462 american ethnologist author fails to describe other indigenous activ- ists responsible for the formation of the Indian Movement in Brazil. Perhaps what is lacking here is a view of the Brazilian Indian Move- ment as more than a corollary of a state indi- genism defined through a perspective that re- lies on abstract categorizations such as the Indians and the West. The Brazilian Indian Movement resu Its from the h istorical mobi I iza- tion of a social movement arising at the inter- section of many institutional agents respond- ing or reacting to that ideology that Gomes himself defines, after Bonfil Batalha (pp. 94, 271), as a form of "internal colonialism." Gomes's analysis of the interethnic relations between Indians and Brazilians is at its best when he reviews the socioeconomic and envi- ronmental impacts of development in Brazil and how it has affected indigenous societies. Here, students and scholars interested in envi- ronmental anthropology and the study of de- velopment may find the book most useful. Gomes gives compelling explanations of how Brazilian ranchers and other landowners have managed to undermine indigenous interests and use the Landless as "spearheads of the colonization process" (p. 187). He recognizes that historical circumstances often are incon- gruent with the laws, political decisions, or policies created to change or contain them. Gomes reveals some of the more perverse dis- junctions between the legal and local realities of indigenous societies. In fact, his meticulous discussion of the economic dependency or po- litical autonomy of indigenous groups could be extended to other political and economic spheres. By the time it is decided whether in- digenous peoples should legally be allowed to commercialize the wood in their own reserva- tions (p. 4), for example, there may be no more profitable hardwoods left for them. Without re- stating some conspiracy theories, it could well be said that both the absence of pertinent legis- lation and the creation of new statutes and laws, in spite of the Brazilian constitution, in- variably favor the economic interests that aim at alienating indigenous peoples from the re- sources found in their lands. Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn. Robin M. Wright Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. xi + 314 pp., maps, figures, photographs, notes, bibliog- raphy, index. JANET CHERNELA Florida International University In the contest over indigenous identities in the northwest Amazon of Brazil, narrative tales of the elderly are viewed as part of an ever- shrinking body of pristine truth that may be tapped to reconstruct a disappearing aborigi- nality. In his new monograph on the Arawakan Hohodene Baniwa of the upper Rio Negro in Brazil, Robin Wright compiles and analyzes a rich body of indigenous discursive forms, in- cluding narratives of cosmogony and cosmol- ogy, shamans' songs, initiation chants, histo- ries of interethnic and European contact, healing formulas, ancestral chants, orations, and life histories. Together, these narratives constitute a Baniwa ritual memory. Wright's new work explores the generative role of Baniwa cosmology in shaping personal and community identities as well as Baniwa history. In demonstrating the deep linkages be- tween systems of signification in Baniwa myth and recurring 18th- and 19th-century mille- narian movements, Wright creates an ethnol- ogy of Baniwa religion in which symbols and time are locked in an interdependent dyna- mism, responding to internal structural con- straints as well as external historic ones. In this approach, Wright follows the Portuguese-Bra- zilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and others who have pointed to the role of traditional cosmology in historic action, in- cluding prophetic movements. Wright has demonstrated convincingly this linkage else- where, such as in the seminal article coauthored with Jonathan Hill, "Time, Narrative, and Rit- ual: Historical Interpretations from an Ama- zonian Society" {Rethinking History and Myth, University of Illinois Press, 1988; see also Eth- nohistory33 (1986):31-54). This new book is an extension and advance- ment of Wright's previous work and is divided into four sections. In part 1, Wright argues that Baniwa millenarian consciousness arises from an opposition, or a dialectical tension between catastrophic and utopic visions of primordial time. The two inseparable principles, utopic and catastrophic, constitute, for Wright, a "spirituality of the end of time" (pp. 15,289). In