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The anthropological study of religious change has gained importance, even urgency, as mission activity has expanded globally, and as traditional communities increasingly participate in global culture. Understanding how and why religious change takes place is a classic problem of social theory, and the editors of the current volume have made significant contributions to this issue in Amazonia. Robin Wright is noted for two earlier edited volumes on religious conversion, and Aparecida Vilaça for some of the most interesting and insightful work to be carried out on religion and religious change in Amazonia, based on her work with the Wari' Indians of Brazil. In this new collection, the contributors take up the issue of the indigenous experience of Christianity, asking not whether indigenous communities will embrace Christianity but how they have done so, and seeking the 'natives' point of view' of this new religion.
Two of the chapters in the current volume consider North American indigenous communities (Allan Greer's on seventeenth-century Canada, and a chapter on an Inuit region by Frederic Laugrand and Jarich Oosten), but the primary focus of the collection is South America, and for the most part lowland South America, where the experience of Christianity has been more volatile.
Most of the contributions explore the variable uses of Christianity in changing expressions of identity. Peter Gow's essay, for example, starts with the intriguing claim by the Peruvian Piro that they are and always have been cristianos, a claim that he situates within Piro notions of social classification: of 'humans and...