scribes the actions that have enabled a group of Paraguayan Guaraní to
maintain a significant degree of political autonomy despite similar pressures
to assimilate.

The last three chapters focus on the Toba, whose various groupings have
constituted the largest and most visible indigenous populations in the Ar-
gentine Chaco. Marcela Mendoza describes subsistence practices, gender re-
lations, and aggression among the Western Toba, who have remained
independent of eastern groups throughout both colonial and national his-
tory. Elmer Miller stresses a growing ethnic awareness and commitment
among scattered settlements of Eastern Toba, concentrating on the role of
the religious culto movement in promoting interactions across group bound-
aries. Pablo G. Wright's account of an individual Toba man who has made
Buenos Aires his major residence during the past fifty years provides keen in-
sight into the urbanization processes that increasingly confront all indige-
nous Chaco families. While each author places emphasis on a particular
aspect of social life (environmental values, moral economy, political action,
subsistence and gender relations, religious beliefs and actions, on jobs in the
city), the reader will be struck by similarities in the values shared by all peo-
ples concerned, as well as by the common problems they confront in their ef-
forts to resist full absorption into the nation-states where their values and
sense of unique identity are threatened.

I wish to express my sincere appreciation to Mario and Marcela Mendoza
for constructing maps 1 and 2, to Murial Kirkpatrick for map 9, to Charles
Eberline for his superb job of copyediting, and finally, to each contributing
author who had to put up with my impatient critiques.

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