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Book Review: Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change

construction. The myth of the “Indian” in Latin American, as in North American culture, has developed quite independently, among white elites, from the living indigenous communities of the same periods. This volume documents how the cultural elites of the newly independent nations of Latin America developed a narrative of preColombian native heroes and peoples to legitimate their revolutions, without identifying these mythic figures with the existing native peoples of their own day. It goes on to show how, in the late nineteenth century, this narrative was transformed to replace Indian heroes with the revolutionary fathers of the independence movements. The twentieth century brought a return of interest in the indigenous peoples, both on the symbolic level and in authentic movements of indigenismo and mestije, both with a variety of expressions in art, literature, and culture, as well as politics and proposals for economic change. These different “genealogies” of Latin American states and cultures are documented through the study of patriotic poetry, constitutional rhetoric, postage stamps, place names, independence day celebrations, museum holdings and organization, as well as popular literature. The complex relationship of these elites, mostly Creoles (Spanish born in the New World), with their Spanish origins, their conquistador-progenitors, the mythological Indian predecessors, and the present indigenous populations, are traced out by the images and narratives shaping national identities. This book will be useful in giving the cultural background in which the churches developed during this turbulent period, and in suggesting some methodologies in studying popular Protestant and Catholic pieties and mission strategies. Parallel studies on the images of missionaries in these narratives intrude, only on occasion. However, the method is helpful in beginning to discern how Christians constructed the history of missions during this period, and their relationship to the national destinies of these countries. This is particularly important in constructing an appropriate ethical critique of past Christian behavior and calling for an authentic, inculturated mission in the present and the adaptation of the churches in a post-Constantinian world.