Strange Enemies: Indigenous
Agency and Scenes of Encounters
in Amazonia
Aparecida Vilaça
2010, Duke University Press
370 pages
THE AUTHOR of this pioneering work has done something remarkable, documenting from the inside the encounter between indigenous people and the agents of what we call modernity in the form of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service, and the subsequent development of the complex relationship between them. Vilaça examines how the warlike Wari in the state of Rondônia came into contact with whites in the late 1950s and efforts to “pacify” them following a period of hostilities provoked by the violence of rubber tappers in their territory. The author documents and explores, beginning with the Wari’s perspective, the cross-cultural encounters in this remarkable exchange. In so doing, she has written an important examination of how otherness is both an essential trait of humanity, but also a condition of the cultural order of both parties that can offer a conceptual tool of empowerment. – GJ
