The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. vol. 3: South America, pt. 1

Let me begin by congratulating the editors for this impressive volume, which, published almost 50 years after the Handbook of South American Indians, compensates for the lack of a serious scholarly synthesis of the history and ethnology of indigenous societies of South America. However, I wish to emphasize that the editors of this volume do not pretend to offer a substitute for Julian Steward’s edited works (1940s); it is equally important to point out that this Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of South America is located in a radically different intellectual and sociopolitical context than the one that informed the publication of the Handbook. Indeed, new worlds separate these two collections devoted to the peoples and histories of the New World: (1) Editors Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz do not claim to provide an exhaustive account, stating from the very beginning their willingness to construct an “idea-oriented...