Introduction

Summary

Indigenous management of otherness and ‘alterity’ has increasingly become a central theme for anthropologists working in Amazonia and broader lowland South America. Much of the literature concerning this theme has focused on relations between specific Indigenous groups and otherly beings (whether human or non-human) in the present. These contemporary contexts of relations with otherness enable new readings and interpretations of comparable historically documented engagements, such as in contexts of missionisation, and clearer understandings of ongoing ethnographic interactions in the region. Relations between Indigenous people, outsiders, and non-human beings reveal conceptual differences and provide new interpretive means for understanding both continuities and discontinuities in historical and contemporary encounters across broader lowland South America.