Wright, Robin M. 1950–

views updated

WRIGHT, Robin M. 1950–

PERSONAL: Born 1950. Education: Stanford University, Ph.D., 1981.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Duke University Press, P.O. Box 90660, Durham, NC 27708-0660.

CAREER: Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, director of Center for Research in Indigenous Ethnology and associate professor of anthropology.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Ismaelillo) Native Peoples in Struggle, E.R.I.N. Publications (Bombay, NY), 1982.

(Translator) Hydroelectric Dams on Brazil's Xingu River and Indigenous Peoples, edited by Leinad Auer de O. Santos and Lucia M. M. de Andrade, Cultural Survival (Cambridge, MA), 1990.

Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1998.

(Translator and editor, with others) Waferinaipe ianheke = A sabedoria dos nossos antepassados: histórias dos hohodene e dos walipere-dakenai do Rio Aiari, narrated by José Marcellino Cornelio, ACIRA/FOIRN (Rio Aiari, Amazonas, Brazil), 1999.

(Editor) Transformando os deuses: os múltiplos sentidos da conservão entre os povos indígenas no Brasil (title means "Transforming the Gods: Multiple Senses of Conversion among Indigenous Peoples in Brazil"), FAPESP (São Paulo, Brazil), 1999.

(Editor, with Neil L. Whitehead) In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2004.

Contributor to scholarly collections of essays and journals, including Annual Review of Anthropology.

SIDELIGHTS: An anthropology professor at Brazil's Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Robin M. Wright has edited and written several works on that country's indigenous peoples. The Baniwa Indians of the northwest Amazon are the subject of his 1998 title Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn. For more than a century, these native people have prophesied the end of the current world civilization and the subsequent re-creation of the original paradise. Such prophecies are passed on by tribal shamans and have their roots deep in the tribe's myths of origin and creation. In his book, Wright looks at the Baniwa religion, and notes how such beliefs have also led to widespread conversion to evangelical Christianity. Wright divides his work into four parts that trace aspects of Baniwa religion from its shamanistic roots to the arrival of the first Christian missionaries.

Reviewing Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion, Thomas Griffiths noted in Cultural Survival Quarterly that "Wright brings together more than two decades of his ethnographic and archival research on the relationships between Baniwa religion, history, and social action." Griffiths further praised Wright's book for the "fabulous ethnographic detail it provides on Baniwa cosmology, ritual and ethnohistory." Journal of Latin American Studies contributor Peter Riviere found Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion a "good and serious book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Cultural Survival Quarterly, December 31, 1999, Thomas Griffiths, review of Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn, p. 75.

Journal of Latin American Studies, February, 2000, Peter Riviere, review of Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion, p. 268.