Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn

Robin M. Wright's Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion, For Those Unborn, published by the University of Texas Press in 1998, is a scholarly ethnography and ethnohistory of Baniwa religion in the northwest Amazon, covering the nineteenth century prophetic movements of the upper Rio Negro and the Icana rivers and tracing the later turn of many Baniwa communities toward evangelical Christianity. Wright conducted extensive fieldwork among the Baniwa over many years. Its strength is that it combines direct ethnographic fieldwork with historical reconstruction of the prophetic movements, a combination that gives the religious change it documents real depth. Its limit is that it centres one people's religious history within a wider and more varied Amazonian indigenous religious landscape, so a claim generalising beyond the Baniwa specifically needs a source addressing the relevant other groups directly.