Native Enclaves in the Upper Amazon: A Case of Regional Non-Integration
Author(s)
Stocks, Anthony
Abstract
The ethnohistory of the Cocamilla Indians of Eastern Peru is examined in order to explain why they, as an ethnic group, have survived the holocaust of contact, missionization, and peonage over the past 400 years. Explanation is sought at various levels of analysis in: (1) the Cocamilla subsistence economy which remained significant to the Spanish after contact, (2) the social institution of the closed corporate community, and continuity in age/sex role relations, and (3) the non-integration of regional society based on an extractive economy characterized by disjunct sectors of production, a disjunction that has allowed the incorporation of the native enclave into the regional class structure.
