Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil (review)

Sociologist Jonathan Warren has written an intriguing and frequently incisive book on the racial politics of Brazil's contemporary eastern Indians, but his analysis is weakened by a disregard for the historical experience of the diverse peoples he studies. Drawing on interviews conducted with 50 Indians and a slightly larger number of non-Indians, he sets out to explain the rapid increase in recent decades of Brazil's indigenous population. The quantitative evidence for this increase remains far from conclusive, and Warren recognizes that his own sample is too small to generalize his findings, particularly since all of his Indian respondents resided in just a few indigenous communities in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais. Nevertheless, he intends his research to be a first step toward understanding the broader phenomenon of Indian resurgence throughout Brazil's eastern Atlantic bulge. "Why has the centuries-long trend of de-Indianization," as Warren frames the issue, "been brought to a halt and even reversed in a region presumed free of Indians?" (p. 11).

Although the Brazilian government recognizes the majority of Warren's subjects as Indians, most non-indigenous Brazilians classify them as blacks, whites, mulattoes, and detribalized remnants—as almost anything, that is, other than "real" Indians. Warren calls them "posttraditional" Indians, the majority of whom have African as well as indigenous origins. Their personal and historical experience of colonialism and racial oppression has resulted in a "dramatic shattering of tradition" (p. 21). Descendants of the once numerous semi-nomadic tribes that inhabited Brazil's littoral and Atlantic forests, they have increasingly engaged in "an active attempt to rediscover, recuperate, and reinvigorate that which has been dismembered" (p. 21). Rather than a legacy of unbroken tradition and putative ethnic purity, the measure of their Indianness is their determination to reconstitute fractured cultures.

Coinciding with a transformation in racial aspirations, the demographic recovery of these posttraditional Indians can be traced, Warren argues, to a series of changes over recent decades, primarily political and ideological. A campaign for indigenous rights emerged with democratization beginning in the late 1970s, buttressed by activist elements within the Roman Catholic Church and by various non-governmental organizations. Organized at the local, national, and international levels, this struggle ameliorated the threat of removal and anti-Indian violence perpetrated by voracious landholders and a state bent on economic development at any cost. An often-successful fight to reclaim land in the form of constitutionally protected reserves encouraged many to assert their status as Indians. Simultaneously, as experts called upon to rule on policy controversies stemming from these changes, a new breed of anthropologists furthered the Indian cause by rejecting as outmoded the criterion of ethnic purity in assessing indigenous claims. Instead, the presence of cultural traces and self-ascribed indigenous identity took center stage, legitimating as Indians many who had once been considered mestizos or mulattos.

Warren skillfully debunks a widely endorsed myth he refers to as the "racial huckster thesis" (p. 55), which casts doubt on such legitimacy by emphasizing the social advantages, especially measured in land, accruing to those who "become" Indian. He elucidates the considerable disincentives associated with being nonwhite in contemporary Brazil. Most self-identifying Indians remain "all but excluded," he finds, "from both the public and private sectors of the economy" (p. 123).

Warren's subtle understanding of present-day racial dynamics is not, unfortunately, matched by his grasp of the history of Brazil's eastern Indians. Relying on disappointingly few and outdated secondary sources for his historical analysis, which fills his third chapter and punctuates the rest of the book, he reduces to what he calls "Indian exorcism" (p. 54) the complex 500-year history of relations between Indians and settlers, slaves, free persons of color, the church, and the state in this extensive region. He finds no differences worth exploring between conquered Indians forced to meld...