The Forbidden Lands. Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 (review)

Reviewed by: The Forbidden Lands. Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 Neil L. Whitehead The Forbidden Lands. Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830. By Hal Langfur (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) This volume is a superb example of historical research informed by anthropological categories. As such it is ‘ethnohistory’ at its very best, clearly demonstrating the necessity of a proper cultural and social understanding of non-western societies for an adequate account of colonial processes. Hal Langfur’s history of the ‘forbidden lands’ of the Eastern Sertão (Minas Gerais) in Brazil is therefore of critical importance for historians and anthropologists, as well as scholars of Brazil and the ‘frontier’ in colonial systems more generally. Moreover, as Langfur himself notes (page 3) “my emphasis on independent Indians sets this work apart from a historiography which is routinely dismissive of their enduring significance.” Although earlier historical writing has certainly acknowledged the ferocity of conquest and the dire demographic impacts of disease and slavery on native populations this has often led to a simple erasure, as historical agents, of the ‘vanished’ Indians. However, as Indian societies themselves have become more politically and culturally assertive and as their demographic situation has shown signs of stabilization and recovery, anthropologists no less than historians have been forced to recognize their persistence in the current moment and their persistent presence in the past. Langfur’s history of the eastward expansion of the mot populous captaincy towards (not away from) the Atlantic coast nicely upends a whole series of unexamined assumptions about Brazilian history and the enduring role that native peoples, as well as free and enslaved blacks, have played in that story. Moreover, Langfur also recasts the historical importance of the interior over the coastal regions. Initial occupation via the Atlantic coast obviously influenced later perception of the emergence of the Brazilian nation as being dependent on events there, whereas Langfur shows that key economic and political processes, in the context of violent engagements with human and ecological frontiers, were also occurring in the hinterland. In turn such violent engagements have had a fundamental impact on Brazilian self-imagining, in a similar way to how the ‘wild west’ continues to haunt the self imagination of North Americans. One component to that self-imagination that also recurs in the historical episode Langfur examines is ‘cannibalism’, depicted in the cover illustration to this volume. The cannibal sign is an enduring trope of the historiography of Brazil and for the colonists of Minas Gerais, no less than the native peoples such as the Botocudo, anxieties as to the possibility of bodily incorporation became enmeshed in the politics and practice of conquest. As with the original cannibals of Columbus – the Caribs – legal provisions, moral justifications and, no doubt some of the violent excesses of cruelty, all reflected the cultural process through which enemies and allies, native and colonials, the savage and civilized were partly constructed by the violence they practiced, as well as those practices they declined. Nor is this the only innovative aspect to Langfur’s radical historiography since he also offers one of the few discussions of the nature of the Brazilian frontier in this region, or any other part of Brazil. As has been the case in recasting the historiography of frontiers in other parts of colonial America, this study reveals a far more indeterminate, uncertain and plural set of relationships amongst colonists, free blacks, slaves and Indians than has been pictured in earlier histories. Nonetheless, Langfur rightly emphasizes that this plurality should not be taken to indicate an absence of conflict and violence or the inevitable emergence of a ‘middle ground’ of ethnic melding and political collaboration. Indeed, perhaps the most important feature of this work is the insight that extreme violence was itself a form of symbolic communication and material exchange that was key to the way in which ethno-political groupings defined themselves and their relationships with others. In many orthodox historical and anthropological accounts violence is pictured as the absence of order, a breakdown in social and cultural functioning. This is a great mistake. Langfur copiously demonstrates...