Musical Chairs? Native Absenteeism in the Colonial Amazon

This paper analyzes what appears, at first glance, to be a long-distance game of “musical chairs”:  the movements of native Amazonians who left their assigned colonial villages and relocated to different ones, sometimes repeatedly.  Portuguese administrators categorized these migrants as “absentees” and kept extensive lists of their names and known locations, and I have collected many such lists for several dozen colonial settlements, spanning a forty-year period (1760-1800).  Using GIS mapping techniques as well as qualitative methods, I attempt to trace these relocations over space and time and to challenge the standard interpretation that absentee movements were arbitrary, aimless, or spurred only by external pressures.  Instead, they were multiply determined by such factors as family and ethnic connections, length of settlement in a particular place, labor obligations and preferences, political/ethnic alliances and rivalries, and the geographical situation of both sending and receiving villages.  The story is also complicated by the fact that the absentees’ relocations to other colonial villages were often sponsored or condoned by local officials, which makes it difficult to analyze them alongside other fugitive movements (i.e., those of slaves).