Brazil we are shifting from the category of behetra or seoro to the third
category, whose barbarism is even greater; not only do they lack legitimate king-
doms, but he who is strongest prevails and commands (Acosta 1991 [1590]: 376).
12
Once more, the lowest stratum is occupied by the unfortunate Chichimecas, origi-
nal inhabitants of Nueva Espaa, who, according to the famous stereotype, do not
till the land but hunt instead, live scattered in rough areas without civility (polica),
Rethinking the Margins 63
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go naked, and do not worship gods or have any kind of religion (Acosta 1991
[1590]: 453). Acosta insists here also on the fact that this is the same mode of
living of many provinces in various parts of the Indies.
So, now I ask, what do we do with these typologies? What do these classes tell
us about the forms of classification for the enormous variety of rites, customs, and
forms of government faced by the Europeans, and what do they banish from sight?
I will take as my point of departure the argument presented by Anthony Pagden,
who considers the third categorythe one corresponding to the greatest level of
barbarismas being for the most part a creation of the European imagination (1982:
167). Does this mean that the remaining, superior categories did in fact correspond
to any authentic Indian reality? Does Pagden mean to say that the behetras and
the empires as defined by Acosta are not a creation of the European imagination?
I believe that to proffer an opinion concerning the ethnographic validity of any
of these three classes can indeed be problematic for at least two different reasons,
and that to do so is at the same time typical of a certain uncritical way of using
those categories and classifications that appear in chronicles and in other docu-
ments from the Colonial period. First, I believe that the category of behetra, as
well as the category of empire, cannot be thought independently of the third class,
which represents simultaneously a sociopolitical type and a cultural stage, inas-
much as it refers to a class of semi-men that occupy a position midway between
animals and the first forms of social organization and of human communication.
In consequence, these types and stereotypes do not describe a concrete empirical
reality that may have existed at the arrival of the Spaniards, or do not merely aspire
to describe it, despite Acostas repeated claims concerning the originality of his
work, which, according to him, tells a true tale of facts and of men (even though
statements to the contrary would appear to be scattered throughout his work, as
when he writes that one cannot know the whole world and must in consequence
use the imagination, or when he says that he will basically limit himself to the
description of the Peruvian Indians in De Procuranda or to the origin of the Mexi-
cans in the Historia Natural). Thus, these types and stereotypes on the one hand
organize the space and the history of the New World, and on the other, prepare the
terrain for a more efficient, appropriate, and just enterprise of colonization and
pacification. Let us remember that this is precisely the main objective of the De
Procuranda indorum salute.
Second, it seems to me that to engage in a search for an authentic indigenous
reality, or to try to differentiate between imagination and reality, fact and fiction,
in the case of Acostas classifications, can make us lose sight of his works truly
crucial character, as well as the procedures used in the construction of knowledge
regarding American realities.
13
If I am at all interested in this work, which played
such a central role in the speculations about the Amerindians and their culture
toward the end of the 16th, and most of the 17th century, it is precisely on account
of how it effects cuts within the indigenous realities, including the traits that it
chooses to select and feature from those societies and the aspects of the indigenous
G. Boccara 64
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social fabric that it forces to disappear. From that point of view, it would seem that
Acostas work is indeed rather modern in its procedures, while, at the same time,
the heaviness of our epistemological field manifests our own archaism. Taking as
a point of departure the present state of the historico-anthropological field, and
inasmuch as I am interested in the construction of an archeology of the political
sciences, I would say that this tendency to outline and detect discrete sociopolitical
units, while defining a political domain in whose center one could locate the object
state, has shown signs of consolidation, inscribing itself within the very structure
of anthropological knowledge and taking on the character of shared evidence.
14
In this respect, we may note that the crucial aspect of Acostas work consists
precisely in its segmentation of the social space of the New World into a series of
cultures radically different from each other, occupying different spaces or territo-
ries, organized according to different forms of government, and corresponding to
different stages in the evolution of humankind. In this way, the Jesuit contributes
to the creation of an ethnological landscape composed of discrete political and
cultural units as he constructs cultural types that become manifest through specific
political and religious types (Pagden 1982: 171174). He presents the image of an
indigenous America without connections, from which inter-ethnic networks or in-
termediate political forms are absent. On the other hand, Acostas evolutionist lens
contributed to the formation of a representation of the frontier as a transitional
space, or as space-time. Obviously, it is not a question here of judging the mission-
ary for his ethnocentrism (defining the world of the barbarians as an inversion of
the Christian world, as far as the lowest stratum is concerned) or for his evolution-
ism (three categories of barbarians, each one representing a different stage of hu-
man evolution, each stage corresponding to a different degree of social organiza-
tion, linguistic development, and religious observance). Obviously, it is not a ques-
tion either of praising him for having been one of the fathers of comparative eth-
nology, and the creator of what Pagden describes as a system of universal ethnol-
ogy that was dependent upon an account of universal history (1982: 192).
It is rather a question of going back to the earliest treatises of applied ethnology
of the New World in order to understand how, on the one hand, the process of
construction of a series of indigenous worlds, for the most part imaginary, has
been achieved, and, on the other, how a number of cultures have become confined
to certain territories due to the needs of pacification, colonization, and evangeliza-
tion. We should note that the spatiotemporal categories of frontier (frontera), in-
land (tierra adentro), and margin (margen) play a central role in this context. That
is, the definition of cultural and, in consequence, political and religious types was
intimately tied to the territorialization of the indigenous politico-cultural units and
nations (naciones).
