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A more general disappointment, for me, was that the book ultimately does notdeliver the sparkle for which the subject matter holds so much potential. There justare not enough of the illuminating anecdotes, the great stories, the only-in-Cubafactor. I wanted the book to remind readers just a little bit better of why they fell in(inevitably tumultuous) love with the country in the first place, or to inspire ro-mance in readers who are new to Cuba’s endless landscape of charms, intrigues,and frustrations.Mark M. Miller, University of Southern Mississippi

THIS LAND IS OURS NOW: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land inBrazil. By Wendy Wolford. xii and pp.; map; ills., bibliog., index. Durham,N.C.: Duke University Press, . . (cloth), isbn ; .

(paper); isbn .

Brazil’s Landless Movement, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra(mst), grew from isolated land occupations in the late s and early s to emergeas Latin America’s largest social movement by the late s, enjoying increasingsupport of Brazil’s middle classes while playing a major role in pro-peasant inter-national networks against neoliberal policies. Wendy Wolford has crafted a fasci-nating ethnographic account of the mst that focuses on two sites in which the mstsuccessfully mobilized people to claim land, one in Santa Catarina State, in the southof Brazil, and the other in Pernambuco State, in the northeastern region. Less suc-cessful were the mst’s attempts to organize production and to maintain peasants asmst members, which is the focus of Wolford’s book.

The narrative of This Land Is Ours Now hinges on key differences between thesites, which in turn inform the “meanings of land” in the book’s subtitle. ThePernambuco site is in a sugarcane zone, whereas the Santa Catarina site is in a mixedfarming region. Settlers in the Pernambuco site have a history of wage labor forsugar mills and large landowners; the Santa Catarina settlers sought to reproducefamily farming and to maintain family networks in agriculture. Wolford’s decisionto study such diverse settings was a wise one, for it allowed her to capture some ofthe diversity in Brazil’s agricultural geography while also taking on the mst’s aim tobe a national movement that necessarily works in diverse agricultural settings.

Wolford’s book makes two key contributions. The first is how she adds to geo-graphical scholarship on social movements by focusing on the fuzziness of mem-bership rather than on the movement’s leaders. She identifies the contrast betweenthe agrarian populism promoted by the mst and the on-the-ground reality of ruralsettlements, what she calls the “banal geographies of organization and resistance”(p. ). Second, Wolford’s focus on the meanings of land is a significant insight. Here,she focuses on the territoriality of land-based social movements. Land has differentmeanings depending on the political and moral economies of the settlements, whichin turn leads to different challenges and outcomes for the social movement.

The two settlements are Wolford’s case studies, which she uses to make her pointson membership in social movements and the variable meaning of land. In addition,the cases allow her to provide great detail on the contradictions between the mst’s

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ideology of agrarian populism and highly localized social, political, and economicmeanings of land. Indeed, in treating the mst’s agrarian populism as an imaginedcommunity, Wolford’s analysis makes for a refreshing contrast to the uncritical writ-ing on the mst. In analyzing the Santa Catarina settlement, Wolford argues thataccess to land mobilized the settlers to join the mst, but the production collectivethat the mst imposed faced resistance because settlers violated moral economies.

In the Pernambuco settlement, settlers joined the mst to obtain access to other-wise difficult-to-open political channels. The setters left the movement to partici-pate in a resurgent sugarcane economy at a moment when difficulties plagued thebanana-cultivation project that the mst offered as an alternative to sugarcane. ThePernambuco case is further complicated by the difficulty that settlers had in adjust-ing to the mst’s agrarian populism, which left no room for the wage labor to whichthey had become accustomed. This flux in membership is at the heart of Wolford’scontributions: to study social movements not as things, and to devote empiricalresearch to ordinary members of social movements. In addition, these cases sup-port her conclusion that, although mst members have dropped out, they may yetreturn to the mst under different conditions.

