The Catholic University of America Press
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Latin American Religions: Histories and Documents in Context. Edited by Anna L. Peterson and Manuel A. Vásquez. (New York: New York University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 324. $25.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-814-76732-0.)

This is one of those rare books that is at once accessible—as any introductory survey such as this one ought to be—and subtly sophisticated. An ideal teaching manual, it will dramatically sharpen students' analytical tools while leaving them blissfully unaware of how "good for them" this book really is.

The volume's introduction sets out key theoretical vectors in a refreshingly unencumbered style: popular versus official religions; orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and syncretism; domination, agency, and resistance; personal conversion versus social change; race, gender, and postcolonialism; and globalization and transnationalism, just to name a few. Once the terms of analysis are in place, the book moves on to description. The categories selected by the editors for the whirlwind tour are appropriately encompassing: Indigenous Religions, Colonial Encounters, Religions of the African Diaspora, Independence and Modernity, Protestantism in Latin America, Postconciliar Roman Catholicism, and Contemporary Religious Diversity and Change. Each section consists of two chapters: first, the editors' introduction to the key issues at stake and to selected sources in which those issues are especially visible, and then a chapter composed of original sources and representative secondary sources. This two-step format cues the reader as to the pertinent issues to come and the reasons they matter, before approaching original documents that vary widely in rhetorical style, perspective, epistemology, and standards of evidence. This approach works beautifully. It yields an unlikely harmony from what could have been a cacophony and makes the volume a genuine pleasure to read.

The original and representative primary- and secondary-source materials were artfully chosen. They include both much of what one might expect [End Page 183] from the Latin American canon—parts of the Popol Vuh; the preface from Bartolomé de las Casas's In Defense of the Indians; a discourse of the liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutiérrez. But they also include wonderful surprises—the diary of Gunnar Vingren, the Swedish emissary of Pentecostalism; a Mormon chronicle from Mexico; and reports on Muslims, Catho-Buddhists, and "new age" Santo Daime devotees in Brazil. Peterson and Vásquez have presented the widest possible range of Latin American religious practices and revealed the region as, on the one hand, a hothouse of hybrids and innovation, and on the other, a region of traditions' resilience. As to this latter, Catholicism is given the most space and is featured in multiple chapters—"Colonial Encounters" (chapter 3), "Independence and Modernity" (chapter 5), and "Postconciliar Roman Catholicism" (chapter 7). It provides the most continuous chronological thread with which the many other stories are interwoven. Yet even here, the editors show the enormous variety of Catholicisms: the cult of the saints of folk Catholicism; the mission Catholicism of different orders as they were variously inflected with indigenous practices they sought to transform; Catholic Action, CEBs, and the theology of liberation; Catholic Charismatic Renewal with its combination of Marian and spirit-foci ("virgophilic pneumocentrism," p. 242); and the various shades of syncretic Catholicism as it is combined with African and Asian beliefs and rituals.

In sum, this volume is faithful to the historical record even as it pushes the reader to expand preconceived ideas of the contents of "the record" and to reread even familiar documents with new eyes. Peterson and Vásquez are not just experts on Latin America but also masters of cutting-edge theoretical issues in the study of religion. Thus this book is not just an ideal introductory text; it offers welcome challenges even for experts.

Paul Christopher Johnson
University of Michigan

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