'Sempre Ajeitando' (Always adjusting): an Amazonian way of being in time¹

This article argues that the modernity of caboclo societies is characterised mainly by its constant renovation of the past in the present, a strategy that has given them great reproductive (social and biological) success and that was critical for their adaptation to unstable economic and political conditions and to a scenario of socio-cultural collapse. Resilience and flexibility are, for the author, the riverine populations’ main features. In the text, Harris dialogues with two previous forms of referring to the genesis of these populations: the “caboclization” process by Eugene Parker, elaborated in the mid-1980’s, and the mercantilist theory, formalised by Stephen Nugent in the beginning of the 1990s. For him, as one imposes abstract categories and concepts with the aim of building collective entities such as caboclo “culture” or “identity”, one misses out what is richest in the analysis object: the heterogeneity, the ambivalence, the ideology of “mixture” and the “opening” before the unknown, which emerges with the analysis of specific biographies in their respective socio-economic contexts.