This book is an ethnography of the native people of the Bajo Urubamba river in Peruvian Amazonia. Gow attempts to account for the fact that the people of this region appear to be very acculturated when compared to better-known indigenous Amazonian peoples. He argues that when native people's claims are viewed from the perspective of their own values, and in the context of their creation of life through the productive transformation of the forest and the commodity economy, they can be seen to form a coherent part of kinship. Historical change is thus revealed as interior to the ongoing creation of kinship for native people, rather than alien to it.