Landscapes of Devils is a beautiful evocation of the history of Argentina’s western Toba people (also known as the Toba-Pilagá) from the late nineteenth century to the present. The author shows how the harsh climate of the Chaco Boreal, at the center of the South American continent, intertwined with memories of places and events among the Tobas, who prior to their defeat by the Argentine army in the early twentieth century were one of the most feared indigenous groups of the region. Through the natives’ understanding of the past, it is possible to understand their complex history as sugar plantation workers in Salta and as subjects evangelized by the British Anglican Church. In the process, historians can benefit from seeing the historical development of the region through the eyes of its indigenous peoples.Gastón Gordillo asserts that memory, for the Toba, is related as much to places as it is to the passage of time. He divides Toba memory into three different places: the bush that is not controlled by whites and where the “ancients” roamed, the sugar plantation of San Martín del Tabacal in Salta (northern Argentina) where the Tobas worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the Anglican mission established in 1930. Only in the late 1960s did time change again, when plantation mechanization eliminated the need for unskilled indigenous laborers such as the Toba. Since then, they have remained in their poverty-stricken settlements in Formosa province.Although his prose is bit clunky at times, and laden with complex nouns, Gordillo shows well the contradictions of each space and time in Tobas historical memory. The Indians today see the bush both as a place of freedom and of poverty, where benevolent devils roam. The “ancient ones,” their ancestors, lived there in freedom, though the Toba recognize that they did not have many material things that they have now. The sugar plantation, in turn, was a place of sexual excess, of backbreaking and dangerous work, and of a surfeit of consumer goods. It was there, close to the unfamiliar mountains and the jungle, that the evil devils resided. The missions, established by the Anglicans in the Tobas’ home territory of Formosa, were also imbued with ambivalent meanings. The Tobas had to submit to a different kind of moral and physical discipline and live in permanent housing. However, the missionaries protected the Indians from state violence and converted them to a religion that the majority apparently adopted happily.For historians, the book offers both a useful overview of the history of this largely ignored territory and a valuable indigenous perspective on historical processes. The author based his research largely on oral histories and did not consult primary historical documents. Nor does he cite all of the available research on the Toba (for example, James Saeger’s excellent and highly relevant The Chaco Mission Frontier [Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000]), but that is not the major strength of this work. Rather, it will be very useful for ethnohistorians who want to imagine how indigenous peoples create historical memories and their own histories. Scholars will find value in these alternate renderings of a process — the integration of indigenous peoples into the plantation complex — that has been well studied by a host of social scientists and historians. Gordillo’s case study can also be read in dialogue with Michael Taussig’s ideas about the devil and commodity fetishism. Gordillo shows great sensitivity in showing how non-Western people imagine their own history. Historians who do research on indigenous peoples, whether in the Chaco or elsewhere, need to take his work into account.