Reviews Biography and autobiography Oakdale, Suzanne. I foresee my life: the ritual performance of autobiography in an Amazonian community. xvi, 206 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2005. £32.95 (cloth) Suzanne Oakdale’s excellent monograph on the KayabiIndians of central Brazil is centred on ritualized autobiographical performances given in various contexts while also giving a more general picture of this indigenous group’s recent interactions with and reactions to Brazilian national society. It begins with a description of Stone-Arm, a Kayabishaman, performing a cure for his ill grandson soon after Oakdale’s first arrival in the community. Oakdale shows how Stone-Arm’s centralnarrative is based on his own career as a shaman, but how within this basic framework he encompasses references to the wide variety of powers and relationships with which the Kayabihave contact, including Oakdale herself as a foreign researcher. In this way, the narrative acts on a number of levels, diagnosing the grandson, encouraging others to welcome and help the new visitor, but also giving a more generalwarning about the outside world. Through such analyses, Oakdale’s focus on three different kinds of ritual public addresses – politicaloratories, Maraka curing songs, and Jawosi rituals that signal an end to mourning – allows her to explore a number of aspects of Kayabisociety. In particular, she uses the narratives, supplemented with other ethnographic data, to show the manner in which the Kayabi dealwith the transformations that have occurred in their lives and those of recent generations. The central example of these transformations has been the Kayabi’s move from areas where they faced intense pressure to assimilate into wider Brazilian society to the relative protection of the Xingu national park. Oakdale notes that this move from areas where Indian identity had a pejorative connotation to one where it has more positive, but still circumscribed, associations has forced the Kayabi to address many different facets of Indian identity as well as new forms of commodity consumption, residence patterns, and leadership. For example, she shows how leaders have learned to negotiate their own positions and identities with the outside world. While within the Xingu they compare themselves to the more ‘traditional’ groups in the Upper Xingu, to outsiders, Oakdale argues, they are willing to fit themselves to an archetypal notion of ‘ideal Indians’: ‘unaware of bourgeois evils’ and making judicious use of the forest. In some cases, this involves the deliberate physical acting out of ‘culture’ in dress and rituals that outsiders can observe and participate in. Oakdale notes that this idea of acting ‘Indian’ is not completely alien to the Kayabi but rather fits within wider Amazonian cosmological ideas in which masks and clothing are understood to encourage the transformation of unstable bodies. As with this example, the strength of the work lies in showing how older Kayabi understandings of the world, and in particular notions of alternative perspectives and of personhood, are used to make sense of their contemporary situation. Based on these ideas, Oakdale argues that public discourses are well suited to guiding people through contemporary transformations. As in the first example of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , - © Royal Anthropological Institute 