The Chaco Mission Frontier is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of anthropologically informed, documented histories of missions in the Americas. James Saeger’s expertise focuses on the interior lowlands of South America, in particular, the riverine and plains environment of the Chaco, lying in the modern nations of Paraguay, Argentina, and a small portion of southeastern Bolivia. The Guaycurúan ethnic bands who people Saeger’s story, unlike their better-known Guaraní cousins, were principally hunter-gatherers who managed and derived their subsistence from the semiarid environment of the Chaco. Throughout the detailed, descriptive chapters that focus both thematically and chronologically on economy, society, politics, and religion, Saeger reveals his thorough knowledge of the region, its geography, and its archives. This book is an attempt to evaluate the mission as an institution as much as it is an ethnohistory of the Guaycurúan peoples and cultures that provide the substance of Saeger’s study.
The...
