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Book Review
| Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forest of Amazonia from Colony to Republic. By Cynthia Radding. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. xx + 431. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $24.95.
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| This book is a brilliantly conceived, exhaustively researched, and skillfully crafted comparative study of cultural landscapes in Sonora, Mexico, and Chiquitos, Bolivia, two frontier regions in Spain's American empire. Drawing on multi-archival research, ethnography, artifacts, and published accounts of travelers and missionaries, Cynthia Radding integrates broad historical frameworks and ethnography in a study that spans both the colonial and post-colonial eras. The book is organized chronologically and thematically, with separate chapters devoted to comparative analyses of ecological and cultural frontiers; colonial political economies; community and territorial claims; ethnic and gender identity formation; political power, governance, and contestation; and spiritual landscapes and rituals. The final two chapters examine changes and continuities during the tumultuous period of independence and early nation-state formation. |
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At first glance, the arid deserts and mountains of Sonora appear to have little in common with the humid lowland forests and savannas of subtropical Chiquitos. However, Radding argues that both regions were pre-Columbian frontiers: Sonora represented the northwestern edge of Mesoamerican culture based on maize-squash-bean agroecologies; Chiquitos lay at the crossroads of Andean empires and Amazonian/Río de la Plata riverine cultures. Indigenous livelihoods in both regions combined agriculture with foraging, fishing, and hunting. Both areas came under the influence of Spanish crown institutions and missionary societies in a process that was far more protracted and tentative than in Mesoamerica and highland Peru in part because Sonora and Chiquitos lay on the peripheries of major silver mining centers. Missionaries and encomenderos (Spaniards holding Crown grants to the labor tribute of Indians) played important roles in changing both the spiritual and physical landscapes of the region, introducing cultigens, architectures, technologies, symbols, and rituals that would be selectively incorporated by indigenous people. Radding concludes that warfare (including violent disputes among indigenous groups) and political negotiations were more important than diseases in accounting for the formation of colonial institutions. |
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Landscapes of Identity and Power also identifies several important differences in the two region's historical trajectories. For example, land concentration and the formation of smallholders took place in parts of Sonora in the eighteenth century; in Chiquitos, corporate structures governed resource use until the 1850s when a fledgling national government targeted both church and indigenous resources (including land and cattle) for privatization. Significantly, Radding argues that similar colonial institutions gave rise to distinct ethnic identities: in Sonora a process of mestizaje ("hybridization") took place while in Chiquitos ethnic identities remained fragmented, a difference that Radding attributes in part to the practice of swidden agriculture widely practiced in Chiquitos. Divergent patterns of resource control and identity formation contributed to the emergence of distinct sites of political contestation. |
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The insights offered by Radding's comparative perspective cannot be done justice in this brief review. Some Environmental History readers will share my desire to know more about the causes, outcomes, and meanings of ecological changes to which the author frequently alludes (see pp. 88, 100, 181, 194, 207, and 302) but does not analyze in depth; others may struggle to stay oriented in two regions filled with unfamiliar people, places, and concepts. However, the author's refusal to reduce the complexity of cultural encounters to familiar tropes of domination and resistance, her subtle yet critical challenges to Carl Sauer and Alfred Crosby's sweeping interpretations of the conquest period, and her attempts to get at indigenous ideas about the non-human world, make this a work that deserves a wide readership. |
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John Soluri is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, and the author of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Texas, 2005). |
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