Based on interviews with indigenous and non-indigenous respondents in Mexico, this book shows that indigenous people do not universally endorse collective over individual rights, and argues that it is social and economic history, and not only ethnic identity, that shapes attitudes toward rights. This finding challenges the claims of many indigenous rights activists and scholars who believe that there is a more or less singular indigenous worldview, which centers on a communitarian conception of identity. The research here, however, draws indigenous people into the fold of political subjects whose attitudes may vary, may change, and are shaped by institutions beyond culture alone. It is a valuable and timely contribution to indigenous scholarship and politics.

Politics, Identify, and Mexico's Indigenous Rights Movement is built around a puzzle that emerges from a comparison between the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and a widespread social protest in Oaxaca in 2006. While the Zapatista uprising famously included an indigenous political platform and demands for collective rights, in Oaxaca, which has an even larger ethnically indigenous population than Chiapas, the 2006 social protests did not include any explicitly indigenous agenda, even though many of the protestors were themselves indigenous. Todd Eisenstadt deploys his survey of 5,000 indigenous and nonindigenous respondents in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas (a state with almost no indigenous people, which he uses as a control case) to explain why two Mexican social movements, both driven primarily by indigenous people, should have had such distinct agendas.

Eisenstadt finds that indigenous respondents in Chiapas hold more communitarian views than indigenous respondents in Oaxaca. He attributes this distinction to landholding patterns and the history of conflict in each state. In Chiapas, most indigenous people live on ejido land, which requires collective decision making, whereas many indigenous people in Oaxaca live on communal land which, despite the name, does not involve collective decision making (p. 68). In addition, Chiapas has a long and violent history of conflict between indigenous and nonindigenous people, whereas in Oaxaca, most conflict has been between and within indigenous communities.

Although the author's research reveals important variation across space (indigenous people hold a range of views regarding collective rights), his analysis does not take into account the likelihood of change over time. The survey he uses to explain the difference between the 1994 and 2006 mobilizations in Chiapas and Oaxaca was undertaken in 2002–3. His reliance on this data to explain political events that took place at other times—almost 10 years earlier, and then three years later—involves a presumption that indigenous views are static.

The first half of the 1990s, however, was the high-water mark of indigenous politics, not only in Mexico but also in many parts of Latin America. As Eisenstadt admits, Zapatista leaders adopted an indigenous rights agenda in 1994 only after realizing that indigenous identity was highly resonant at that particular time (p. 88). Indigenous rights was also on the political agenda in Oaxaca in 1995, as activists demanded, and received, the right to conduct local elections according to traditional practice (usos y costumbres). Indigenous identity has been much less politically salient in Mexico since the 2000 election that ended the hegemony of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that if the Zapatista uprising had taken place in 2006, then like the Oaxaca protests, it also would not have coalesced around indigenous rights. Eisenstadt's analysis does not take into account the likely possibility that the difference between the two social movements might be one of time (1994 vs. 2006), rather than place (Chiapas vs. Oaxaca).

Although the book is primarily constructed around a comparison of the two social movements, the author also, and more controversially, frames his research as a referendum on the Zapatista leadership. The survey of indigenous public opinion in Chiapas is meant to assess whether Zapatista leaders represent indigenous attitudes in Chiapas, whether indigenous people express communitarian beliefs, and whether the Zapatistas are the natural interpreters of an indigenous cultural frame (pp. 54–55).

Although Eisenstadt finds that indigenous people in Chiapas are more likely than those in Oaxaca to hold communitarian views, he also asserts that even in Chiapas, most indigenous survey respondents do not hold such views. The evidence for this strong claim, however, is difficult to assess. The author constructed communitarian and pluralist clusters by aggregating eight survey questions, including “the indigenous people are the true stewards of the land” and “people have the responsibility of following the ideas of the community and not question them much” (p. 58). But 72.1% of “Communitarian Indigenous Respondents” (a category that is not clearly explained, but may represent indigenous respondents that sort into a communitarian modal cluster based on their answers to all eight questions) agree with the first statement, and 69.9% agree with the second statement.

I was unable to locate data on how indigenous respondents in Chiapas specifically (as opposed to Chiapas and Oaxaca, combined) answered these questions, or on how indigenous respondents who were not already sorted into a communitarian modal cluster answered these questions. The author does not reveal, for example, how many indigenous respondents in Chiapas agree with the statement that “mandatory communal work is not legal” (one of the eight survey questions designed to assess communitarian attitudes). And indeed, although he asserts that “Zapatista communitarianism was not reflective of the attitudes of most indigenous respondents in Chiapas” (p. 71), elsewhere he also admits that the data “disconfirm the null hypothesis that ethnic identity is an important cause of communitarian attitudes for all but Model 1 (Chiapas)” (p. 63). This sentence is not easy to unravel, but it appears to indicate that in Chiapas, ethnic identity is an important “cause” of communitarian attitudes.

In his introductory chapter, Eisenstadt explains that his approach is “similar to that of anthropologist David Stoll, who took issue with many of the factual inconsistencies in Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu's epic autobiography I Rigoberta Menchu (1984). He aims at moving beyond the activist scholarship that, he believes, has dominated research on the Zapatistas to uncover the “objective circumstances and discernible truths” (p. 15) he believes that his survey reveals.

The author seems to be on much firmer ground, however, in Chapters 6 and 7, where he relaxes the premise that indigenous people hold either individual or communitarian commitments, presenting ethnographic research that shows how people integrate both perspectives, and how their orientations may change in different contexts. Here, he truly captures the agency and complexity of indigenous beliefs and attitudes, and shows that indigenous rights are not, by definition, collective rights.

Many indigenous rights activists, however, including the Zapatistas, already reflect this complexity. In public documents like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, indigenous activists have endorsed both individual and collective rights. Article 1 of the UN declaration states, for example: “Indigenous peoples have the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms.” The Zapatistas have also insisted on a simultaneous commitment to individual and collective rights, in particular with respect to women's rights. In January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) circulated the Zapatista Women's Revolutionary Law, which asserts a range of individual rights that challenge many indigenous traditional practices. The Zapatistas, in fact, were instrumental in orienting the indigenous rights movement around the premise that the moral force of collective rights depends in part on respect for individual rights. This position does seem to come closer to accurately representing the complexity that Eisenstadt reveals.

This book is a work of “critical” indigenous scholarship. It breaks important new ground by taking indigenous people seriously as political actors who hold a range of views, many of which are shaped by forces beyond culture alone. This analysis of political identity challenges the claims of many rights activists, and activist scholars, who have staked indigenous rights on the assertion that indigenous peoples hold a fundamentally distinct and unified worldview. Eisenstadt's findings problematize that belief, with the potential for shifting and proliferating, or undermining, the grounds on which indigenous people make political claims. At the same time, the author seems to overstate the degree to which indigenous people in Chiapas break with communitarian beliefs, and to understate the degree to which indigenous rights movements already grapple with the tensions inherent in a twin commitment to collective and individual rights—probably the central issue of indigenous politics in most countries today.