Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia

Abstract

Of Mixed Blood is an ethnography of the native people of the Bajo Urubamba river in Peruvian Amazonia. The people of this region appear very acculturated when compared to better-known indigenous Amazonian peoples. Peter Gow's analysis focuses on features of social organization which would seem to demonstrate this most clearly: the role of schools and recent land reform laws in the definition of the community, and native people's claim to be ‘of mixed blood’. By stressing that these claims are made by native people themselves, he challenges the dominant vision of them as passive victims of history. Dr Gow argues that when native people's claims are viewed from the perspective of their own values, and in the context of their creation of life through the productive transformation of the forest and the commodity economy, they can be seen to form a coherent part of kinship. Historical change is thus revealed as interior to the ongoing creation of kinship for native people, rather than alien to it. This study offers a new approach to the issue of historical and ethnographic analysis of Amazonian cultures.