15
The idea of culture, and by extension, of a human group linked
to a place and associated with a certain space, even in the case of peoples defined
as nomadic, functions as a central device in the representation of the Amerindian
sociocultural space.
The idea according to which cultures can be considered to be unique and dis-
Rethinking the Margins 65
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crete entities corresponding to diverse places and spaces is obviously linked to the
will to impose order in an otherwise chaotic world, and responds also to the need to
construct an interpretative frame according to which sociopolitical differences can
be explained, and, if necessary, cultural differences themselves can be created. The
tracing of limits and the creation of frontiers are therefore intimately connected to
projects of pacification and colonization whose main objective is to understand
cultures from the inside in order to modify them. Overall, we can see that Acostas
work presents us with an image of the New World as a cultural mosaic: discrete
cultural spaces are given a priori, as well as all other entities and identities. And
when historical processes are invoked, as in the case of the Mexicans discussed in
book seven of the Historia Natural, it is always in order to inscribe them within a
predetermined temporal scheme running from the lowest stratum, that of the
Chichimecas, all the way up to the highest one, that of empire. Even the political
struggles between barbarian groups and more civilized individuals are explained in
terms of an evolutionism we could classify as phylogenetic.
Evolutionist typologies and pitfalls of colonial classifications
Thus we arrive at the second part of this essay, where, keeping in mind Acostas
classifications and his procedures of spatialization, I would like to conduct an
inquiry into whether more or less recent attempts at establishing sociopolitical
typologies applicable to Amerindian realities, which would at the same time be
able to account for indigenous social formations, have indeed managed to break
loose from sociopolitical models foreign to the Amerindian worlds. I would also
like to cast a critical look at the colonial categories used to analyze the indigenous
forms in history, the mechanisms for the production of difference, and the ways in
which various forms of cross breeding (mestizaje) and intertwining took place in
the New World.
In order to answer these questions, I will discuss the typologies established by
anthropologists such as Service and Carneiro, focusing on the category of chiefdom
(cacicazgo or curacazgo). In the second place, I will show how historian David
Webers recent work on the sociopolitical dynamics of the American frontiers tends
to perpetuate what could be called a conquest culture, or the symbolic violence
exercised when notions such as those of frontier, ethnic group, or social evolution
are deployed as self-evident concepts or as shared evidence (Rabasa 2000).
On tribes and chieftancies, on social equality and complexity
Despite the fact that certain conjectures proposed by evolutionist political anthro-
pology regarding the origins of the state or of hierarchical societies can sometimes
be highly amusing (When should we expect the emergence of World Govern-
ment? Carneiro 1978), it is important to observe that neither evolutionism nor the
search for origins has completely disappeared from the Americanist academic land-
G. Boccara 66
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scape.
16
So it is that the ecological determinism of the Handbook of South Ameri-
can Indians from the 1940s, the typology defined by Elman Service in 1962 in his
Primitive Social Organization, and Marshall Sahlinss proposals regarding the tribal
stage in human societies still cast an influence over a good part of the studies
addressing American indigenous societies. In fact, the stages of sociopolitical evo-
lution (band-tribe-chiefdom-state) still constitute the frame of reference many an-
thropologists use in thinking about the political dynamics of indigenous societies.
Granted, in the last two decades, the content of the classes has changed signifi-
cantly, and, along with those changes, the totality of the geo-ethnic and geo-politi-
cal Amerindian panorama. By way of a compressed summary I would say that,
first, the dichotomy between, on the one hand, civilized highlands considered as
cradles of increased sociopolitical complexity and cultural diffusion and, on the
other, savage lowlands inhabited by stagnant egalitarian societies has been put
into question and discarded.
Second, this break with a dichotomy up to then well entrenched has led toward
a revision of the distribution map of complex social formations in America. It is
thus that, from the time of the investigations of Donald Lathrap and Ana Roosevelt,
the Amazonian region has appeared also as a space wherein so-called complex
social formations were developed, capable of producing considerable surplus, as
well as leaders whose power extended beyond the simple community or hamlet
(see Roosevelts chapter in Salomon and Schwartz 1999).
Third, the concept of chiefdom (cacicazgo), understood in general terms as a
complex social formation,
17
was posited as constituting the most extended class
throughout the continent. In consequence, chiefdoms experienced a boom, a de-
velopment that, in turn, posed several problems regarding the concepts analytical
status. These problems concerned, on the one hand, numerous discrepancies rela-
tive to the determination of the concepts characteristics, taking the form of ques-
tions such as: Are chiefdoms multicommunal political units showing two or three
levels? Does the ancestral worship play a central ideological role in the function-
ing of chiefdoms? Does such a political form develop under environmental cir-
cumscription,
18
as Carneiro proposed in his seminal 1981 text, The Chiefdom:
Precursor of the State? Should chiefdoms be defined as rank societies, as did Morton
Fried in The Evolution of Political Society (1967),
19
or should one rather define
them as political units composed of a multiplicity of villages, as Carneiro suggests
(1981: 20)? Another set of questions then concerned the fact that the societies
grouped under this class would appear no longer to have many things in common
(Cahokia, Araucanians, Timucua, Seoros Andinos, etc.). Such a crise de croissance
led toward a more recent innovation, which consists in positing a distinction be-
tween chiefdom and chieftaincy. In concentrating on the way in which, under cer-
tain circumstances, the exercise of power becomes a permanent feature, so that the
conditions are created for the accumulation of wealth and the formation of as-
cribed status or of hereditary (not achieved) power, the recent studies by Redmond
(1998) and Whitehead (1996, 1998a, 1998b) are attempting to re-historicize their
Rethinking the Margins 67
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assumed perspective.
