Ethnicity, Gender, and Ceremonial Traditions in the Gran 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

As Morris’s book—and Liffman’s review of it—make abundantly clear, the Gran Nayar is one of the most culturally significant regions in Mexico, and its unique and complicated history is the basis of its significance to the people who live there, as well as to others whose lives have been changed by it. In this brief comment on both Morris’s book and Liffman’s detailed review of it, I would just like to re-emphasize the profound importance of the ancient but still very much alive Mesoamerican religious traditions that made life worth living for the Indigenous peoples of the region during the period covered by Morris’s book, and thus the crucial role that these traditions must have played in the regional events that the book sees as part of the larger Mexican Revolution and post-Revolutionary Mexican state formation. In this respect, Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans will hopefully set the stage for a reconsideration of the role played by these violent military campaigns—based on what increasingly appear to be bizarre nationalist fantasies—in the much more important and long-lasting Indigenous histories of the region, which we have every reason to believe will continue long after the collapse of the contemporary Mexican nation and with it the global system of nation-states. What Morris and others in the Gran Nayar region call “el costumbre” is much more than a simple set of customs or habits. Rather, it is seen by the region’s Indigenous groups as a profound way of life that is best understood and expressed through their distinct but related Indigenous languages. Each of these languages, in turn, is seen as the manifestation of a kind of clearly expressed and focused mental effort that ultimately derives from and is connected to each group’s sacred homelands, which in turn are sustained by ceremonial traditions based on the realities of the natural world. The sacred homelands are then seen to have been formed by the sacrifices of the ancestors, whose energies continue in these ongoing natural realities as long as el costumbre continues. These are ways of life that are much more involved and crucially significant than other “cultural” trends, fashions or ideologies that have characterized modernizing Mexico, and they have their own historical weight beyond those that motivated outside actors during the period under consideration, or those that motivated the local or regional bosses and militia leaders who engaged with these outsiders. Greater focus on the different ontologies produced by el costumbre might alter Morris’s perspective on the character of Indigenous participation in the events discussed, which are presented as more fragmented and contingent than they appear to have been. For example, Morris says that some Indigenous communities were “genuinely attracted to the rival ideologies of Villistas and Carancistas, cristeros, and radical agrarian reformers” (7), but when such seeming attractions are discussed, it is the “markedly magical way of understanding the world” (7)—and so Indigenous autonomy in their sacred homelands—that drives participation. As Morris rightly points out, the Indigenous people who practice costumbre in their homelands see themselves and their ways of life “as superior to those of mestizo Mexicans” (42). They correctly understood that forcibly removing their children from this way of life would make them become “malicious, lose their customs, and quickly die” (84), and so almost none of them would have been interested in the various state-building ideologies promoted by the various fanatical and dangerous outsiders who actively sought to destroy the Indigenous peoples and traditions of the region. Although Morris discusses the importance of the costumbre and recognizes the limitations of the “rationalist” historical approach that characterizes the book—which is …