The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

This chapter explores two different systems of research oversight in recent Brazilian history: the bureaucracies of the twentieth and twenty-first-century Brazilian state, and approaches developed by A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeias over the same period in Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Focusing primarily on genetics-based research, Dent develops the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability. She argues that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. The protectionist state regulation contrasts with relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Specifically, A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers through the careful modulation of researchers’ affective experience of fieldwork, working to create enduring relationships and mutual obligation.

In this conclusion, Stephen T. Casper reviews themes and findings from the entirety of the collection. He situates the book as a whole as a provocation to reconsider the traditional historiographic approach in the history of the human sciences.