"Suzanne Oakdale has produced a book that is a delight to read and also instructive on many levels, thanks in part to her fluid construction of cosmopolitanism."—John McDowell, Journal of Folklore Research Reviews
“Oakdale weaves a magnificent ethnographic-historical tapestry, blending Kawaiwete elders’ life histories with archivally sourced non-Indigenous accounts and national narratives to illuminate Native influence on and understandings of dramatic events in Brazil’s twentieth-century heartland. Amazonian Cosmopolitans brilliantly links Native peoples and the Amazon to larger global historical processes.”—Laura R. Graham, professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa and president-elect of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
“The guiding concepts of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘cosmopolitans’ (in their various guises) work very well in redefining the whole perspective on how to understand the lives of Amazonian Indigenous persons during the twentieth century. This is a rare achievement in anthropology as a whole and a highly important contribution to Amazonian studies.”—Carlos Fausto, author of Art Effects: Image, Agency, and Ritual in Amazonia
“The subject is very important because it concerns the survival and adaptation decisions and practices of two Amazonian Indians who became related to the Villas-Bôas brothers and the Xingu Indigenous Park and with frontier businessmen and settlers. They make alliances through the sharing of food, the sharing of work, and the appeal to and intervention of non-human actors accessible through shamanic practices. . . . The wider picture reveals the official, changing policies of the Brazilian government over the last century aimed at incorporating the Indians to Brazilian society and to its distinct myths of origin.”—Edgardo C. Krebs, research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
