The making of regional systems : the Tapajós/Madeira and Trombetas/Nhamundá regions in the lower Brazilian Amazon, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The author is grateful to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support.Building on Neil Whitehead’s work in northern South America, this article considers the formations of two different deep-forest regional networks. Though these Amerindian spaces have origins in the precolonial past, this article analyses their shaping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period when they were invaded by colonial agents. There were other regional systems along the course of the Amazon and its many tributaries that were a part of a similar historical process of refounding identities and claims on land and people involving challenges to leadership and political organization. Following Hal Langfur, we can term this general making of spaces a re-territorialization. Critical social relations include those between Amerindian ethnic entities and their leaders, soldiers, and missionaries. This article focuses on a key spatial relation between Amerindian settlements and the mission, or partially colonized village, which had an indirect or direct contact with each other.PostprintPeer reviewe