20
What can we say about the foregoing debates concerning the complexity of
indigenous societies? And, above all, what opinion should one hold regarding this
typology, which has only become increasingly amorphous, given the widespread
presence of chiefdoms throughout the continent?
First, it is necessary to stress the salutary character of the use of the category of
chiefdom in peripheral or frontier contexts, inasmuch as this allows us to point
toward larger-scale developments, and to the fact that other macroregional inte-
gration has taken place in the past. Still, going back here to a comment made by
Carlos Fausto (2000), I wonder if the break with the determinist model of Steward,
and with the evolutionist one of Service, is not more apparent than real. To say, as
Roosevelt does, that the lowlands are exceptionally suited to the development of
sizable chiefdoms, or that the Araucanians did not belong to the category of
tribe but to chiefdom instead, as proposed recently by Tom Dillehay (2002), does
not help at all in breaking away from the previous models, nor does it help to
account for the diversity and complexity of sociocultural processes in those un-
conquered lands. Furthermore, this obsession with chiefdoms and chieftains tends
always to conceal the desire to understand how the state was born, inasmuch as
chiefdoms are taken to represent an intermediary and crucial stage between egali-
tarian societies and the state.
21
Such eschatological perspective is, in my opinion,
very harmful to historico-anthropological investigations, for each and every social
form taken to precede its formation is interpreted in the shadow of the state.
In the second place, I believe one can legitimately ask oneself up to what point
the proposal presented by Whitehead (1998b), concerning the possibility of mak-
ing a distinction between social formation and agency, chiefdom and chieftaincy,
really does diverge from the one made by Sahlins in his famous 1968 article, Poor
Man, Rich Man, Big-Man and Chief, or in Services 1962 text.
22
In fact, we could
go back a great deal more in time, as we find this same idea in Les stats, empires
et principautez du monde, written by Pierre dAvity in 1617,
23
or even in Acostas
very own Historia Natural, texts in which the authors explain the evolution and
increased sophistication of political, cultural, and therefore religious forms, as a
result of the activities of certain more cultivated and enterprising individuals.
In the third place, I believe that the problem with these evolutionist typologies,
their neo-historicist tinges notwithstanding, is that they trap us within simple-minded
sociopolitical models that do not leave room to imagine other kinds of sociopolitical
organization (multi-ethnic networks, interdigitated identities, social chain, etc.).
As Fausto warns us once more, we should be careful to avoid interpreting complex
evidence through paradoxically simple typological molds (2000: 41), for it is pos-
sible that diverse processes of complexificationthat is, processes of economic
intensification, of social differentiation, and of religious centralizationmay have
existed (2000: 26).
Finally, I believe that the fact that this social formation, now regarded as com-
plex, has nowadays become so fashionable, and that every day newer and more
G. Boccara 68
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numerous chiefdoms appear to pop up where once there were only tribes or no-
madic bands of individuals, answers not only to theoretical issues but also to di-
verse political struggles regarding the culture and identity of indigenous peoples
today. It is, in other words, a question of cultural politics of identity.
Trapped in the order of colonial discourse
Because I am talking about frontiers and interethnic dynamics, I must mention a
scholar who has in recent years displayed remarkable dynamism in this field of
endeavor, namely, David Weber. In a recent study, this historian, whose work, I
repeat once more, has been and still is of great importance in the subfield of His-
panic frontier studies, falls in my opinion into several of the errors I have previ-
ously mentioned. Concerning the use of the terms tribal society (sociedad tribal)
and nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples (pueblos nmades y semi-nmades), he
writes, without making further distinctions, that in all the world throughout the
Modern period, those societies with state-like organizations faced, as a general
rule, difficulties in controlling tribal societies, especially in the case of nomadic
and semi-nomadic peoples (1998: 149). I think we can say, without running the
risk of being labeled diehard postmoderns, that these categoriestribe, nomadic,
and semi-nomadic peopleshave been all too often used by the agents of those
very state organizations in order to justify their projects of conquest and coloniza-
tion. Every once in a while, nomads were conjured up simply because their in-
scription within a given territory differed from the colonizing agents ideas. Some-
times, nomads were generated through wars and through the deployment of de-
vices for economic exploitation (the mitas and encomiendas), which would then
suggest that, in such cases, the names refugee and displaced person would be more
appropriate. In fact, the Reche-Mapuche from the 16th century had a special word
to refer to this kind of displaced Indian from the north: they called them the tripan-
che (tripan: to leave, to go out; che: people).
