Equal parts history and anthropology, Slavery and Utopia provides a close reading of the dynamic networks of indigenous resistance in Peru's central Amazon during the early twentieth century. Overcoming archival silences at every turn, the author shows us that what seemed to be isolated episodes of violence were instead part of a sophisticated indigenous cultural and political revival aimed at ridding the region of mestizo settlers. And at the centre of it all was a ‘dissenting world transformer’ named José Carlos Amaringo Chico, or simply ‘Tasorentsi’.
Amaringo Chico (circa 1875–1958) was an Ashaninka chief who led a multi-ethnic rebellion against the landowners of the central Amazon. As a young man, he earned his reputation and wealth by raiding neighbouring villages to capture slaves for the rubber plantations. But when the regional rubber economy collapsed around 1910, Amazonian peoples grew bolder in their resistance to the slavery and debt peonage of the settlers. It was in this moment, we learn, that Amaringo Chico began to use the cultural capital he had gained as an Indian slaver to garner support for an anti-settler insurgency. Even after the Peruvian state brutally repressed the rebellion, Amaringo Chico's influence only grew. Over the next decade, he would come to be known throughout the region as ‘Tasorentsi’, an Ashaninka word that denotes a direct connection to the gods. This holy reputation made him a successful ‘people gatherer’ after he adopted Seventh-Day Adventism in the 1920s.
Slavery and Utopia revives a historical moment that left scant documentary traces. Fernando Santos-Granero first encountered Tasorentsi through an unlikely set of reports left by a Polish military officer who had travelled through the central Amazon in the late 1920s. From there, an exhaustive search provided only a small set of sources for the author to work with. Santos-Granero addresses these archival silences by inviting readers to think alongside his deductive reasoning. Chapter 4, for example, includes a translation of a Franciscan missionary's account of his interaction with an unnamed Ashaninka trader. The author leads readers through the step-by-step deductions used to conclude that this indigenous trader was indeed Tasorentsi. While in this instance the author is quite convincing, the educated guesswork can at times feel overstated. Such is the case with the author's decision to mark 1875 as Tasorentsi's birth year based on a series of oral accounts about the Ashaninka chief's cousin. This approximated date later becomes the foundation for estimating the dates of a variety of events. In the end, without this key information the book's intimate portrait of indigenous lives in this time and place would not be possible.
Visual and oral sources illuminate parts of the narrative that escaped the written record. Indeed, as the author admits, ‘the text would not be half as interesting were it not for the oral information [provided by Ashaninka elders]’ (p. xv). Over 40 images serve as a visual index of important actors and locations, conveniently ordered and located in the front matter for easy reference. Bringing these images to publication required its own in-depth research and technical processing. Even after careful professional enhancement, facial recognition software was unable to confirm the identity of the man Santos-Granero believes to be Tasorentsi in the photograph on the book's cover.
Slavery and Utopia serves as a shining example of the benefits of collaboration, as the author draws on the expertise of a vast network of scholars in a variety of fields. For example, Santos-Granero worked with a team of linguists to provide the first English translation of a ritual song that played a central role in the unfolding of the 1914 rebellion. The author then circulated the transcription to indigenous musicians in the central Amazon, who concluded that the song was made up of linguistic features from Ashaninka, Yine and Shipibo-Conibo words, but did not fully pertain to any of these languages. This, we learn, was part of Tasorentsi's plan to unite the members of these three estranged ethnic groups in a messianic movement to combat oppressive labour coercion from white and mestizo landowners.
Given the wide breadth of Santos-Granero's contributions, the few instances where he does not engage with important parallel literatures stand out. This is the case with the work of the late Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo, whose theorisation of Andean millennialism could have bolstered the author's evaluation of Amazonian peoples’ ‘search for the Inka gods’ (p. xiii). Another example is the author's reliance on a single concept from cognitive psychology, called ‘conceptual integration’, to describe a phenomenon of cultural mixing that in anthropology and religious studies has engendered deep literatures on hybridity, syncretism and bricolage (pp. 135–42).
Santos-Granero's collaborative triangulation of the scant evidence resuscitates stories that were silenced and co-opted by colonisers and their allies even as they occurred. These initial misrememberings, coupled with the historian's dogged fetishisation of documentary sources, have created a situation in which ‘the wars and dreams of an Amazonian world transformer’ could be forgotten. And so the book's greatest contribution is perhaps its most subtle one: the centring of the stories of indigenous actors in their struggles against colonisation within a historiographical tradition that was built to forget them.
