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Ethnohistory 50.4 (2003) 772-776



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Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil. By Jonathan W. Warren. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. xx + 363 pp., illustrations, abbreviations, introduction, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $21.95 paper.)
Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988. By Seth Garfield. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. xii + 316 pp., maps, tables, illustrations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper.)

Racial Revolutions is the breathless title of Jonathan Warren's breathless new study. The Indian population, against all past predictions, is increasing in Brazil. Furthermore, he argues that the growing number of newly self-identified Indians is a major reason for this population increase. His book explains why this is occurring and points to this trend as the key to the construction of an antiracist future in Brazil.

Using various neologisms to reinforce the novelty of his study, Warren looks at "posttraditional" Indians, who may know only a few words of an indigenous language, only a few religious traditions, and maybe some ceremonial dances or maybe not. They embrace these cultural fragments and work to construct a fuller indigenous identity. Warren absolutely rejects a materialist explanation for this increase in population, saying that there are precious few material rewards for self-identifying as an Indian in Brazil [End Page 772] (indeed, there are mostly costs as Indians suffer discrimination and outright attacks from others). Instead, support from the progressive wing of the Catholic Church, and from nongovernmental organizations, has encouraged "posttraditional" Indians to assert their identity. Also, an improved FUNAI (Brazil's version of the Bureau of Indian Affairs) is more supportive of Indians. Finally, Brazilian anthropologists, who play a powerful role in government bureaucracies, have become allies of those seeking to assert their "Indianness."

The title of the final chapter of the book, "Contesting White Supremacy," presents what Warren sees as his most important finding: that Indians contest white supremacy in Brazil, while people of African descent largely do not. The people he studied, he argues, "were bringing into being alternative symbolic arenas in which whiteness was not hypervalued as good, the beautiful, the desired, or the deserving" (278). "Posttraditional" Indians thus hold the key "to dismantling one of Europe's most crucial contributions to the region: white supremacy" (282).

It is hard not to admire Warren's dedication to his topic, and he certainly conveys his belief in the vital importance of his work. Indeed, the reader feels his excitement as he presents his antiracism argument. And yet, a number of weaknesses, one of which Warren himself acknowledges, limit the book's impact.

This entire study is based on interviews with fifty Indians and seventy-two non-Indians. Warren admits that there is no way to tell if his sample is at all representative of other Indians. Furthermore, large segments of several chapters are based on two or three secondary sources, and the book as a whole relies mostly on ten or so secondary sources. In this sense Racial Revolutions seems hurried, as if the author desperately wanted to make his case as soon as possible.

A far bigger problem is Warren's assertion that he is the first to identify this topic and its complexities. In fact, a book published in the 1980s, but not cited by Warren, presages much of what appears here. In The Indians and Brazil [Os Ìndios e o Brasil], Mércio P. Gomes notes that his book "seeks to fulfill the task of reinterpreting the relations between the Indians and the Brazilian nation in light of the most important historical data of recent years—the Indian demographic turnaround." 2 To be sure, Gomes focuses more on "traditional" Indians, but he does discuss renewed assertions of Indian identity by those who had not identified themselves as such in the past. And like Warren, Gomes points to the Catholic Church, nongovernmental agencies, and Brazilian anthropologists as sources of this new identity...

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