Shawn Michael Austin’s important new study of Guaraní ethnic communities in Río de la Plata situates Native kinship at the heart of Spanish colonial governance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Paraguay. The book’s examination of cuñadasgo, a Guaraní model of kinship based on brother-in-law networks established by chieftains, reveals how outsiders to Guaraní lineage groups were brought into familial relations through concubinage and marriage, with the expectation that it established a political alliance between kin. This fundamental means of establishing ethnic political bonds between Guaraní lineage groups was extended to the Spanish upon their arrival in the sixteenth century. While coercion and brutality were central to colonial concubinage, encomienda (forced-labor system), marriage, and other institutions shared by Spaniards and Guaraní, Austin argues that cuñadasgo also made it possible for Native men and women to negotiate power with their new European kin.

During the early years of colonization in Río de...

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