Colonial Kinship

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