The Conclusion considers the implications of the revisionist framework that seeks to hold the histories of Eastern Amazon together, even if there is much tension and conflict between its constituent parts. Specifically, the study forces a reconsideration of three aspects: the making of Indigenous territories in the sertão; how the concept of the sertão can be reworked in Brazilian historiography; and a reconsideration of the ways in which historical periods are conventionally broken up. Regardless of the changing meanings and varying human interactions with the Amazon environment, the enduring character that shapes human societies and the spaces they inhabit lies in its flowing waters. Understanding the Amazon through the aforementioned spatial history involves seeing it as a geographical place shaped by the interactions between the peoples who have lived there. To understand the Amazon today, these histories must be woven together, as the region was shaped by conflict and dispossession – legacies that persist to this day.

The lack of uniformity sets up Chapter 5, which focuses on the places that were developing along the main course of the Amazon and the lower parts of its tributaries. Most of these settlements were missions, and by the early eighteenth century they had taken on board a dual identity of being connected to the hinterland and to the colonial centre of Belém. This chapter seeks to show the riverine areas were not emptied, as many scholars have wrongly assumed. A more nuanced historical understanding of the ethnic profiles between missions and the hinterlands is revealed, where the core elements of each place include ethnic composition, its location (chosen or imposed), economic contribution to the colonial economy, military and missionary presence, and relationship to hinterland. We thus have the three spaces emerging by the mid eighteenth century – the Amerindian complexes in the hinterland, the colonial sphere centred on Belém, and the riverine settlements which formed their own assemblies.

The final chapter examines how a new kind of shamanism developed in the riverbank settlements and attracted peoples across the colonial and Indigenous spaces. Although shamanism was a feature of Amerindian societies, the Portuguese also had a tradition of healing and folk curing. Riverine shamans from Indigenous communities were highly active in the eighteenth century, and modified Indigenous practices and Catholic symbols to meet the needs of their clients from all backgrounds seeking their ‘merciful’ work. Shamanic curing and healing connected the three spaces as shamans moved between each one and provided clients with relief from their suffering.

Chapter 3 examines the reorganization of Indigenous regional networks in the areas near to Belém in the Lower Amazon. To avoid enslavement by the Portuguese, some Indigenous communities moved away from the easy-to-access riverbanks. Other Indigenous people successfully engaged with the Crown on their own terms, which allowed them a measure of autonomy to build communities, use their skills for their own benefit, and meet the demands of settlers. These changes and movements led to the development of what the Portuguese called the sertão, a place where people and forest and river products could be retrieved. From an Indigenous perspective, a regrouping occurred as people fled slavery upriver and moved to the riverbank to access colonial goods, such as metal tools.

Chapter 5 focuses on the state system of food provision, which continues to supply Cuban families with essential food and other household goods in heavily subsidised prices. State goods operate as concretions of the revolution’s moral project, embodying its frugal ethos metonymically, and taking it deep into people’s homes and ultimately, through ingestion, their bodies. Here too, however, the duplex personhood elaborated earlier comes into play, this time due to the fact that people gain access to these goods only by virtue of their bureaucratic designation as ‘citizens’ of the revolution. While this appears to be a version of the role/person model developed in Chapter 3, it also turns the model on its head since here the role of citizen is associated with what is deemed as the deepest level of people’s existence, namely their ‘basic needs’ as biological organisms. This puts a paradox into the heart of the state rationing system, which can be parsed out morphologically as the constitutive mismatch between a state system that purports to cater to people as whole, flesh-and-blood people, but only actually meets a small part of the needs they feel they have. The chapter builds a model of this part/whole paradox with reference to the ethnography of the system’s operation at neighbourhood level.

Chapter 4 looks at the strengthening of Indigenous networks in the sertão in the Lower Amazon, especially around the Tapajós and Trombetas rivers. Here missions acted as gateways to the deep multi-ethnic forest networks in Amerindian territories where more slaves and converts could be found, and where people were recruited to work on canoes to collect cacao and the drugs of the hinterlands. In these regions, long standing networks between Indigenous societies had alternated between alliance and peace and war and enslavement. Colonial agents were added as new players in the complex set of relations that linked Belém and the sertão. Sometimes the shift of relations led to the strengthening of Amerindian networks, such as in the south bank areas. The reconfiguring of networks led to the reconstitution of the riverbanks and the creation of the hinterland; each region was different according to local dynamics that spawned singular cultural and social situations.

