Neil Whitehead believes Amazonian history remains “an eternal present of ‘first contacts’ and ‘marvelous discover[ies]’” (p. vii). Western scholars have preferred to accept, as history, the discursive inventions of European chroniclers whose reports are several removes from their sources. What has been regarded as Amazonian history, then, is more correctly part of an Iberian travelogue tradition, in which the narrator, estranged from his surroundings, is his own subject of contemplation—and his imagination his primary source. Histories and Historicities uses the Amazon case to explore “a new scholarship on history and historicity.” In it, nine anthropologists from Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States rely on oral histories and symbolic narratives of indigenous spokespersons, rather than written archival documents. Together, these contributions well illustrate that history is local, shaped by the specificities and interests of its narrators. The choice of the plural “histories” in the title, rather than the conventional “history,” makes...
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