This book is a long-overdue ethnohistory of Tupi peoples of the sixteenth-century Brazilian coast, and the inland peoples — known generically as the Tapuia — of the seventeenth-century Brazilian interior (sertão). Rejecting the approach often used by anthropologists and historians to characterize the history of contact, conquest, and colonization as a stark opposition between “Indians” who wanted to preserve their culture and “Europeans” who wanted to demonize, assimilate, dominate, or exterminate them, Pompa seeks to recreate the complexity of the relationships, and in particular the roles of indigenous groups in shaping these explosive encounters. Using the language of religion as her focus, Pompa argues that religion served as the means through which each culture translated and understood the other.
The first part of the book focuses on the encounters between coastal Tupi and Guarani-speaking peoples and Europeans. Pompa emphasizes that a careful rereading of the well-known texts written...
