indigenism: ethnic politics in brazilby alcida rita ramos
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Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil by Alcida Rita RamosReview by: Kenneth MaxwellForeign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 3 (May - Jun., 1999), p. 144Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20049321 .
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Recent Books
University of Oklahoma Press, 1998,
544 pp. $47-95 The Columbus quincentennial in 1992 unleashed an outpouring of revisionist
texts that quickly turned the former hero
into a "great Satan"?the European who
began the process of violent dispossession and destruction of the indigenous
populations. Cook represents the recent
corrective to this trend, arguing that the
disaster was not a deliberate plot of the
Spanish but a deadly result of Old World bacteria infecting new, vulnerable popula tions. For the first time ever, indigenous
Americans suffered deadly Eurasian
sicknesses in wave after wave of small
pox, measles, typhus, plague, influenza,
malaria, and yellow fever. Pandemics
ultimately wiped out entire peoples, while
those who survived were too weak to resist
European domination. Cook concludes
that disease, not war, was primarily re
sponsible for the rapid expansion of the
Spanish empire. Although he is coy when it comes to numbers, he has produced a
notable and well-written counterargument to some of the virulently anti-Spanish texts of the early 1990s.
Henige tackles a related topic: how
scholars have constructed estimates of
the pre-Columbian populations of the
western hemisphere. His book will not
be popular among his colleagues; Henige takes no prisoners in his powerful decon
struction of many cherished fables. The
famous "Berkeley School" of demography, which claimed that the population of American Indians was 20 times greater
than previous estimates, is one of his most
notable targets. Henige argues that such
high estimates are based on meager and
often unfounded data. His marvelous
demonstration of the use and abuse of
data in history shows how subjective the
extrapolation of numbers can be, however
sophisticated the arithmetic.
Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil, by
alcida rita ramos. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998,
368 pp. $21.95 (paper). Although indigenous peoples compose
less than one percent of Brazil s population,
they occupy a prominent role in its national
consciousness. This notable book by a
Brazilian anthropologist, based on 30 years of fieldwork among the Yanomami Indians, takes a multifaceted look at how Brazilians
see their remaining Indian peoples?and how the Indians portray themselves while
defending their ethnic rights against the
Brazilian state. At the core of the complex
relationship between indigenous and
European Brazilians is an ambivalence
that reflects both Brazils pride in ethnic
pluralism and its simultaneous desire for
cultural homogeneity. This is a country, Ramos writes, that continues to "nourish
its unresolved love-hate relationship with
its minorities, its ambivalence towards
the Indian as a necessary evil, a convenient
bone stuck in its throat, a perfect ideolog ical alibi that goes on justifying its choking in a stifling inferiority complex." A major contribution to the ongoing debate over
the fate of Americas indigenous peoples.
Blessed Anast?cia: Women, Race, and
Christianity in Brazil, by john burdick. New York: Routledge, 1998,
246 pp. $21.99 (paper). A persuasive thesis from a passionate
scholar-activist. Following his remarkable
book on religion in Brazil, Burdick breaks new
ground again with an account of
how women's experience with race in
[144] FOREIGN AFFAIRS - Volume78No.j
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