On the other hand, we know, thanks to the studies by Brian Ferguson and Neil
Whitehead (1990), that many of the so-called tribes have appeared as a result of
the tribalization process put under way in areas of state expansion. For all of the
preceding reasons, I think we should avoid as much as possible this kind of gener-
alization, which does not contribute in the least to deessentialize Colonial dis-
course nor help us to account for the categories of understanding of the colonizing
agents; on the contrary, it tends to perpetuate both the discontinuity of the official
classificatory bias of the 16th, as well as of the 19th century and the narratives of
concealment that were instrumental in the exotization of the other, as against the
familiarity of the we.
A bit further in the study I have just mentioned, titled Borbones y brbaros.
Centro y periferia en la reformulacin de la poltica de Espaa hacia los indgenas
no sometidos, David Weber speaks about the Araucanos from southern Chile
and about the Chichimecas from the north of Mexico, as if he were referring to
Rethinking the Margins 69
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real ethnic groups (1998: 150), when we are aware by now of the very limited
ethnographic value held by such heteronyms. At the same time, their great value as
operators for politico-cultural demarcation during the Colonial period has become
increasingly evident.
Next, this historian mentions the treaties signed by the Spaniards with diverse
Indian nations throughout the American continent and comments, quite rightly,
that they formed part of the new Bourbon policy for the administration of colonial
space as well as constituting a response to concrete peripheral dynamics. So it is
that treaties were signed by the Comanches, Creeks, Chickasaw, and Navajos in
the north, as well as in Central and South America, along the Caribbean coast of
Nicaragua, in the region of Chaco, and the Pampas and the Araucana. Still, I think
that it would be appropriate to interpret those treaties and negotiations as devices
for ethnification and normalization, that is to say, as institutions that contributed to
the creation not only of the indigenous ethnic groups but also of a certain homoge-
neous and normalized juridical space. To speak about those spaces of negotiation
as if they represented neutral sites of free and smooth communication between
two preexisting ethnic or national entities, the Spanish-Creoles on the one hand
and the Indian nations on the other, is to lose from sight one of the fundamental
aspects of the colonial process: the creation of collective colonial subjects (ethnic
groups, corresponding to fixed territories and composed of a documented number
of subgroups) and of individual colonial subjects (the chieftains now considered
as agents of the king, in the double sense of judges and policemen; Boccara 1999,
2002). By recuperating the colonial terms contained in the various parliamentary
documents (parlamentos), one runs the risk of taking the indigenous ethnic groups
as a priori givens while at the same time abandoning analysis of the mechanisms
for the production of difference through the use of juridico-political tools.
I would also like to point out that it is precisely as a result of this process of
ethnification-normalization that new categories or classes of marginalized peoples
were created or re-created: delinquents, nomads, fugitives, idlers, all of those groups
and individuals that either did not fit into the new category of Indian subject to and
of the king, and in the new Colonial political cartography, or whose leaders re-
fused to take part in the new political negotiations. Thus, this new arrangement or
management of the diverse American spaces and of the forms of illegality tended
to create new margins, filling them in with new figures of otherness (Boccara
1999; Araya Espinosa 1999).
Finally, one could say, regarding the declarations made during the signing of
the treaties or collected in the official documents, what has already been said about
the requerimientos: that they are performative utterances, in the sense that they are
neither descriptions, affirmations, nor exhortations but phrases that, under certain
circumstances, turn their saying into a doing. The words In the name of the Creek
or the Picunche nations or In the name of God and the King I take possession of
this land are neither true nor false, do not need to be demonstrated, do not de-
scribe, but do things (Austin 1970). Treaties and negotiations played a fundamen-
G. Boccara 70
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tal role in the creation of the Americas as an ethnic mosaic. In discounting this
fact, one ignores the mechanisms for the location of cultures and societies at the
same time that one depoliticizes the construction of cultures and identities (Ferguson
1997). In saying that the Indian nations have their own rights, territories, and cul-
tures, the Colonial authorities tend to fragment the indigenous social fabric, fore-
close the native sociopolitical units, and contribute to creating the insular charac-
ter of the cultures thus isolated.
A true anthropology of the frontier should also include a sort of political an-
thropology of treaties, missions, and negotiations that would allow us to rehistoricize
and repoliticize our own analyses of the Colonial mechanisms for the creation of
difference. This would also permit us to see that power, as Michel Foucault has so
convincingly argued, is not always repressive (Deleuze 1986; Foucault 1976, 1992)
but, on the contrary, often creative. Missions and other examples of political nego-
tiations (parlamentos, treaties), as pillars of the Colonial politics of frontier ad-
ministration (Boccara 1999), tend to construct small positive individualities through
minute operations on the bodies and souls of the subjects thus identified, recorded,
tamed, civilized, disciplined, and held accountable. This application of Colonial
power in the American frontiers uses individuals simultaneously as objects and
as instruments of its own exercise (Ewald 1992: 206), and it gathers information
in order to act with more efficacy so as to intensify and enlarge the effects of
power. Such a microphysics of civilization is accompanied by a macrophysics of
ethnification (see below Ethnogenesis and ethnification) that we must reconstruct
in order to account for colonial processes in all of their complexity.
