Jonathan W. Warren, Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. 368 pp. $74.95 cloth; 22.95 paper

Extract

Racial Revolutions comes at a crucial time for indigenist policy in Brazil. Newly elected president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva takes over with several orders for the permanent protection of Indian reserves on his desk, completed but left unsigned by outgoing president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Lula's party, the Workers Party, has a strongly progressive social platform on issues of racial discrimination but no track record or firm positions on Indian issues. Fundamental changes in Brazilian Indian law have been proposed and may come before Congress early this year. Three fatal attacks on Indians occurred in January 2003, the first month of Lula's presidency. One of these cases, the murder by youths of a seventy-seven year-old Indian man in Porto Alegre, recalls the fatal 1997 immolation of a visiting Pataxó leader while sleeping at a bus stop in Brasília, a well-publicized case with which Jonathan Warren opens his book. Finally, anthropologists who work with Indians in Brazil are still dealing with the repercussions of serious ethical charges involving research among the Yanomami Indians raised against senior Amazonianists by journalist Patrick Tierney in his book Darkness in El Dorado (2000).