1 Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction Editors: Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews Cambridge University Press, 2018 Afro-indigenous interactions, relations, and comparisons Peter Wade, University of Manchester FINAL DRAFT, January 2017 Introduction In history and anthropology, there has traditionally been a strong tendency to deal with Latin American indigenous and Afro-descendant people as separate categories. The separation has been structured by conceptual distinctions between rural and urban, ethnicity and race, anthropology and sociology, and more and less “other”. This academic tendency has deep roots in colonial and postcolonial governance practices, which treated native Americans and Africans as very distinct – in terms of their places in the legal system and in the political- economic divisions of labor, and in terms of their moral-physical constitution – and posited a basic antagonism between them. The practice of colonial authorities tended to assume the separation of the two categories, and this was reproduced in the historical archive, fragmenting and masking evidence of exchanges and interactions. The same separation continued in different ways in regimes of governance after independence and into the present day. This divergence influenced the shape of anthropology in Latin America, when, during the twentieth century, it was institutionalized as a discipline that focused almost entirely on indigenous peoples, often seen as under threat from whites and mestizos, but also blacks. The