Colonial Kinship: Guarani, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay

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 Guarani - 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 Guarani logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to marry into Guarani families in order to acquire indigenous tributaries, thereby becoming brothers-in-law (tovaji) to Guarani chieftains. This pattern of interethnic exchange infused colonial relations and institutions with Guarani social meanings and expectations of reciprocity that forever changed Spaniards, African slaves, and their descendants. Austin demonstrates that Guarani of diverse social and political positions actively shaped colonial society along indigenous lines.