The book builds on Rivière’s kaleidoscope metaphor to deconstruct the ambiguities of the Amazon as a cultural category created by the colonial encounter. The collected essays explore the multiplicity of indigenous responses to colonial and modernizing forces, while keeping a sharp focus on the variety of ways everyday life is structured and patterned. The book pioneers new ways of writing history and comparing cultures by exploring aesthetics, material forms, and ecological realities through their multi-stranded dynamics. Each of the thirteen authors delves into the specificities of native Amazonian societies, showing how consanguinity, affinity, ritual action, and the dissolution and recreation of boundaries are organized in each. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s GUT chapter offers a renewed understanding of affinity and its role in Amazonian sociality.