This book—like other recent work by Jorge Augusto Gamboa Mendoza, Juan Cobo, and Joanne Rappaport—makes an effort to connect often-isolated research on the colonial New Kingdom of Granada to debates emerging from other regions of Latin America. By looking at indigenous leaders as they engaged with the Spanish legal system, Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez contributes to ongoing conversations that involve such scholars as Brian Owensby, Jovita Baber, Karen Graubart, Alcira Dueñas, Yanna Yannakakis, Gabriela Ramos, and John Charles.At its heart, this monograph is a study of two systems for organizing human labor and production—one exemplified by a Spanish economic institution and the other by an indigenous ceremony—and their role in rationalizing the “transcultural” intergrowth of the economies of the early Spanish colony and the surrounding native communities from which it extracted wealth. The first of these is the Spanish encomienda. Muñoz explains that rather than focusing on how Spaniards integrated indigenous communities into the burgeoning world economic system (as others have done), he seeks to understand how encomiendas integrated the patterns of native economies. According to him, the encomienda economic system reproduced native systems of redistribution—by, for instance, collecting mantas (blankets) taken in tribute and reselling them in the colony's mines or drafting labor from indios de servicio—in a “transcultural formation” (p. 136). Such indigenous patterns, he argues, were visible in the pre-Hispanic Muisca biohote—a ceremonial event that Spanish sources insisted on referring to as a borrachera—which managed the redistribution of community resources within indigenous religious, economic, social, and aesthetic “dynamics of power” (p. 140). Muñoz develops our understanding of indigenous social patterns by drawing upon both a 1563 trial, in which the cacique of Ubaque was prosecuted for the crime of idolatry after having convened the greatest biohote in living memory, and decades of assiduous work done by anthropologists. He uses this evidence to contrast the indigenous “moral economy” against an Atlantic-oriented production model championed by Spanish bureaucrats, administrators, and clerics, who regarded their success as dependent on the reproduction of Spanish “policía” (Spanish language, religion, customs, and residence patterns) among the native community (p. 20).The author's choice to confine his analysis to one valley of the Colombian highlands is methodologically interesting. His justification derives from his source base of trial documents, in which indigenous litigants always restricted their claims—whether facing off against other indigenous parties or against encomenderos—to the geographical constraints of the valley within which they resided. By staying true to indigenous units of geopolitical analysis, he is also able to follow evolutions in indigenous authority in almost microhistorical detail. Muñoz is thus able to show how changing political climates affected the way that successive caciques of Ubaque, one of the preeminent centers of native power at the time of Spanish invasion, interacted with Spanish authorities. In the 1560s, encomenderos and caciques had felt comfortable negotiating cultural truces that fell afoul of the crown's official line on Christian orthodoxy. Muñoz claims, however, that crown bureaucrats' clampdown on “idolatry” in 1563 was part of a strategy to provide a rationale for intervention so as to ultimately limit encomenderos' authority (p. 154). This strategy's success became evident in the 1580s, when subsequent caciques intentionally fashioned themselves as good Christian subjects when they petitioned Spanish legal authorities. Muñoz explains their appropriation of Castilian values as part of a reorientation toward Spanish commercial networks outside the encomienda and their abandonment of traditional indigenous patterns of legitimization. In this environment, he contends, in both indigenous and Spanish eyes, custom became “a battlefield . . . [and] the use of words, dress, and objects became a profoundly political act” (p. 177).Historians such as Steve Stern long ago identified a shift in the working of Andean indigenous authority before and after the 1570s, but the fine-grained analysis here gives us a better sense of the dynamics of that change within one particular political context. The close reading of a series of legal trials involving successive caciques of Ubaque and their family members is especially productive for the nuance and human texture that it provides. The only lingering question is how representative the Ubaque example might be. Muñoz analyzes a later visita of indigenous territory in 1687, which suggests that traditional patterns reinforcing indigenous authority largely endured, as did Spanish complaints about the slow progress of Christianization, a century afterward. It would be intriguing to see further study into other cacicazgos.In the end, this monograph is a joy to read. Though largely intended for specialists in the New Kingdom of Granada, it is both well written and clear in its arguments. Because of this, it may very well prove useful to graduate students in other fields of colonial history who are seeking to understand the mechanics of Spanish-indigenous relations in the sixteenth century.