Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Claudio Saunt, University of Georgia

In Captives and Cousins, James F. Brooks paints a rich and detailed portrait of the "intercultural exchange network" (p. 363) that characterized the American Southwest in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The network tied together Navajos, Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, Utes, Pueblos, and New Mexico colonists in a regional economy based on trade, theft, kinship, and slavery. The economy resists simple description and defies familiar categories of analysis, yet Brooks skillfully elucidates its complexities to recover the history of this enormous region of early America.	1
Brooks traces the origins of this social network system to Iberian and Native American traditions of violence, exchange, honor, and shame. In several fundamental ways, he suggests, Iberian and Southwestern societies echoed each other: the reputations of both Spanish and native men rested on their ability to protect and control their families, and success depended on social interactions with other groups; conventions of honor and shame in both Spain and the Southwest dictated the tenor of relations between groups; and social interactions with outsiders created interdependency and produced unresolved tensions in the maintenance of stable cultural identities. The cross-cultural resonance described by Brooks, however, is tenuous; it is difficult to speculate about the existence in the precontact Southwest of culturally constructed categories such as honor and shame, let alone to determine if they functioned in the same way as they did in early modern Spain. Nevertheless, Brooks asserts that the parallels between indigenous and Iberian traditions meant that men from both sides of the Atlantic "negotiated interdependency and maintained honor by acknowledging the exchangeability of their women and children" (p. 40).	2
Even if Brooks does not sufficiently substantiate that honor and shame shaped the actions of Spanish and native men in the colonial Southwest, it is clear that the political economy he describes drew on both Iberian and indigenous traditions of kinship slavery. Brooks's description of this borderlands economy is nuanced and sophisticated. It begins with an important insight: although anthropologists have long believed that war and gift exchange are opposite and mutually exclusive actions, slave-raiding and trade were both part of a larger system of exchange relations in the Southwest. "The capture of 'enemy' women and children," he writes, was "one extreme expression along a continuum of exchange" (p. 17).	3
Slavery and slave-raiding were central to the political economy of the borderlands. Slaves contributed not solely the surplus labor needed to tend livestock, but also reproductive labor, a scarce resource in many small native and New Mexican settlements. Proscriptions against endogamy forced men to look beyond their communities, leading to "mutualistic or competitive patriarchal exchanges of women" (p. 365). When men married their female slaves, the line between slavery and kinship, captives and cousins, dissolved. Brooks recognizes that kinship slavery involved its own form of exploitation and coercion. Nevertheless, even if they were still in subordinate positions, when slaves became kin, they contributed to the growth of families and communities.	. . .