Erynn Masi de Casanova, Dust and Dignity: Domestic Employment in Contemporary Ecuador (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. xi + 174, £20.99 pb.

Abstract

and festive component, whose main function was to reassert egalitarian relations between the two nations (p. 93). During the 1840s, prompted by aspirations of capital expansion and racist civilising discourses against Indigenous savagery, Chilean authorities transformed parlamentos, from diplomatic instances to meetings with compliant Mapuche leaders where treaties with conditions set by Chilean governments were signed. As Herr convincingly argues, the new treaties justified the military invasion of Wallmapu not as a war of conquest that would require peace agreements and future reparations, but as the appeasement of borderlands ideally followed by concessions to Indigenous people under the terms and conditions set by the state, such as the limited recognition of land ownership rights within the small space of reservations (reducciones). Rolf Foerster’s ¿Pactos de sumisión o actos de rebelión? (Pehuén, 2018) and Fernando Pairican’s Toqui: Guerra y tradición en el siglo XIX (Pehuén, 2020)−monographs on Indigenous-state relations not available at the time of writing of Contested Nation− focus on how Mapuche customary diplomacy was deployed in response to the increasingly aggressive and authoritarian stance of Chilean governments. These works open the possibility that, while the signing of treaties entailed an overall Mapuche submission to the Chilean state, negotiations with future conquerors provided the means through which the Mapuche population ensured its cultural survival, threatened by the prospect of extermination and animated claims of autonomy and self-governance that would later in the twentieth century inspire the consolidation of a large and diverse Mapuche social movement. Beyond the success of Chilean violent colonisation, can Mapuche diplomatic engagement with the Chilean state also reveal a possible failure of the nineteenth-century Chilean elite’s project of complete assimilation and eradication of Mapuche anticolonial aspiration? (See Pairican, Toqui (2020), p. 281.) Herr’s book points to the possibility of a new way of thinking about diplomacy and colonial violence in the nineteenth century that will continue to catch the attention of historians of state formation in Latin America.