New perspectives: Ethnogenesis and ethnification,
multi-ethnic networks and interdigitated identities,
middle grounds and Mestizaje
In the last few years, several new themes, concepts, and avenues of investigation
have appeared that seem to present stimulating alternatives to previous modes of
interpretation concerning the sociocultural dynamics and historical processes in
the New World. I would like to mention briefly some of them here. Among them,
I would like to call attention, in particular, to the themes of combined processes of
ethnogenesis and ethnification, of multi-ethnic networks, and of interdigitated iden-
tities, as representing some of the basic principles of organization of indigenous
societies. I would like to mention too the recent emphasis placed on the analysis of
intermediary spaces and on the role of intermediaries or passeurs. Finally, I would
also underline the new interest garnered by the processes of mestizaje and by analysis
of the formation of middle grounds.
Ethnogenesis and ethnification
I will just say, as regards the combined processes of ethnogenesis and ethnification,
Rethinking the Margins 71
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that from the time of the work of William Sturtevant in the early 1970s, the use of
the first concept has become widespread at the same time that it has slowly be-
come associated with the second. Whereas for Sturtevant the phenomenon of
ethnogenesis strictly referred to the physical emergence of new political groups,
nowadays the tendency is to use the term to characterize very different processes
of transformation, not only in political terms but also when linked to the forms of
identity definition of a group through time. In separating the concept of ethnogenesis
from its strictly biological meaning (which it also had among Soviet anthropolo-
gists; Michael 1962), more recent studies have emphasized the capacities for ad-
aptation and creation shown by indigenous societies and have begun to consider
the possibility that new social configurations may have taken shape, not only as a
result of fission and fusion processes but also through the incorporation of foreign
elements and of consecutive modifications in the definition of the self (Hill 1996;
Schwartz and Salomon 2000).
On the other hand, it is now accepted that the processes of ethnogenesis cannot
be studied without taking into account the attendant phenomena of ethnification
and ethnocide (Sider 1994; Whitehead 1996). What this clearly implies is that it is
not possible to engage the topic of ethnic unites and identities without at the same
time taking into consideration the social and political contexts that may have par-
ticipated in their formation. The aforementioned considerations will be of crucial
importance in cases belonging to the Colonial period, as, for instance, in exploring
the processes of ethnogenesis-ethnification of the Mapuche or the Miskitu, which
cannot be understood without analyzing not only the mechanisms of Colonial power
but also the struggles among different imperial powers in their attempt to gain
control of the borderlands (Boccara 2002).
Interdigitation, multi-ethnicity, and diasporic social logic
In speaking about the stimulating theme of interdigitation, I will refer to the study
of interlocking identities undertaken by Jos Luis Martnez in his latest work on
the circum-punea area in the Southern Andes. One can say about the work of this
Chilean anthropologist that it follows in the wake of the studies realized by John
Murra, while at the same time it constitutes an attempt to problematize the rela-
tionship between ethnic identity, political units, and the question of control of re-
sources. In fact, even though Murra speaks in his classic and seminal study about
vertical control of a maximum of ecological zones (1975 [1972]), of the exist-
ence of vertical archipelagos, ethnic interlocking (1975 [1972]: 79), and multi-
ethnic oases (1975 [1972]: 73)thus making it possible to reflect on the non-
correspondence between ethnic groups and territories, or on the noncontiguousness
between community and territoryhe does not seem to account for the paths of
formation of such ethnic entities. Rather, he merely observed that these ethnic
groups diverge in their cultural equipment (1975 [1972]: 76), while he advo-
cates the idea of an ethnico-political nucleus (core area) upon which other settle-
G. Boccara 72
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ments are dependent. According to Martnez (2000), what he describes as inter-
mixed populations (poblaciones entremezcladas), or as a high degree of inter-
digitation, constitutes precisely one of the central traits in the model of human and
ecologico-productive complementarity prevalent in the circum-punea area. Thus,
breaking with the ideas present in previous models about autarchic sociopolitical
units, such as the Seoros, Martnez (2000) postulates the existence of a series of
intertwining cultural strategies that facilitated the formation of geo-ethnic spaces
where the determination of discreet political and ethnic units has no relevance.
24
The author notes that throughout the zone under scrutiny, one can find individuals
belonging to all sorts of groups (Lipes, Chicha, Atacama), sharing the spaces and
the use of local resources. In consequence, he proposes a model where ethnic iden-
tities, in addition to being defined within an interdigitated space, respond funda-
mentally to political, social, and economic determinations.
25
As can readily be
seen, this represents a considerably more complex proposition than the monoethnic
concept advocated by Service, according to which chiefdoms expand by accretion
of neighboring towns or groups whose culture and language are similar (1981
[1962]: 142).
26
As far as the existence of multi-ethnic networks and the dynamic construction
of identities are concerned, I refer the reader to the plentiful number of studies
dedicated to the South American lowlands.
27
I will call attention here to certain
fundamental analyses concerning the question of warfare as a predatory device
dedicated to the conceptualization and interiorization of the outside, and to their
impact on our ways of conceiving the socius, not as a sort of identitarian bubble
but as something that is constructed through its relationship with the exterior
(Viveiros de Castro 1993). These Amazonian works have put into question one of
the main pillars of our sociological tradition, namely, our concept of society as a
homogeneous whole defined on the basis of an imagined self-coincidence, as well
as our idea of culture as a sphere separated and opposed to nature.
28
Another ex-
ample of social and historical dynamics that cannot be explained by monotopic
approaches and evolutionist models is given by a recent collective volume on
Arawak-speaking peoples in which the contributors emphasize long-distance mi-
grations, interregional networks, supraregional macropolities, diasporic social logic,
and transethnic identities as central characteristics of these indigenous societies.
