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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