Between the Leader of Virtù and the Good Savage

Abstract

In between borders in an area with the greatest biodiversity in the world, it can be said that Indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin are still in a process of colonial encounter and under constant identity recreation. Regarded as “human resources,” in the sense that they are the best interpreters of the sociopolitical space that is the Amazon, Indigenous peoples are the path to the Eldorado in the region. Even though this sounds cliché, there is some truth to this story in the deep Amazon rain forest. Upon closer study of the region, however, it is immediately clear that its people are much more than mere human resources or instruments, as most mainstream discourse has framed them. Much to the contrary, Indigenous peoples are fundamental agents in shaping the political aspects of this region, which each day is turned more and more into a zone of multiscale relationships involving the global, the international, and the local. In other words, it is an area of postcolonial diplomacies (Beier 2005a).