Racial Revolutions

Jonathan Warren has written a provocative, no-holds-barred appeal to incorporate Brazil’s eastern Indians into scholarship about race and antiracist activism. Racial Revolutions is not about Amazonian Indians or international indigenous movement politics. Nor is it a book about history or historical explanations. Instead, it focuses on newly recognized indigenous groups in a region of Brazil believed for many years to have no Indian population. Until the late 1970s, the assumption was that descendants of the indigenous inhabitants of the eastern and northeastern regions of Brazil had been assimilated into the local peasantry. Warren devotes all but the final chapter of the book to answering the question, “Why has there been an indigenous resurgence in eastern Brazil?” Based on structured interviews conducted in three Minas Gerais indigenous rural communities and a neighborhood in Belo Horizonte, as well as previous research conducted in a small town in the state of Rio de Janeiro among non-Indians, Warren examines the material and discursive reasons why certain mixed-race people have come to self-identify as Indians. He argues that the reduction of repression with the coming of democracy, the revamping of the Catholic Church’s indigenous policies, and the linkage of Indianness to the promise of land contributed to this demographic upsurge, which is also linked to the development of alternative discourses about the definition of Indians in academic, legal, and social movement circles. He also ardently disputes arguments that are used to challenge the authenticity of such claims, such as the view that people opt for indigenous self-identification as a way to get material benefits (the “racial huckster” theory) and to avoid being considered black. These challenges are crucial to his ultimate argument that Indians are the most race-conscious group in Brazil.While the general trend in Brazil has been to consider Indians under the theoretical rubric of ethnicity, Warren uses the terms race and racial in discussing indigenous identity shifts. By doing so, he foreshadows his final argument that Indians are vital to the struggle against white supremacy in Brazil because their antiracist discourse is more highly developed than that of black Brazilians. Although he underestimates the social significance of various strands of the black movement and its allies, Warren raises important issues about a potential antiracist coalition of Indians and blacks. African heritage should not trump indigenous background, Warren argues, in the construction of a new multicultural Brazilian democracy. He points out that the assumption that pardos are a latent black population in Brazil draws from U.S. constructions of blackness, in which most people of both African and indigenous descent come to mobilize as black (p. 238). This assumption, he proposes, can be directly challenged in eastern Brazil, where the majority of newly recognized Indians are of African descent.Although Warren eschews class analysis, the evidence he presents could be used to further our understanding of the intersection between demands for land and discourses about identity among rural workers and peasants. When viewed this way, his evidence might suggest that the resurgence of indigenous self-identification is not simply about Indianness but also about political subjectivities forged in the struggle for land and their resulting communities of likeness. For example, my work compares recent northeastern Indian recognitions and quilombo recognitions under the 1988 constitution and has found mixed-race peasants self-identifying as black for the first time. Many of Warren’s observations about racial identity formation would also apply to these newly self-identifying black communities. Warren’s project would therefore be strengthened and deepened by a historical analysis of the process of these groups’ identity transformation. Much light could be shed on how discursive imaginings about being black or Indian are produced and what it is about Brazilian society in any given period that would allow people to choose a particular racial or ethnic identity.Given its activist focus, Racial Revolutions would have benefited from a more thorough analysis of the role that law has played in the resurgence of Indian identities in the east and northeast. Warren characterizes the 1973 Indian Statute as a product of “savage mind anthropology” and argues that the “legal definition of Indianness remained unaltered” in 1973 (p. 222). However, that law—which, influenced by Fredrik Barth’s theory of ethnic boundaries, offered the first statutory definition of índio—emphasized self-ascription and perceptions of sameness and difference. As such, it served as the basis for over 30 recognitions of what Warren terms “posttraditional Indians”: groups that had long been considered assimilated, without distinct languages or rituals.Warren correctly points out that there is little literature in the United States on these developments, but there is a substantial literature over the last two decades produced by Brazilian anthropologists, including João Pacheco de Oliveira Filho and his cadre of students. These anthropologists have advanced the notion of ethnogenesis to explain the upsurge of indigenous recognitions in northeastern Brazil. This rich Brazilian literature, together with Racial Revolutions, represents an important parallel development to the fledgling studies of black Indians in North America. More importantly, Racial Revolutions begins to fill a Brazilian void in the growing U.S.-produced anthropological literature about mixed-race peoples and their indigenous roots throughout Latin America. Finally, Racial Revolutions is a stimulating book, well suited for undergraduate teaching about race and ethnicity in Latin America

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