This article has as its objective to put forward some hypotheses about the dialectical relationships between two social processes. On the one hand, the nation-building process in Brazil and on the another hand the transformation of the South American indigenous social organizations. Our starting point is a specific ethnographic background, the Chaco/Pantanal (floodable swamps in central Brazil). We make a critique of some evolutionist and structuralist views on state building and indigenous peoples leadership, demonstrating how the segmentary organization and the reciprocity logic are interwoven into colonial social-historical dialectics.
Colonialism; Reciprocity; Segmentarity; Political processes
