Piergiorgio di Giminiani, Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018), pp. xiv + 246, $55.00, hb.
controlled resources’ (p. 138). The last two chapters turn to Lehmann’s theorising about social movements. Taking on the oft-used distinction between state and civil society, he argues that the notion that civil society is independent of the state has only limited value for Latin America. The movimento negro lacks a centralised leadership and its strength is in its being a large number of groups with loose ties. It is, more precisely, a network with ‘the potential beneficiaries of their actions ... elsewhere’ (p. 194). The movement’s centre of gravity is in academia. It does not look like classic social movements with strong leadership combined with grassroots culture and support. Like many other recent movements, it forms part of larger transnational movements. (Lehmann also notes that the increasingly influential evangelical churches enjoy substantial autonomy from the state but have largely been ignored by political theorists.) He argues that the quotas campaign has been focused on specific institutions (universities) to prevent the exclusion of non-whites from societal elites. In the short term, he believes this strategy will ‘brown’ the university’s student population, and perhaps, in the long term, the professoriate and the elite. The Prism of Race is an excellent overview of the debates and developments around affirmative action in Brazil over the last quarter-century. Clearly written, deeply researched and judiciously argued, the book is a balanced analysis of contentious issues by a scholar with deep experience in Brazil and strong ties to Brazilian scholars on all sides of the debates about affirmative action.