A01=Shawn Michael Austin
Asuncion
Author_Shawn Michael Austin
Category=JBSL11
Category=NHK
encomienda
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnohistory
Franciscan Reducciones
Indigenous peoples
mestizos
Paraguay
South America
Product details
- ISBN 9780826361967
- Weight: 675g
- Dimensions: 151 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Dec 2020
- Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In Colonial Kinship, historian Shawn Michael Austin traces the history of conquest and colonization in Paraguay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasizing the social and cultural agency of Guaraní - the indigenous people of Paraguay - not only in Jesuit missions but also in colonial settlements and Indian pueblos scattered in and around the Spanish city of Asuncion, Austin argues that interethnic relations and cultural change in Paraguay can only be properly understood through the Guaraní logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to marry into Guaraní families in order to acquire indigenous tributaries, thereby becoming "brothers-in-law" (tovají) to Guaraní chieftains. This pattern of interethnic exchange infused colonial relations and institutions with Guaraní social meanings and expectations of reciprocity that forever changed Spaniards, African slaves, and their descendants. Austin demonstrates that Guaraní of diverse social and political positions actively shaped colonial society along indigenous lines.
Shawn Michael Austin is an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas.
