On Indigenous Politics and Political Revolution in Mexico and Beyond 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

When I began the research project that became Soldiers, Saints and Shamans, I had two aims in mind. One was essentially political: to better understand why ethnic mobilizations and radical political movements have so often clashed, with important consequences for so many of the revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the twentieth century. Studying the participation of the Wixárika (Huichol), Náayari (Cora), O’dam (Southern Tepehuan), and Mexicanero (Nahuatl-speaking) peoples of the Gran Nayar in the Mexican Revolution seemed to me to be an opportunity to shed further light on this complex issue, which seemed all the more relevant in the early 2010s as “identity politics” became increasingly important in the US and UK; as Berber, Tuareg, Druze and Kurdish minorities played key roles in uprisings in Libya, Mali and Syria; and Indigenous militia groups became prominent protagonists in Mexico’s own, ongoing “Drug War” (Gledhill 2015; Ley, Mattiace and Trejo 2019). My research also had a more specific historigraphical aim: to reconstruct how and why the Mexican Revolution—the first of the great social revolutions of the twentieth century, and the third of the major political transformations Mexico has undergone since the Spanish invasion of 1519—unfolded as it did in the Gran Nayar, a peripheral “shatter zone” in many ways comparable to James C. Scott’s Zomia (2009, 8), and a stronghold of societies that Pierre Clastres (1974) might have praised for their attitudes towards (or, indeed, against) the state (cf. Neurath 2011). As a region that has received much attention from anthropologists but, with a few important exceptions (for example, Lira 2020; Rojas 1993), has been comparatively neglected by historians of modern Mexico, focusing on the Gran Nayar seemed to me to offer a chance, as Alan Knight generously put it a few pages back, to “fill a gap” in the historical record in a way that would also help to ground in historical “fact” the ever-expanding anthropological literature on the region, its peoples, and on Indigenous Mexico more generally. However, as my research progressed and I spent more and more time doing “anthrohistorical” fieldwork in the Gran Nayar, making friends with local people and taking part in the many rituals, ceremonies, and fiestas that still help to define life in the region, a third aim became increasingly important: to understand (at least in part), and hopefully make (somewhat) understandable to other outsiders, the idiosyncratic, ritual-centred, important and often beautiful ways in which the forebears of today’s Wixárika, Náayari, O’dam, and Mexicanero people understood the world and their place in it, and how these were transformed by, and in their own ways helped to shape (at least at the local level), both the Mexican Revolution and the reimagined Mexican nation-state that emerged from it. I am therefore immensely grateful to Anthropologica for publishing Paul Liffman’s comprehensive review of Soldiers, Saints and Shamans in this issue, and for inviting two other distinguished authorities on the ethnography of the Gran Nayar, Johannes Neurath and Philip Coyle, as well as one of the world’s foremost historians of the Mexican Revolution, Alan Knight, to comment on both Liffman’s review and on the book itself. The work of all four of these scholars has had a huge influence on my own, and their detailed, generous, and thought-provoking critiques of my book have helped me to reflect further on how far I have managed to fulfil my three aims. Happily, all four of my reviewers seem to agree with my analysis of the causes of conflict between Indigenous communities and revolutionary forces in the Gran Nayar, which have parallels throughout the Global South, from Vietnam to Nicaragua (Goscha 2016; …