The argument could have been strengthened in two main areas. First, the bookis not evenly balanced between the case studies. I doubt that Wolford wanted herwork to be a comparative study, but the fact is that, with two sites showing strongsimilarities and contrasts, readers may want the narrative to show a sharper com-parative angle. Both sites are used to explore the book’s key issuesshifting mem-bership in social mobilization and the variable meanings of landbut the evidenceand narrative in the book are heavily tilted to the Pernambuco case. Wolford pro-vides a fascinating set of settler vignettes that help her explain the Pernambucosettlement (pp. –); however, no comparable material is provided for the SantaCatarina case. Interviews with mst leaders in Pernambuco are quoted at length, butnot with leaders in Santa Catarina. Although Wolford’s methodology indicates thatshe collected data through household surveys, the only example of clear compari-son is provided in tables that indicate why settlers joined the mst and how theylearned of the movement (pp. , ). Moreover, at the moment when readers mightexpect a chapter that would bring the two cases into side-by-side comparison, thebook concludes with a discussion of agrarian reform policies mainly since ,when President Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva took office. This is important as context,but it hardly helps readers in search of a synthesis of the prodigious ethnographicwork in the book.

Second, This Land Is Ours Now is only partly successful at engaging with Brazil’s“contradictory peasants” debate. Certainly, Wolford outlines the contours of thisdebate. One view among scholars is that Brazil has no peasantry because a small-farmer class did not develop organically. This perspective is highly critical of themst, arguing that Brazil’s historical opportunity for a peasant movement has longsince passed. Other scholars have argued that modern agricultural developmentinspired an agricultural working class that sought land but had to settle for a wage.

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In this view, the mst has responded to an urgent need among landless workers. Sheresolves this contradiction by arguing that “the peasantry has historically been bothencouraged and thwarted” (p. ). This may be true, but she does not use findingsfrom both sites to push the debate further. Through the Santa Catarina case, sheargues that a small-farmer class was receptive to the mst and that the conditionsand struggles of this peasantry informed the mst’s agrarian populism. However,the Pernambuco site suggests that sugarcane workers cannot easily become peas-ants, at least in terms of the mst’s agrarian populism. In addition, Wolford’s discus-sion of the Pernambuco site indicates the tensions between the mst and rural tradeunions in the state, which wanted to improve working conditions, not to create apeasantry along the lines of the mst’s ideology. The chapters on Pernambuco repre-sent a missed opportunity to explore the “contradictory peasants” debate more indepth.

Human geographers who seek a fine example of ethnographic methods shouldbe drawn to this book. Hopefully This Land Is Ours Now will inform how geographersdevelop new research into social movements grounded in territories, resources, andland- or sea-based production systems. Overall, the book is a significant addition tothe geographical literature on development and social movements.ChristianBrannstrom, Texas A&M University

INDIGENOUS DEVELOPMENT IN THE ANDES: Culture, Power, and Trans-nationalism. By Robert Andolina, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe.xii and pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., bibliog., index. Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press, . . (cloth) isbn ; . (paper) isbn.

With Indigenous Development in the Andes, the political scientist Robert Andolinaand the geographers Nina Laurie and Sarah Radcliffe add to a growing list of bookson indigenous peoples and the politics of international development in LatinAmerica. In contrast to many of these books, Indigenous Development in the Andesis less concerned with social movement politics than with the ways in which indig-enous populations have been included in international development programsinuneven and often incomplete ways, to be sure. In particular, the book’s analysis of“development-with-identity”sometimes referred to as “ethnodevelopment”ad-dresses the formation and functioning of transnational development networks andthe ways in which these shape development agendas concerning indigenous peoples.

Andolina, Laurie, and Radcliffe begin by posing two questions: “How are devel-opment policy and practice reconfigured once ethnicity and cultural difference areinserted explicitly into development thinking?” and “How does multiethnictransnationalism . . . emerge and sustain itself?” (p. ; italics in the original). Follow-ing theoretical considerations of transnational networks and indigenous politics(chapter ) and the concepts of development-with-identity and social capital in thecontext of the Andean indigenous cultures (chapter ), the authors examine fourareas of indigenous development practice: governance of ethnoterritorial spaces