The editors of the volume insist in their introduction on the fact that the connect-
edness that existed among macroregions now severed by centuries of colonial de-
mographic and political history can be traced back to pre-Columbian time (Hill
and Santos-Granero 2002: 15). They also emphasize the openness and inclusivity
of Arawakan sociopolitical formations as well as the frequency and intensity of
multilingualism and cross-linguistic ties, rethinking the very notion of culture area
and language family.
Rethinking the Margins 73
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Beyond and behind resistance . . . More power: Mestizajes and
middle grounds
Finally, the two concepts to have emerged with the most vigor during the last
decade are mestizaje and middle grounds. The notion of middle grounds, coined
by Richard White (1991), insists on the facts of creation and communication of a
commonly shared culture between Indians and Europeans. It is a question of break-
ing with the traditional, and doubtlessly limiting, approach that conceives the terms
of the encounter as a simple clash between two monolithical blocks because, as we
know, the multiple interactions generated by that encounter led to the formation of
new spaces, new forms of communication, and new codes of behavior. The middle
ground, conceived as a space both real and symbolic, is the expression of the cre-
ation of these new worlds within the New Worldto use the phrase coined ten
years ago in an international encounter in Paris.
29
From this point of view, the
middle ground resembles, in its mechanisms and manifestations, that Mestizo Mind
studied by French historian Serge Gruzinski in his last book (2002),
30
insofar as it
allows us to rethink Colonial realities, not in terms of simple oppositions such as
resistance/acculturation or nativism/hispanization but, rather, on the basis of more
open notions such as mixture, metamorphosis, intermediation, and passages.
31
Through the appropriation of Foucaults and Bourdieus reflections concerning
the relations between power, society, and culture, and of recent critical revisions
concerning the links between domination and resistance (Abu-Lughod 1990; Ortner
1995; Scott 1985, 1990), and by re-placing history at the base of differences spon-
taneously treated as ancient or natural (Bourdieu 2000: 54), the numerous authors
who have worked, over the course of the decade, toward the development of a
meditation concerning the mechanisms of mestizaje have not produced simple
answers to the debates around questions of continuity and change, culture, and
identity. What they have proposed is that we abandon simple-minded oppositions
as tools in the task of rethinking sociohistorical processes, a task that should be
grounded, first, in an apparent paradoxnamely, that the continuity of things is to
be looked for in their transformations, because changes are, precisely, what can
shed light on permanenceand, second, in constant remembrance of the fact that
we have had to learn the nation and the state. The state is not society, wrote
Bakounine (1972: 319), and it is only after we have managed to de-state our
minds and to re-historicize our forms of classification and categories of under-
standing that we will be able to apprehend the Amerindian geopolitical spaces as
well as the Colonial frontier zones exactly as they are: as fluid, flexible, and change-
able products of a permanent political struggle, as an expression of a precarious
system of power relations that is constantly under construction by means of mul-
tiple negotiations, compromises, and mobilizations, sometimes revealing conceal-
ing behaviors.
In focusing on the mechanisms of mestizaje and on the construction of middle
grounds, these studies allow us to go beyond the plane of the univocal and of the
G. Boccara 74
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absolute character of concepts such as tradition, modernity, and resistance. Instead
of trying to determine the degrees of resistance presented by this or that subaltern
group, it is now a question of analyzing the relations between different protago-
nists as a function of the transformation of the forms of dependence and domina-
tion. The constitutive character of the relations between colonizers and the sub-
jects upon which the diverse mechanisms of social domination, economic exploi-
tation, and political subjection are, on principle, applied forces us toward reflec-
tion concerning the conditions of possibility of the production of difference. In the
same way, abandoning the old notion of a face-to-face between two radically dif-
ferent universes (colonizers and colonized, modernity and tradition), the studies
about middle grounds and mestizaje can help us to understand the shared means
and ways through which collective and individual social agents define their social
and cultural properties.
Instead of considering the so-called subaltern agents as an otherness outside the
institutions of state and capitalist domination, it would be more useful to consider
their participation in the struggles concerning the definition of new frameworks of
relationships. There is no absolute and ideal criterion for resistance, but rather the
opposite, a wide spectrum of relations of interdependence with respect to the domi-
nant institutions. So it is that occasionally, in a move that only superficially could
appear as contradictory, a group can achieve increased autonomy through forging
an alliance with a colonial power (as with the Mapuche in 18th-century southern
Chile). In other cases, it is location within interstitial and intermediary zones that
will allow a group to reproduce its specificity (e.g., the Jumanos in 17th-century
northern Mexico). In still other cases, it is through the adoption of the institutions
of domination and exploitation of the colonizing society that a group manages to
escape total assimilation (e.g., the Miskitu in 18th-century Nicaragua). Finally,
many institutions, technologies, and symbols can, as we know, be appropriated,
redefined, and subverted, creating what, in the eyes of the colonizers, could appear
as cultural monsters.