This chapter substantiates ethnographically the claim that the Cuban revolution has a cosmogonic character. With reference to revolutionary discourse, and not least the pronouncements of protagonists such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the chapter’s purpose is to get the conceptual measure of the idea that the revolution’s raison d’etre was to mark a break with the past in order to build a new and better world for Cuba and its people. This includes detailing the manners in which the revolutionary project was pursued in an array of areas, from the role of self-sacrificial violence and the hyperactivity of legal reform in the first years of the revolution, to the sweeping scope of land-reform and the hubristic attempt, in the end of the 1960s, literally to transform nature into culture by rendering the whole of the Cuban rural territory arable. Importantly, each of these historiographic discussions is oriented with reference to the analytical coordinates established by the problem of cosmogony. The upshot is an explicitly morphological conceptualization of the revolutionary project organized around the twin shapes of totality and containment , as well as the caterpillar-like shape of its forward-moving thrusts, configured as an interplay between potential change (meta-change) and its ever-partial realizations. Operating together, these three formal elements (totality, containment and motion) mark out the coordinates for what I call the ‘transcendental’ character of the revolution’s project – its concerted effort to become not just a feature of people’s lives, but their underlying condition of possibility.

Chapter 2 examines a period when various European traders attempted to settle in the Amazon by forming local alliances with Indigenous peoples. Although the numbers of these non-Iberian Europeans were tiny, the impact of their partnerships, and the resulting effort by the Portuguese and their allies to eliminate their presence, caused immeasurable damage to native societies in the estuarine areas. By 1640, the Portuguese had expelled the other European interlopers and exacted revenge on the Indigenous allies of their enemies, and started to establish riverbank settlements and plantations. In turn, this led the Portuguese to require labour to service this colonial economy and support their territorial ambitions. They pushed up the Amazon as far as the Tapajós and Madeira rivers to obtain their slaves from the riverbank polities, which gave rise to Belém as the focal point of the Eastern Amazon and marked the beginnings of the formation of a colonial sphere.

Prefaced by an extended ethnographic account of Fidel Castro’s charisma as it emerged in the days of national mourning that followed his death in 2016, Chapter 9 concludes the book’s morphological argument by drawing out its implications for two forms of comparison that contribute to its development. The first concerns the analogies and contrasts between political and religious concepts and practices, which feature throughout the development of the book’s morphological analysis and are viewed here in relation to the broader discussion about ‘political theology’. The second returns to the comparative anthropological framework with which the book begins, namely the varied ways in which the distinction between nature and culture can be made, locating revolutions in this comparative frame.

This chapter furthers the book’s morphological analysis of the revolution’s relationship to people by examining it as a relationship of care. The ethnographic context here is housing, focusing on the way in which the revolutionary state’s all-embracing involvement in the infrastructure of people’s lives acts as another prime avatar of its moral concretion. The chapter recounts the story of Clarita, for whom her state-built house embodies her own sense of being a revolutionary, though, as she says, ‘in her own way’. Getting an analytical handle on Clarita’s sense of commitment to the revolution involves showing the ways in which the state’s transcendental project of care is supplemented by relationships that are intimate and personal. This happens through the myriad ways in which personal relationships – with family, neighbours and workmates – are enlisted in order to bring to fruition the state-sponsored scheme that provided her with the means to build a new house. The revolutionary state is credited with providing houses as habitable wholes, and in this way is able to incorporate under its aegis of care the myriad ways in which nonstate resources and relationships are necessary in order for this to happen. Crucially, this centripetal dynamic renders the intimate ambit of personalized sociality a constitutive (albeit unacknowledged) feature of the revolutionary state’s project of care, traversing the distance that separates its institutional structures and procedures from the day-to-day sociality of people’s lives.

Chapter 6 analyses how kinship is both a relationship over time creating the next generation, and one that is spatially promiscuous, adapting the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The riverbank villages had become strengthened by their hinterland networks but also by their own internal connections by the mid eighteenth century. The reforms of the Portuguese Crown in the 1750s supported this process with greater resources, control, and scrutiny. Each community, or village, continued to hold its own ethnic profile through the endurance of viable kin units and marriages within and across ethnic identities.