AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST BOOK REVIEWS Books in Translation AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 114, No. 3, pp. 543–558, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. c  2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01461.x Poeticas de vida en espacios de muerte: G ´ enero, poder y estado en la contidianeidad warao [Poetics of life in spaces of death: Gender, power and the state in Warao everyday life] Charles L. Briggs. Quito, Ecuador: Abya Yala, 2008. 460 pp. Simeon Floyd Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics In this book Charles Briggs brings together a series of ethno- graphic studies based on many years of research with the Warao people of the Orinoco Delta region of Venezuela. Some of the chapters have previously appeared elsewhere in English, but with so much emphasis on academic pub- lishing in English it is rare that foreign researchers make their work available to a Latin American readership through publishing Spanish volumes like this one. Here Briggs offers a good model of how to open dialog with Latin American researchers and also for how to encourage Warao people to read the results of his research themselves (although a relatively high instance of typographic errors and translation issues and the usage of heavy academic language sometimes make the text less accessible). The major contribution of Po´ eticas de vida en espacios de muerte is its combination of the analysis of discourse, poetics, and speech genres with a social analysis of power, inequality, and topics like race and gen- der. Briggs points out that “discourse is frequently seen as an intrinsic component of indigenous communities instead of as a dynamic site of competence, struggles of power and inequality, relations with the State, capitalism, and interna- tional institutions” (p. 62). There has been sustained interest in poetics in the linguistic anthropology of indigenous lan- guages of the Americas, but this work has seldom engaged with more political elements as Briggs sets out to do here. The book reads more like a collection of articles than a single narrative, but a common thread in all the chapters is the connection of sociopolitical themes with discourse forms. These include narrative, gossip, curing songs, ritual wailing, and more, treated both at the scale of the speech event as well as the broader scale of socially circulating discourses. Speech genres play a large role throughout the book, not conceptualized as static sets of linguistic features but instead as sites of social negotiations. One chapter de- scribes gossip not just as a Warao speech practice but also as a contested space where men can seek to legitimize their own discourse while delegitimizing that of women. In one of the more detailed analyses of a speech genre in the book, a shamanic song to cure a ray sting, Briggs argues against a simplistic view that shamanic practices function to reinforce symbolic cultural consistency, offering instead an account in which shamans negotiate power over bodies—individual as well as social and political. In a similar way, a chapter about women’s ritual wailing argues against a clich´ ed description of wailing as “resistence,” instead giving a more complex account of how this speech genre offers “an important fo- rum for unmasking social hierarchies, including those that sustain the power of postcolonial institutions and the Nation- State” (p. 291). Two of the most powerful chapters describe a cholera epidemic in the Orinoco Delta in which official racializing discourses casting Warao people as premodern, ignorant, and unsanitary come into tension with other ways of narrating, illustrating how the linearization of events in narrative is a situated social achievement that mediates col- lective memory. Briggs shows how conspiracy theories about the epidemic’s origins “read the bodies of the sick as signs of sick political bodies, showing how racialization contributed to an epidemic that resides in the nucleus of a sick racial project” (402–403). Once these kinds of insights have been registered, it is difficult to return to the paradigm of de- scribing discourse forms like these different Warao ways of speaking simply as stable elements of traditional culture and not as negotiated sites of social processes. The book has no conclusion section, so the larger sig- nificance of the work is not explicitly summarized for the