32
In conclusion, the perspective adopted by scholars concerned with issues of
mestizaje and middle grounds points toward the need for replacing the old, radical
contrast between European colonizer and Amerindian colonized subject with a
common-space model where a series of groups, identities, and knowledge slowly
become differentiated through time while maintaining, nevertheless, a constitu-
tive relation. It is due, in great part, to our forgetfulness concerning these
sociohistorical processes of differentiation and mutual construction of social agents,
cultural entities, and their attendant categories of knowledge that relations of domi-
nation, the exercise of symbolic violence, and naturalizing discourses concerning
inequality become perpetuated. It is due to this forgetfulness about the processes
regarding the production of difference that marginalized peoples can be treated as
archaic groups or that those that have been subjugated can be classified as back-
ward and lacking in agency. It is due to this ignorance that some social scientists
(modernizing or archaizing utopians) can still contrast modernity and tradition,
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westernization and nativism, acculturation and resistance, and use the term devel-
opment in the same way that the missionaries from the Colonial period used the
term civilization: as embodying the central value of our time (Ferguson 1990) or
as an operator of politics of representation and identity (Escobar 1995). Finally,
and by way of paying my respects to the late Pierre Bourdieu, I would like to say
that the everyday forms of scholarly work and resistance should consist in dis-
mantling the process responsible for the transformation of history into nature, and
of cultural arbitrariness into the natural (2001: 2).
Notes
Received 4 June 2002; accepted 9 October 2002.
This article was translated by Dina Rivera (Yale University). I owe a debt of gratitude to the people at
the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University: to its director James Scott, its coordinator Kay
Mansfield, and to my colleagues V. Dzingarai, M. Goldman, L. Oglesby, R. Schurman, S. Sihna, and
H. West. I would also like to thank for their reading and comments all of the people who attended the 5
April 2002 session of the Agrarian Studies Colloquium Series where a preliminary version of this
article was presented.
Address correspondence to Gillaume Boccara, CERMA, EHESS, 54 bd. Raspail, 75006, Paris, France.
E-mail: boccara@ehess.fr
1. Given the great semantic variation of the notion of frontier through time and space, I would say that
there is no absolute and ideal criterion to define it, even though we could agree with Stephen
Greenblatt when he writes: The marginal existence, the lives of those who are not us, marks their
distance from civility (1991: 66).
2. Sent to Lima in 1569, Acosta was elected provincial of the Jesuit in 1576. He founded various
colleges and traveled within the Peruvian Virreinato. Back to Spain in the late 16th century, he
occupied the position of rector of the College of Salamanca.
3. According to Sebastian de Covarrubiass Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Espaola (1611), behetra
refers to Middle Ages towns whose inhabitants used to elect their lords: Cuentan las cornicas que
como oviesse en Castilla la Vieja algunos pueblos que tenan costumbre de tiempo inmemorial
mudar a su voluntad los seores estables que quisiessen por cuya razn se dixeron behetras . . .
libertad de poder ellos nombrar [sus seores]. And further on: en la behetra como no tienen
cabea a quien respetar, todos hablan a bulto. Y por esso donde quiera que dan voces confusamente,
dezimos ser behetra. De hetria, que vale en lengua antigua castellana enredo, mezcla, confusin
. . . y de all se pudo dezir behetra, mezcla y confusin de gentes. Refer also to the definition of the
Diccionario de Autoridades (1726).
4. In this respect, my analysis differs from Fermn Del Pino-Dazs one, insofar as this Spanish histo-
rian praises Acostas great interest for cultural difference (1992: 318), forgetting to mention the
Jesuit contribution to the very production of sociocultural difference. Likewise, Del Pino-Daz
implicitly considers that the distinction made by Acosta between a natural history on the one
hand and a moral history on the other refers to preexisting and objective categories (316317),
whereas I consider them as cultural constructs.
5. Acostas De Procuranda was written in Latin. I am using here the 1984 translation published by the
CSIC (Spain).
6. Se apartan de la recta razn y de la practica habitual de los hombres.
7. Que tienen rgimen poltico estable de gobierno, leyes pblicas, ciudades fortificadas, magistrados,
comercio prspero y bien organizado, y, lo que ms importa, uso bien conocido de las letras.
Regarding the importance of literacy as an operator for sociocultural classification, refer to Mignolo
G. Boccara 76
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(1995, chap. 1).
8. Los reinos menores y principados que tienen caciques, no andan errantes como las fieras, tienen
juez y jefe designado y viven en ciudades.
9. Una clase muy extendida.
10. La heterogeneidad y multiplicidad de regmenes polticos de pueblos que viven sin un legtimo
prncipe que los rijaque es lo que los espaoles llaman behetras.
11. Los hombres salvajes, semejantes a bestias, que apenas tienen sentimientos humanos. Sin rey, sin
ley, sin pactos, sin magistrados ni rgimen de gobierno fijos, cambiando de domicilio de tiempo en
tiempo y an cuando lo tienen fijo, ms se parece a una cueva de fieras o establos de animales.
12. No solo no tienen reinos fundados sino que el que ms puede prevalece y manda.
13. As Rolena Adorno argues in her study on Guaman Poma, one should not consider the cronistas as
historians who lie but should rather ask what facts are presented and what are the assumptions
or conceptual matrix on which their exposition is based (2000: 15).
