Indigenous Struggle

The Challenge of Diversity: Indigenous Peoples and Reform of the State in Latin America (El reto de la diversidad: pueblos indígenas y reforma del estado en América Latina). Edited by Willem Assies, Gemma van der Haar and André Hoekema. Translated by Rob Aitken and Paul Kersey Johnson. (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Thela Thesis, 2000. Pp. 315. $30.00 paper).

From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in Latin America. By Alison Brysk. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. 370. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. By Marisol de la Cadena. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. 408. $22.95 paper.)

Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988. By Seth Garfield. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 316. $19.95 paper.)

Ethnopolitics in Ecuador: Indigenous Rights and the Strengthening of Democracy. By Melina Selverston-Scher. (Coral Gables, Fla.: North-South Center Press, 2001. Pp. 152. $17.95 paper, $35.00 cloth.)

Endangered Peoples of Latin America: Struggles to Survive and Thrive. Edited by Susan C. Stonich. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Pp. 232. $45.00 cloth.)

Organización y liderazgo Aymara, 1979-1996. By Esteban Ticona Alejo. (La Paz: Universidad de la Cordillera, AGRUCO, 2000. Pp. 213. n.p.)

Using a variety of disciplinary lenses, the books collected here explain how indigenous peoples in Latin America struggle toward a myriad of goals: for the survival of their historically rooted yet constantly changing cultures; for title to and control over traditionally held territories; for the right to define themselves individually and collectively in relation to other groups in society; for the right to control images and representations of "the Indian" that are offered by non-indigenous intellectuals, the state, or others; for access to economic resources to maintain their preferred modes of economic production and to improve what are often miserable and unhealthy living standards; for the right to participate in public decision-making as individual citizens and as collectively recognized "peoples" or "nations"; and for the right to be indigenous and a full and equal citizen of a Latin American nation at the same time. The books include accounts by participants in or supporters of indigenous struggles (Selverston, Ticona, authors in the Assies, et al. book such as Orellana and Yrigoyen), academics native to and intimately connected to the national context of the struggles they analyze (de la Cadena, most of the Assies, et al. authors), and "outsider" scholars who bring greater cultural and professional distance to their work (Assies, Brysk, Garfield, Hoekema, Stonich and most of her authors, and Van der Haar).

This collection exemplifies two trends representative of the recent wave of studies of indigenous struggle that began in the early 1990s. First, indigenous struggles in the 1980s became more overtly political as indigenous movements were able to gain national and even international political space. In response, as Les Field observed in a 1994 review essay for LARR, anthropologists had by the early 1990s become increasingly focused on indigenous resistance to the nation-state. Political resistance, in fact, had become "the primary characteristic of Indian ethnicity" (Field 1994, 239). "More and more, the arena of the nation-state and the relationship between indigenous peoples and nation-states is the central one of analytic as well as political activity" for social scientists (ibid., 248).

The increasingly political importance of indigenous social movements attracted the attention of political scientists. In the mid-late 1990s, political scientists studying Latin America—who mainly have ignored the topic of race or ethnicity—increasingly devoted attention to indigenous peoples as important political actors in their own right. They moved beyond the classist peasant studies of the 1960s-1980s to embrace more culturalist approaches that appreciate the ethnic and racial dimensions of indigenous political resistance. In addition, political scientists are studying indigenous political struggles as a means toward...