The Arakmbut are an indigenous people in the southeastern Peruvian rain forest who have survived with their culture intact despite encounters with missionaries since the 1950s and a gold rush into their territory over the past 15 years. This final volume of the series looks at the growing consciousness among the Arakmbut of their own rights and the growing development of indigenous rights internationally, and describes the importance of the invisible spirit world in the Arakmbut legal system. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity. The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin America. They address the double binds of indigenous organizing and "working within the system" as well as the flexibility of political tactics used to achieve cultural goals outside the scope of state politics. The contributors answer questions about who speaks for indigenous communities, how indigenous movements relate to the popular left, and how conflicts between the national indigenous leadership and local communities play out in specific cultural and political contexts. The volume sheds new light on the realities of asymmetrical power relations and on the ways in which indigenous communities and their representatives employ Western constructions of subjectivity, alterity, and authentic versus counterfeit identity, as well as how they manipulate bureaucratic structures, international organizations, and the mass media to advance goals that involve distinctive visions of an indigenous future.

This pioneering work brings the pre-Columbian and colonial history of Latin America home: rather than starting out in Spain and following Columbus and the conquistadores as they “discover” New World peoples, The Formation of Latin American Nations begins with the Mesoamerican and South American nations as they were before the advent of European colonialism—and only then moves on to the sixteenth-century Spanish arrival and its impact. To form a clearer picture of precolonial Latin America, Thomas Ward reads between the lines in the “Chronicles of the Indies,” filling in the blanks with information derived from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and common-sense logic. Although he finds fascinating points of comparison among the K’iche’ Maya in Central America, the polities (señoríos) of Colombia, and the Chimú of the northern Peruvian coast, Ward focuses on two of the best-known peoples: the Nahua (Aztec) of Central Mexico and the Inka of the Andes. His study privileges indigenous-identified authors such as Diego Muñoz Camargo, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala while it also consults Spanish chroniclers like Hernán Cortés, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Pedro Cieza de León, and Bartolomé de las Casas. The nation-forming processes that Ward theorizes feature two forms of cultural appropriation: the horizontal, in which nations appropriate people and customs from adjacent cultures, and the vertical, in which nations dig into their own past to fortify their concept of exceptionality. In defining these processes, Ward eschews the most common measure, race, instead opting for the Nahua altepetl, the Inka panaka, and the K’iche’ amaq’. His work thus approaches the nation both as the indigenous people conceptualized it and with terminology that would have been familiar to them before and after contact with the Spanish. The result is a truly decolonial account of the formation and organization of Latin American nations, one that puts the indigenous perspective at its center.

Indigenous people in Latin America have mobilized in unprecedented ways - demanding recognition, equal protection, and subnational autonomy. These are remarkable developments in a region where ethnic cleavages were once universally described as weak. Recently, however, indigenous activists and elected officials have increasingly shaped national political deliberations. Deborah Yashar explains the contemporary and uneven emergence of Latin American indigenous movements - addressing both why indigenous identities have become politically salient in the contemporary period and why they have translated into significant political organizations in some places and not others. She argues that ethnic politics can best be explained through a comparative historical approach that analyzes three factors: changing citizenship regimes, social networks, and political associational space. Her argument provides insight into the fragility and unevenness of Latin America's third wave democracies and has broader implications for the ways in which we theorize the relationship between citizenship, states, identity, and social action.

The Cambridge History of Latin America is a large scale, collaborative, multi-volume history of Latin America during the five centuries from the first contacts between Europeans and the native peoples of the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present. Latin America: Politics and Society since 1930 consists of chapters from Part 2 of Volume VI of The Cambridge History that provide a thorough account of political movements in Latin America. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay.

Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Stuides, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities. The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research underway in specialized areas. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is the oldest continuing reference work in the field. Dolores Moyano Martin, of the Library of Congress Hispanic Division, has been the editor since 1977, and P. Sue Mundell has been assistant editor since 1994. The subject categories for Volume 55 are as follows: Anthropology (including Archaeology and Ethnology) Economics Electronic Resources for the Social Sciences Geography Government and Politics International Relations Sociology