Indigenous Territoriality, Emergent Political Actors, and State Formation in the Sierra del Nayar Morris, Nathaniel. Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910-1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020, 371 pages

Based on original archival research and intrepid anthropological fieldwork in violent times, this book demonstrates with unprecedented scope and detail how the Indigenous communities of a region often seen as subsisting in a magical, ahistorical bubble were fully engaged in the Mexican Revolution. At the same time, it shows how these communities framed this engagement in terms of their local social organization and ritually-centred senses of place and history. As such, Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans is an elegant, interdisciplinary milestone in what Morris calls “anthrohistory” (11), the genre that Paul Friedrich conceived for The Princes of Naranja (1987), his psychological and mythopoetic magnum opus about agrarian violence in revolutionary Michoacán. Both books focus on the symbolic values and blood ties that underpin peasant land struggles, but Morris adds a finer-grained and broader regional and global comparative perspective (62, 111, 152–153). Like Friedrich, Morris’s contribution owes much to his ability to interview irreplaceable elder guardians of historical memory and ritual traditions, many of whom have since died, often sadly as a result of COVID-19. Morris brings his hybrid approach to the Gran Nayar, the multi-ethnic region of the southern Sierra Madre Occidental that is home to Wixárika-Huichol, Náayari-Cora, O’dam-Tepehuano, Mexicanero-Nahua, and mestizo communities in Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango and Zacatecas. For decades the Gran Nayar has been the focus of much anthropological interest, including my own linguistically-oriented work in support of Wixárika ritual experts’ placemaking practices and claims to their divine ancestors’ landmarks and territories (Liffman 2011, 2018, 2022). But too many studies have been hobbled by community-centred approaches, and until now the region has received only a few important historical treatments. In addition to Friedrich’s anthrohistory, Morris’s book has at least two other major influences: the historiographical focus on the role of serrano societies in the Mexican Revolution proposed by Alan Knight (1986), who supervised his dissertation, and the pioneering historian of the Gran Nayar, Jean Meyer (1974–76). Meyer holds that “popular Catholicism” pervaded the nationwide Cristero rebellions that began in 1926 against the new revolutionary state, but Morris questions how far this notion applies to the Gran Nayar. Among the subsequent historical approaches, Jennie Purnell, Ben Fallaw, Philip Coyle, and Matthew Butler are some of the most important scholars cited, but none covers the culture and history of the region with the scope and depth of this book, which Morris rightly calls “the first systematic study of the participation of the Gran Nayar’s inhabitants in the Mexican Revolution” (7). In Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans, Morris has worked out the relevant historical and cultural background (Chapter 1); the shifting patterns of alliances with and against the various early revolutionary factions (Chapter 2); the two periods of the Cristero rebellion (or Cristiada) in the region (Chapters 4 and 6), in which he points out that the Wixárika and O’dam fighters were the last in Mexico to disarm (6); and the two interwar phases of state formation (Chapters 3 and 5). Morris argues that these patterns of alliance had much to do with land tenure and communal autonomy, especially outrage at the modernizing revolutionary state’s clumsy attempts to culturally assimilate “primitive” and “superstitious” Indigenous societies through capitalist agrarian relations of production and Spanish-language socialist education (except when Indigenous cosmopolitans supported these projects in order to channel federal resources into their communities, if not their own pockets). These processes were shaped by internal Indigenous rivalries, such as “the long-running dyadic conflict” between the Wixárika communities (162) and opposition to whichever side their generally hostile mestizo neighbours happened to be on (49): “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” None of this had much …