After a long period of declining numbers and of predictions about their transformation into non-Indians, the number of Brazilians self-identifying as indigenous has begun to grow. Jonathan Warren examines the shift in which people who might once have claimed mixed-race status instead reconstruct themselves as “post-traditional” Indians. His is, thus, a study of changing categories of identity and the forging of those reckonings around “a longing, an orientation, that involves an active attempt to rediscover, recuperate and reinvigorate that which has been dismembered” (p. 21).

Simply because Warren explores qualitatively Brazil’s contemporary indigenous resurgence, Racial Revolutions is a must read. Despite the author’s penchant for neologisms, his account is a clearly and engagingly written diagnostic of an increasing emphasis on identities, of the political and cultural rights important to worldwide indigenous movements and Brazil’s recent redemocratization, and of a cultivation of tradition and origins salient in political discourse today.

Warren builds on Frederick Barth’s insights into boundaries, claiming that if people “envision ethnic divisions, then ethnic groups can be maintained despite cultural change and in the absence of ‘real’ cultural differences” (p. 217). This challenges ideas of indigenous communities existing in the past, on the nation’s periphery, and within a continuous pre-Columbian tradition. Instead, these communities are maintained and re-created today through the “Law of the Indio,” or a “symbolic order in which Indianness can be experienced as … of worth and significance” (p. 205). This logic enables people to set themselves against definitions of Indianness that revolve around phenotype and savagery. Warren argues that, despite this “Law of the White,” indigenous identities encompass a broad range of physical traits and involve tradition’s recovery rather than unbroken transmission of core ideals. Although Warren is unclear whether such recovery emanates from differentiation and reinvention or the reconstruction of something once present but submerged among a people he believes remain, at base, indigenous despite their misplaced mixed race identifications, the argument is compelling. Yet it is also troubling.

A dichotomous reading of identity around “laws” promises much yet ultimately leaves important questions unanswered. Warren does not show in a nuanced way how people traverse or establish boundaries between laws. Instead, he asserts that they do so, motioning at competing worldviews in interviews and life histories that juxtapose information without providing a way of evaluating conversations. This lapse may stem from research conducted in multiple sites. It is especially noticeable when Warren moves to an indigenous village built on what was first a plantation worked by slaves and then a prison labor camp for Indians. A richer site is difficult to imagine for investigation of the situation of indigenous (and Afro-descendent) people emerging from the violence of conquest and the postcolony. Yet Warren shies away from an ethnography of the embodied relations and everyday practices hinted at in the book’s photographs.

A concerted engagement with people’s relationship to social process might point more clearly to the ways that Brazilians have made sense out of a historically specific field in which they have become, or made themselves, Indian. This landscape, which Warren paints as more of a scattered backdrop of discrimination than a lived negotiation of victories and defeats, might include improvements in infant mortality, uneven and sometimes cynical, but nonetheless increasing, governmental attention to indigenous–landowner disputes, and greater rural access to schools and transportation. Such programs, whose presence but not whose efficacy were apparent in the 1990s, may have helped catalyze different identity politics. Although Warren makes a point of pointing to the state, a multifaceted approach to the contradictions of state-directed “care” would have situated indigenous resurgence in clearer material and interpretive contexts. It would also have made more complex one of the strongest aspects of the book, Warren’s convincing refutation of “racial hucksterism” (pp. 94–113), the claim that indigenous identification is but a cynical attempt to take advantage of government programs.

Despite the debunking of the claim that indigenous identification is but a rational and very capitalist choice, Warren fails to question sufficiently how phenomena and canons relate. He reviews biological thought without noting how a southern cone Lamarckianism renders Brazilian biology quite different from North America’s. And in arguing that Brazil’s Black Movement has not attracted a popular following despite dominating research agendas, he jumps from Salvador’s Ilê Aiyê (founded in the 1970s) to southern Brazil’s Frente Negra of the 1930s and on to South Africa’s African National Congress. Not only does Warren fail to theorize his axes of comparison, but he also fails to note that Ilê Aiyê is enormously influential among working-class Afro-Bahians. Similar issues are apparent as Warren draws on evidence from Brazil, Mexico, and North America without considering debates, histories, and positions in the global order. Errors in Portuguese and misspellings of Brazilian researchers’ names compound these problems.

Nonetheless, Warren puts his finger on critical trends in Latin America today. He is one of the first to begin to unpack in English the explosive growth in indigenous populations in Brazil in the 1990s. He has, thus, helped set a research agenda. And he has done so by writing powerfully against discrimination and in a sincere and engaged manner. Racial Revolutions will continue to spark debate and inspire other social scientists’ efforts in the years to come. That is more than enough reason to read, argue with, and find inspiration in this compelling monograph that addresses a still-puzzling phenomenon.