14. On this point, I inscribe my argument totally within the coordinates traced by C. Bernand and
S. Gruzinski in their archeology of religious sciences (1988). As they write, concerning the construc-
tion of the category of idolatry and the determination of the religious sphere: ces grilles
[interprtatives des colonisateurs] rduisent et emprisonnent si bien quelles aboutissent crer des
objets nouveaux: les idoltries mexicaine et pruvienne. . . . [Ces grilles] se sont installes et
enracines dans la pense occidentale dans une approche du rel qui sacharne discerner et
circonscrire ce quil est convenu dappeler le domaine du religieux (1988: 7).
15. During the Colonial period, a nation was defined as a politically and territorially organized unit
inhabited by natives (los naturales).
16. For an excellent critique of the weight of evolutionism in the study of sociohistorical processes and
cultural dynamics in the Pacific, see N. Thomas (1989).
17. According to Service: Chiefdoms are redistributional societies with a permanent central agency of
coordination (1962: 134). According to Carneiro, a chiefdom is an autonomous political unit
comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief
(1981: 45).
18. Resource concentration and environmental circumscription promote population pressure, from
which chiefdoms evolve from chieftaincy through warfare (Redmond 1998: 8). Carneiro writes:
The circumscription theory runs as follows. As population density increases, and arable land comes
into short supply, fighting over land ensues. Villages vanquished in war, having nowhere to flee,
are forced to remain in place and to be subjugated by the victors. Chiefdoms arose most readily in
environmentally circumscribed areas, such as islands and narrow valleys (1981: 64).
19. According to Fried: Rank exists when there are fewer positions of valued status than persons
capable of filling them. A rank society has means of limiting the access of its members to status
positions that they would otherwise hold on the basis of sex, age, or personal attributes (1967: 52).
20. Redmond writes: chieftaincy represents an emergent simultaneous hierarchy in which an achieved
leader exercises hierarchically differentiated decision-making functions, albeit on a temporary
basis (1998: 4). And further on: If it persists, the chieftaincy might well be poised for permanent
institutionalization as a hereditary chiefdom (1998: 6). Whitehead writes: Chieftaincy is under-
stood as being present in any supradomestic leadership: as such the range of this political phenom-
enon is wide indeed. . . . Chiefdom is then understood to be a special case of chieftaincy, one that is
coincident with other forms of leadership and control in the spheres of economy and ideology, such
as management of irrigation works, or the social relationship with the divine (1998a: 151).
21. One of the questions Fried asks at the very beginning of his book is: What was the nature of the
simplest society? (1967: 51).
22. Service writes: When chieftainship becomes a permanent office in the structure of society, social
inequality becomes characteristic of the society (1981 [1962]: 139).
23. See the part dedicated to La connaissance que les peuples du Nouveau Monde ont de Dieu, page
246.
24. Concerning this topic, see also the study by Susan Sleeper-Smith on the role of women in the fur
trade during the 18th century in the area of the Western Great Lakes (2000). This historian demon-
strates that in order to understand Colonial intercultural dynamics, the phenomena of godparenting
Rethinking the Margins 77
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and kin networks are much more relevant than those of ethnicity and fixed tribal affiliation.
25. In this respect, it should be noted that Enrique Mayers works on the household economies in the
Andes point in the same direction of a complexification of John Murras model. I refer here particu-
larly to the second chapter of Mayers latest book (2002), in which the author shows that verticality
did not necessarily mean self-sufficiency or absence of autonomous exchanges of goods (through
barter and trade) in pre-Columbian economies.
26. Chiefdoms tend to expand by accretion when their neighbors are similar in language and culture.
27. For a synthesis of recent works, see Carneiro Da Cunha (1992), as well as the recent special issue
of Ethnohistory (2000).
28. Viveiros de Castro (1996).
29. Gruzinski and Wachtel (1996).
30. Concerning this topic, see also the study by Rolena Adorno (1994) on the writings of the ladino
indians and the way in which the production of mestizo works, as well as new cultural forms based
on casting a projection over the Colonial past and concerns determined by the new social context.
This author insists on the mediating character of these cultural outsiders: they do not lend them-
selves to the simple or dichotomous characterizations of European versus Amerindian society and
culture and they reveal instead the richer, more ambiguous strategies that characterize the roles of
cultural mediation they inevitably played (1994: 383). She also wonders about the meaning and
implications of writing history from a culturally hybrid perspective (1994: 387).
31. With respect to the question of mestizaje, one should note the glimmerings of new research per-
spectives. While the French Africanist Jean-Loup Amselle no longer speaks about mestizaje or
originary syncretism (1998) but about branchements (2001), Gruzinski prefers now also to speak
about connections or connected histories (2001). Beyond the use of metaphors originating in the
field of cybernetics or computer sciences, I must say that such overcautiousness with respect to the
indiscriminate use of the concept of mestizaje (cautiousness concerning the use of a term that could
certainly trap us within a racialized conception of history and could also be used as a weapon
against the recognition of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas) strikes me as salu-
tary. The theoretical status of the concept of mestizaje should be discussed, as one should also
attempt to re-politicize the concrete facts of hybridization that constitute, above all, a political
phenomenon. In contradiction of the culturalist perspective, it is necessary to insist on the fact
that mestizaje refers to a crucial domain of struggle (Sider 1994: 20).
32. I am borrowing this formula from Christophe Giudicelli, whose PhD deals with the fundamentally
mestizo logic of the rebellion of the so-called Tepehuanes in northern Mexico at the beginning of
the 17th century (2000).
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