Melville and Frances Herskovits, Arthur Ramos, Nina Rodrigues, Fernando Ortiz, Rómulo Lachatañeré, Ruth Landes, E. Franklin Frazier: these are but a few of the many researchers who in the middle of the twentieth century collectively authored an object of study now known as Afro-Latin America. They wrote classic anthropological texts, recounting details of cultural practice, rituals, histories, spirits, and sacred spaces and objects. We also understand them to have contributed to the field of comparative race relations, in which Brazil or Cuba was compared to the United States, most often with the intention of contrasting racist and segregationist practices of North Americans with the supposed fluidity of racial categories and relative absence of discrimination in Cuban or Brazilian institutions. Scholars have critiqued their assumptions and conclusions even while participating in renewing debates about formulations such as African retentions. Few, if any, have spanned the entirety of this midcentury intellectual output and critically analyzed it with a consistent methodological approach. This book does so, and what emerges, over the course of 668 pages, is a concurrent excavation and questioning of Afro-Latin America as a category of analysis. Cunha does not take a wholly constructivist perspective, arguing for example that ethnographies of Afro-Brazilian or Afro-Cuban culture are illusions, generated via staged performances, armchair fieldwork, or misreadings of prior accounts, though there are plenty of examples of researchers engaging in those as Cunha details the making of ethnographic texts. Instead, the book focuses on the relationships and encounters in the field and the textual objects produced in their aftermath as artifacts that merit contextualization and attention. It does so by drawing on exhaustive and meticulous research in the papers of dozens of anthropologists and their interlocutors in four countries. It is simultaneously the story of how those archives came to exist; of how they were amassed, donated, and made accessible; of the people involved in their creation and curation; and of the intellectual and epistemological stakes in listening critically and with care to the many voices that they contain.The book maps the emergence of Afro-Latin America as a field of study now embedded in so many North American institutions. Correspondence between Rodrigues and Ortiz maps a shared set of intellectual influences from European criminology and their mutual interest in “providing scientific explanations, rather than moral judgements, for the behaviour of the black population” (p. 138). These explanations would be the foundations and pernicious dissemination of notions of brujería, or witchcraft, in both Cuba and Brazil. Letters and correspondence also play a key role in understanding the importance of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, which served as a kind of training ground and patronage center for young anthropologists. The campus was the site of a series of debates that prompted the emergence of the idea of the “plantation as a conceptual artefact,” which subsequently informed the study of postemancipation societies throughout the Americas (p. 340). Before traveling to Brazil for fieldwork, the young anthropologist Ruth Landes, a white woman from New York, spent some time at Fisk, acclimating herself to the South and its racial dynamics. In following both people and objects as they journeyed to North American university campuses, Cuban libraries, Bahian gardens, or private homes in Lagos, Cunha stitches together a perspective through which knowledge and geography are mutually constituted.The book also depends on and scrutinizes storytelling. Laundresses who share their knowledge; personages like Martiniano do Bomfim, who interacted with countless researchers working in Salvador; the archivists who form intense relationships with the material that they curate and care for; the wives and assistants and bureaucrats and technicians—accounts of each of these and dozens more are rendered with acumen but also an eye for the humanness of their pursuits, complete with mistakes, deception, insecurity, ambition, care, and carelessness. Some accounts are more familiar, like the rapacious quality with which Ortiz leaned on his informants and insinuated himself into rituals and societies even as he was writing about Cubans of African descent as bearers of atavistic characteristics that heightened their propensities toward criminality. But the story of his interlocutor and contemporary Rómulo Lachatañeré, the Cuban anthropologist who insisted that Ortiz's approach and conclusions with regard to brujería were both epistemologically violent and intellectually bankrupt, is perhaps less well known. Lachatañeré died young, and there is little public documentation of his work. But his daughter Diana was curator of the special collections and manuscripts at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City for many years. Storytelling emerges as central to Cunha's authorial voice through her transparent account of her encounters with Diana Lachatañeré, which eventually led to access to her father's private papers. Like the book, this story speaks to central intellectual and ethical questions about the production of knowledge and reveals its multilayered contingencies. Most of all, the care of observation and deep intelligence of the book's approach, writing, and conclusions permeate every page.