In this most interesting and useful compilation of capsule biographies, Frances Karttunen examines members of indigenous societies who functioned as culture brokers with European countries, colonies, or envoys. Her examples run from the sixteenth century to the present day. Six of the individuals studied are from Latin America, five from the United States (including a woman who emigrated from the Portuguese Azores), two from Australia (in a single episode), and one each from Europe (a Finn in Russia), Africa, and Asia. The Latin Americans are Doña Marina, Caspar Antonio Chi (a sixteenth-century Maya translator), Guaman Poma de Ayala, Doña Luz Jiménez (a frequent subject of twentieth-century Mexican painters who also dictated an autobiography), María Sabina (famous for interpreting hallucinogenic-mushroom visions), and Dayuma (an Ecuadorean Indian woman who served as an interpreter for missionaries).
While the cases are clustered in three categories—guides, civil servants, and informants—the classification is of limited utility, because many of these people played several roles in their lifetimes. Ten of the sixteen subjects are women. Karttunen states that initially she intended to write only about women who played these roles, but later decided that while gender certainly shaped these people’s experiences, it did not in itself determine their function as go-betweens.
Karttunen organizes her chapters, which generally run from 20 to 30 pages, in similar fashion. She places each individual in the context of his or her era and circumstances, including the particular conditions in which the native peoples operated and the goals they were seeking to achieve. Karttunen is very good at appreciating the dynamics of any situation, remaining sensitive to divisions within the indigenous cultures themselves and to the actual options they had at the time. She then ponders the attributes of the persons or their positions that might explain why they functioned as they did. Karttunen inserts an analytical overview at the end of each of the three major sections and an interesting epilogue that considers the lives of her subjects’ children.
As only makes sense, the treatment of each of these individuals is tempered greatly by the character and quality of the documentation available. Some of these culture brokers wrote a good deal about themselves, and hence Karttunen can probe their consciousness and reasoning in some depth. In other cases, she must depend heavily on what others wrote about the subjects and the roles they played.
Readers will benefit from consideration of any one of these case studies and certainly from a systematic reading of the larger work. Karttunen has composed a work of utility that is accessible at different levels—both to serious scholars and to students interested in people who have represented their cultures to outsiders.
