Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988 (review)

Celestino Tsererob'o, chief of a Xavante village in central Brazil during the final decade of military rule that ended in 1985, appears on the cover of Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil, shirtless, armed with a club, and painted for war. Framed not by the tropical savanna of his native environment in the state of Mato Grosso but by high-rise office buildings and urban traffic, he also dons sneakers, gym shorts, and an executive's briefcase, as he prepares to do battle in the distant capital of Brasília. His adversaries, bureaucrats of the military government, had been charged with resolving the nation's "Indian problem," which hampered the rapid expansion of corporate cattle ranching and the implementation of other developmental schemes aimed at commodifying the land and resources of Brazil's immense interior. It is a fitting image for a book that documents the Xavante's complex and contradictory relationship with the nation-state during the period stretching from the nationalist, centralizing Estado Novo dictatorship of President Getúlio Vargas to re- democratization and the indigenous legislative achievements enshrined in the constitution of 1988. This monograph stands as a major contribution to the ongoing effort by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to explore the impressive adaptability and capacity for ethnic resurgence of indigenous societies once thought to be irredeemably wedded to tradition and thus doomed to final destruction by capitalist integration and modernity.

Without minimizing the devastating effects of violent land conflicts, disease, forced migration, ecological spoliation, and cultural repression, Garfield documents the multiform ways in which the Xavante, considered until the 1940s to be Brazil's most hostile Indians, engaged the state to gain important material concessions and legislative protections. "The Xavante were subordinated to state power but failed to metamorphose into the generic citizens, merry farmers, and disciplined laborers that government planners heralded," argues Garfield. "They became a politically mobilized ethnic group among Brazil's sprawling underclass, well informed of their rights, entitlements, and cultural symbolism" (216). They did so by competing successfully for limited state resources, by persuading and threatening state planners and local elites, by turning national and international press coverage to their advantage, and by alternately rejecting, adapting to, and reworking the hegemonic projects of an emerging national society. In the process, an aboriginal culture rooted in the Gê language and a political economy based on kin-ordered hunting and gathering were transformed. But the Xavante appropriated, manipulated, and remade notions of "Indianness" imposed on them by Westerners to ensure their ethnic survival and, eventually, their demographic recovery. Notably, in 1979, after great struggle, they secured almost ten times the land initially reserved for them by the military government.

Garfield examines with empirical subtlety and theoretical sophistication how Xavante leaders negotiated the pitfalls and opposing interests of an array of factions bent on controlling the incorporation of indigenous peoples into national society. A procession of presidents, Indian- affairs administrators, local officials, missionaries, ranchers, anthro-pologists, and human-rights activists combined intimidation, patronage, and protectionist discourse to secure often-incompatible objectives. Garfield might have examined the squatters, peasants, and smallholders more thoroughly in their quotidian interactions with the Xavante; arguably, they were as marginalized in the historiography as the Indians themselves. Garfield's primary interest lies in the "interplay between state policy and indigenous political culture" (2). But no complete understanding of that dynamic is possible without probing the way subsistence farmers—pressed, often intentionally, into conflict with Indians by large landowners and opportunistic officials—influenced the outcome of frontier power relations. To the extent that Garfield's book helps to set the agenda for this area and other important areas of future research, he has succeeded admirably in advancing scholarly debates concerning Brazilian state formation, internal territorial...