Beyond Alterity is a ground-breaking book, which sets out to question the meaning and the relevance of the concept of ‘indigenous’ in the humanities, the social sciences and public policy. The term has become such a taken-for-granted epistemological category that problematising it in this way is something of an iconoclastic endeavour. In the book, rather than conceiving of the alterity of indigenous persons as an ‘explanation’ that allows us to know or understand the actions, behaviour and characteristics of certain people a priori, the authors problematise that perceived alterity as an ‘object to be explained’, deconstructing and historicising the apparently natural association between indigenous identification and alterity. It also argues that privileging alterity or difference, however defined, restricts the study and analysis of those considered to be indigenous to certain rubrics and social and historical phenomena, obscures alternative ways of understanding their past and present, and exoticises them into a permanent ‘other’. Instead, the book emphasises diversity amongst and between indigenous peoples and cross-over and engagement with non-indigenous peoples, and wider fields of struggle and systems of classification such as the state, the nation, class and social status, in time and space. As Paul K. Eiss argues in his afterword, Beyond Alterity offers a challenge to the current use of alterity and identity in scholarship and politics, which recreates, often unwittingly, the imperialist world it critiques. The book, thus, attempts to dissolve the assumed geo-historical entity of ‘indigenous’ and thereby to go beyond the fixed and reified conceptions of the West and the Other embodied by ‘Occidentalism’.

Together the six chapters that comprise Part 1 of the book, ‘Land and Government’, show that from the colonial period until the late twentieth century indigenous peoples were enmeshed in systems of land tenure, commercial relations, colonial and national politics and education and literacy in multiple ways not defined by common understandings of indigenous ethnicity. For example, far from being homogenous and egalitarian, indigenous collective entities were diverse, hierarchical and beset by internal conflicts. In Chapters 1 and 6, Emilio Kourí and Gabriela Torres-Mazuera highlight the existence of multiple forms of land ownership, including private property and individual plots, commercialisation and socio-economic inequalities and significant historical breaks. These had little or nothing to do with communalism, ‘traditional’ uses and cosmovisions, or sharp distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous people. In Chapters 2 and 3 Peter Guardino and Michael Ducey challenge the supposed parochialism, traditionalism and isolation of rural society during the colonial and independence eras, and instead show indigenous political conduct as necessarily engaged in broader political institutions and processes of change. Chapters 4 and 5, by Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo and Elsie Rockwell, contest the idea that indigenous societies were anathema to or necessarily excluded from literacy in Spanish. Therefore, these chapters present clear empirical evidence that historicises and challenges stereotypical conceptions of indigenous societies and behaviour that has tended to remain unquestioned in much of the historiography and scholarship to date.

Chapters 7 to 11 in Part 2 examine the role of science in the medical, archaeological and anthropological construction of the concept of ‘indigenous’ in Mexico in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They consider the way in which scientific discourses contributed to the emergence of a stable definition of what ‘indigenous’ meant theoretically and in terms of applied social policy. In Chapter 7 Laura Cházaro shows the roles played by medical anthropology and archaeology in developing the idea of a Mexican race distinct from the Indians. In Chapter 8, Paula López Caballero notes that one of the central problems faced by Mexico's indigenistas in the 1940s was to define who actually was indigenous, a task which ‘constituted a spirited site of dispute’ (p. 200). Eventually, the indigenous subject became institutionalised within indigenista discourse as part of a community, but this was by no means the only definition of alterity put forward by anthropologists at this time; nor was it one that resolved the discussion over the relationship of indigeneity to biology, culture or class. Similarly, in Chapter 9, which examines the applied anthropology and integrated regional development carried out by the Indigenous National Institute (INI) in the Papaloapan River Basin in the state of Veracruz, Diana Lynn Schwartz highlights the distance between academic and institutional definitions of Indian populations and the empirical evidence. That evidence shows that these populations were heterogeneous and often characterised by traits defined as modern, national and mestizo. In Chapter 10, José Luis Escalona Victoria examines the way in which archaeologists and anthropologists, above all Evon Vogt and the Harvard Chiapas project, produced indigenous alterity and stabilised the idea of the Maya as an ethnic group with uninterrupted links between contemporary and ancient civilisations. Chapter 11 by Vivette García Deister considers the Mexico genome project which, despite being unable to identify an ‘indigenous type’ distinguishable from a mestizo one, continued to associate pathologies such as susceptibility to obesity and diabetes with indigenous genes. Together these chapters show how the definition of indigenous has been ‘fixed’ through social and historical processes that construct indigenous alterity out of many socially determined possibilities, rather than such alterity being pre-existent, essential or self-evident from the start.

Beyond Alterity lays down a challenge to students and scholars of indigenous peoples and rural society in Latin America and, like many innovative books, its implications can be unsettling. By problematising the meaning and usefulness of the concept of ‘indigenous’, and exposing the Occidentalism upon which such ‘othering’ is premised, the book questions the use of ahistorical identities such as ‘indigenous’ as a mode of analysis and challenges much of the historiography and social analysis produced about indigenous peoples to date. It also questions, implicitly, the use of identity as a means of political mobilisation to challenge the inequities of modernisation. In the afterword, Eiss argues that doubting the validity of a particular identity need not lead to a rejection of the legitimacy of indigenous people's claims and political goals because the category of indigenous, like all political identities, is, in the editors’ words, ‘a permanent field of negotiation and dispute whose meanings are always volatile and elusive’ (p. 6). This may be so, but such nuances are not necessarily self-evident inside or outside the academy.