The Journey to Freedom: Maroon Forebears in Southern Venezuela

Abstract. Many of the black slaves brought to the Americas by European colo-nizers developed strategies of resistance and survival in reaction to colonial slavery. Grand marronnage—or the permanent flight of black slaves from their European oppressors—is one of these strategies used by Aripaeño forebears. This essay ex-amines their journey to freedom, which involved historical processes of ethnogene-sis within a diverse and complex ecological and cultural scenario presented by the Guianas during the eighteenth century. The growing rapprochement between anthropology and history has con-tributed to overriding the scholarly treatment of non-Western peoples as ahistorical, passive recipients of Western hegemony.1 This new approach toward a critical and historical contextualization of oral-based cultures has permitted anthropologists to present anthropological human subjects as active social actors in the interpretation, construction, reproduction, and transformation of their experiences with Western society; and to provide cultural interpretations of historical periods and processes. The emphasis in this essay is on those historical and active dimensions of non-Western peoples in their colonial encounter, presented through a critical and histori-cal interpretation of the grand marronnage carried out by Aripaeño fore-bears in the Guianas around the mid-eighteenth century.2 Grand marronnage was a strategy of cultural resistance and survival developed by many enslaved Africans and Creoles in the Americas as a re-sponse to the colonial system of slavery. Defined as the permanent flight of a group of black slaves from their European oppressors (Bilby ; Mos-coso ; Price ; Thornton ), grand marronnage involved run-Ethnohistory :– (summer–fall ) Copyright © by the American Society for Ethnohistory