Scholars have increasingly become aware that slavery cannot be studied as an isolated phenomenon, detached from its broader social and political context (Villasante-de Beauvais 2000; Klein 1998). They insist on the need to situate slavery and other forms of servitude within the framework provided by internal forms of social stratification. Above all, they recognize the importance of placing these institutions within the regional power systems that allow them to be reproduced. Ignoring the larger context would run the risk of transforming native forms of slavery into epiphenomena—curious and exotic customs without any grounding on the configurations of power and...

In native tropical America, as elsewhere,warfare or piracy was the matrix of slavery and other forms of servitude (Levy-Bruhl 1931: 6). It’s true that war was not the only way to obtain slaves. They could also be acquired through trade and as tribute. Nevertheless, slaves thus acquired were always linked to an original act of violence, whether it was the abduction of individuals or the subjugation of local groups by raiding and warfare. Slavery through purchase and tribute were only derivative forms. More importantly,native slavery here always assumed the form of exoservitude—that is, the enslavement of people belonging to...

The appropriation of enemy land was not usually the main objective of Amerindian warfare in postcontact times (Evans 1971: 1416). There is evidence, nonetheless, that in precontact times this was an important cause for large-scale wars of conquest and defense (Roosevelt 1993: 260). The fragmentation and broad dispersal of indigenous groups belonging to the same language families throughout tropical America suggest that in pre-Columbian times there was some sort of competition for land—possibly for the most fertile and productive lands—that gave rise to out-and-out wars of expansion. In such a historical scenario, migrating peoples were either collectivities waging...

Seasonal raiding and wars of expansion seem to have been the main forms of indigenous warfare in the American tropics. Each of these forms of warfare gave rise to a very different mode of servitude: in one, war captives were used as domestics and drudges; in the other, subject populations were employed as servants for the collective benefit of the dominant society. Persons subjected through these two forms of warfare could not have been in more different situations. Whereas war captives underwent processes of homeland alienation, depersonalization, and social death, subordinate populations were able to maintain their lands, family ties,...

That most Amerindian raiding was aimed at taking women as wives, and that other captives—mostly children—were promptly integrated into their captors’ societies, is a widespread but misleading notion based mostly on twentieth-century ethnographic information. Many tropical forest societies during contact times did not incorporate war captives into their households as concubines or adopted children. On the contrary, captors marked captives as being alien, inferior, and subordinate, and hence not eligible for full membership in their society. In this chapter, I examine the many ways in which war captives were marked as servitors through what Patterson (1982: 52) has...

It has been argued that native tropical American war captives cannot be defined as slaves because they were not central to the productive system of their masters’ societies. Some contend that no Amerindian society had developed an economy sophisticated enough to depend on the labor force of a slave class (Langebaek 1992: 145; Clastres 1998b: 70). Others assert that captive slaves had importance (Goldman 1963: 106) or did not provide a significant volume of surplus labor (Steward and Faron 1959: 188). Most authors, however agree on the important point that the existence of captives did not liberate their masters from...

For native tropical American societies, the slave condition was not so much a contrast between freedom and lack of freedom as one between humanness and nonhumanness, or between sociality and nonsociality. As Kopytoff and Miers (1977: 17) have argued in relation to African societies, “the antithesis of ‘slavery’ is not ‘freedom’ qua autonomy but rather ‘belonging.’” Slaves in kin-based societies are foreigners, ‘others’ who do not belong because they are considered to be less than human, and thus are believed to lack the arts of civility and social life (Lévy–Brhul 1931: 14). People “like us” cannot be enslaved. They...

Rather than being a fixed status, captive slavery in native tropical America was a process—a process in which slaves shifted from a marginal condition as recent war prisoners to their integration as subordinates and, eventually, to their (or their descendants’) assimilation into their masters’ kinship networks. Cut off from their kin, alienated from their territories and collectivities, war prisoners occupied a liminal position similar to that of initiates in rites of passage (Kopytoff and Miers 1977: 15). Captives who were destined to be traded immediately remained in this liminal condition. The few who were chosen to be adopted or...

In native tropical America, the institution of slavery originated largely from warfare. More specifically, it originated from exowarfare—that is, waging war against peoples with differeent languages and cultural practices. And yet the enslavement of enemy Others figures only marginally in the literature discussing the causes of warfare in native America, a rich and extensive literature that goes far back in time. Authors have tended to explain Amerindian warfare as originating from a combination of social and psychological features. Murphy (1957), for instance, argues that Mundurueú warfare is the result of the repressed hostility between kin and affines that often...