INTRODUCTION

Identity is one of anthropology’s oldest and favorite topics of inquiry. Interests have bounced between polemic ideas of primordial conditions, biology, descent, and natural communities to those of situation and contingency, alliance, and imagined communities. Identity in cultural anthropology is most commonly viewed as a sense of self or self-awareness - of personhood or subjectivity - that involves reflexive understandings of sameness and difference with “others” (Jenkins 1996). This paper discusses questions of identity and, particularly, historical and archaeological identities in Amazonia. It takes as its point of departure the idea that questions of identity, like those of equally popular agency or practice, are scalar. Further, in place of traditional views of cultural and ecological uniformity, recent research on all fronts, aided by the immense power of computers and remotely sensed imagery, suggests that variability and dynamic change are no less pronounced in Amazonia than any other equally proportioned place on earth (and see Chapters 11, 12, 20 and 50 in this volume).

Archaeologists also have grappled protractedly with questions of identity (see, e. g., Jones 1997), insofar as they attempt to reveal how groups of artifacts or other material things reflect the identities (ethnicity, gender, and role) of the people who made or interacted with them and how these identities were deployed in social interactions (by agents). Recently, archaeologists have turned to questions of the body and personhood as strategic loci of social agency in the archaeological record. They approach these questions quite differently than cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists who take the present as the point of departure. Archaeologists see the human body not only as a privileged site

Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell.

Springer, New York, 2008

Of cultural process, but instead as an inflection point between the microscopic worlds of specific events, individual cultural acts, and particulate phenomenon (bone chemistries, genetics, fish bones, stone chips, charcoal, and the like), with the mesoscopic world of gender, status and role, and household and community, which, in turn, articulate with macroscopic worlds of cultural identity within regional systems. While students of the present may concentrate on one or another level of analysis, for the archaeologist personhood must be understood from a multi-scalar and iterative perspective, linking local to regional and short-term to long-term, and boundaries change according to perspective.

Approaching Amazonian archaeological identities requires that we accept a certain collective identity that extends well beyond the individual person or community and also extends well beyond the present. It assumes that there is something fundamentally similar among groups living in this region, as opposed to the Andes or temperate Europe, and to sub-groupings (archaeological “phases,” “traditions,” “series,” “cultures,” and the like). But, what are these large-scale social identities? How do we relate them to actual human lives, sentiments, or feelings of selfness and otherness, and social interaction? How and why do they change?

In Amazonia, many of these questions of identity are premature, as the basic rudiments of space and time systematics are still being worked out, often for the first time, and, in fact, most of the area remains archaeological terra incognito. Nevertheless, strategic comparisons between archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic distributions reveal broad ethno-linguistic and smaller-scale socio-cultural groups (archaeological “cultures”). Importantly, archaeology and early ethnohistory are means to understand Amazonian identities over the long-term, which often reveal an historical distortion and systematic bias in views that fail to contextualize the societies present in the twentieth century within much longer histories.

Therefore, one of the first steps in reconstructing past identities is to deconstruct present ones, which means questioning certain basic assumptions. As Strathern (1999: 235) notes: “A society, like a culture, is [,] so to speak [,] already written and forever remaining to be so,” and interpretation is always done in “a world already occupied by ‘societies.’ ” The history of Amazonian identities has yet to be written. The societies written into or onto the Amazon are generally those from the twentieth century: small, autonomous, dispersed and having little impact on the environment. In cruder characterizations—for instance, those of many environmentalists—one almost gets the impression that native peoples are more like wildlife than civilization. They are not refugees from colonial and post-colonial expansions, but naturvolkern as Karl von den Steinen, Amazonia’s first anthropologist, called them. To avoid the “tyranny” of the ethnographic record, it must be recognized that much cultural variation and a staggering number of lives and whole cultural groups were lost in the centuries following 1492.

Regional specialists in long-term indigenous histories in Amazonia, which extend beyond one or two centuries, tend to agree that societies much larger, more productive (in absolute terms), and very different in certain respects than living Amazonian peoples characterize the past. One area in particular has yet to be problematized in regional ethnology: how do large, regional polities known to have existed in various parts of Amazonia differ or not from contemporary Amazonian peoples in terms of, for instance, social identities.

Here I depart somewhat from the “heartland” of identity studies (the individual person, their “selves” and “others”) and focus on group identity over the long-term—group habitus—and macroscopic ethno-linguistic groupings: big bodies and meta-persons. Identity can be broken down into two questions: 1) How are identities constructed (or “represented”)

By outsiders or, in other words, how have societies and cultures—the peoples of Amazonia—been written, and how has this changed through time? and 2) What are the identities themselves, and how have these changed? Although often treated as such within modernist anthropology, the two are obviously not autonomous, just as the two views of identity (as primordial condition and tradition or as situational response and agency) are as often as not referring not to a general force but a point of view or factor of historical resolution. Diverse elements of primordialism and contingency interact in sociohistorical trajectories. The problem of identity is multi-scalar and dynamic, and persons are both hybrids, with many identities, and “stand-up citizens”, at the same time.

What interests us here—the stepping-stones in this seeming morass of identity perspectives—are macro-identities: archaeological cultures and regional traditions. The first consideration is macro-historical identities (interregional or continental in scale and “agency” which correspond to large archaeological traditions—e. g., Amazonian Barran-coid, Amazonian Polychrome traditions), ethno-linguistic groupings (e. g., Arawak or Tupi-guarani families), culture areas, and regional or world-systems. Secondly, I look at the level of archaeological cultures, specifically those that correspond to two areas of complex societies in Amazonia (the circum-Caribbean and eastern Brazil are others, but not described here; see Chapters 13, 16, 17, 18 and 33 in this volume): the Amazon floodplains and the southern Amazonian uplands. Finally, I take the Upper Xingu as a specific case of fractal personhood and complex society.