Anthropologist Andrew Canessa has worked in the same Bolivian Aymara village since 1989, visiting annually for over two decades. This long-term familiarity has allowed him to penetrate the most private zones of community and family. In exploring what being indigenous means to indigenous people, Canessa focuses on the domestic and personal rather than public performances such as marches and elections. The village of Wila Kjarka (Canessa’s pseudonym for the town), despite its seeming isolation, is in constant dialogue with the outside world; when Canessa analyzes identity formation in the kitchen and the marital bed, the wider history of Bolivia and global political currents are a constant spectral presence. The book contrasts the identity jaqi, an Aymara word meaning “real person,” with the categories mestizo, indigenous, and Indian. Canessa is careful and thoughtful with this tricky terminology. The term Indian is pejorative and rooted in centuries of oppression; it is an identity to escape. Indigenous is a newer category with great contemporary currency but does not originate in Andean villages. The people of Wila Kjarka prefer the term jaqi. Canessa asserts that numerous daily social interactions produce these identities.The ethnography contains some more conventional elements, such as an excellent description of how the community marks life’s various stages. But Canessa is serious about connecting community and family to wider social, political, and economic currents. His analysis of Wila Kjarka’s remembrance of the revolutionary changes that swept Bolivia in the 1950s contributes to an understanding of the period’s significance for ordinary rural Bolivians. He does an excellent job of contrasting the documentary record with popular historical memory. The inhabitants of Wila Kjarka remember the 1950s as a true anticolonial moment. Yet Canessa’s informants do not specifically recall the National Revolution of 1952; they instead narrate their own position at the center of events. The people of Wila Kjarka emphasize their fight with a neighboring community and their own role in expelling hacienda owners from the region.Canessa devotes a chapter to education in indigenous communities. All the teachers he studies received their education after Bolivia’s 1994 Educational Reform Law. The reform sought to eradicate racism in the country’s public schools and to promote the use of indigenous language in the classroom. Canessa discovers that, although Wila Kjarka’s teachers come from rural Aymara communities, they often fail to identify ethnically with the children they teach. He makes the argument that individuals who sacrifice so much to get an education and leave their own communities can be determined enemies of rural Aymara lifeways. Canessa also notes the lack of popular support for bilingual education; parents want their children to learn the Spanish language.The book contains an excellent analysis of the terrifying figure of the kharisiri. Known by a variety of names in both Quechua and Aymara, the kharisiri is a malevolent stranger who assaults indigenous people to steal their body fat, leaving them depleted and dying. The people of Wila Kjarka use this ominous figure to draw the boundary between community insiders and outsiders. The kharisiri also explains the historic power of mestizos and whites. These dominant ethnicities lack a relationship with the spiritual forces that the people of Wila Kjarka believe in; their superior position can only be explained by the rapacious exploitation of indigenous people and their bodies.Canessa also explores the ethnic politics of leaders like Felipe Quispe Huanca and Evo Morales in dialogue with identity construction in Wila Kjarka. The examination of Felipe Quispe is especially welcome. While his political career has since been eclipsed by Evo Morales’s, Felipe Quispe is an important proponent of a militant Aymara identity. Canessa makes the observation that Quispe’s Aymara nationalism draws more on nineteenth-century European concepts than it does on daily construction of identity in a place like Wila Kjarka. As for Evo Morales, Canessa lays out an interesting road map of Morales’s evolving political identity, from Indian peasant to mestizo union leader to indigenous president. His analysis of Morales’s public imagery with Bolivian beauty queens is especially thought provoking. Morales is often photographed posing with European-looking beauty contestants and is not afraid to joke around with the contrast and tensions involved. The book concludes by noting Wila Kjarka’s material improvements since Morales assumed the presidency in 2006 and the community’s palpable hope for the future.Canessa, in the book’s introduction, may use the Aymara term q’ara a bit carelessly. Q’ara is an Aymara word for urban mestizos and whites and can be an epithet. Canessa deploys it with more care later, but initially its use is out of step with his otherwise careful handling of loaded ethnic language. Also, he may be a bit one-sided in his presentation of Bolivian teachers’ unions that have bickered with Evo Morales’s government. Overall, Canessa is an astute observer of Bolivian rural life, and he possesses an engaging sense of humor: the book often makes one think and laugh at the same time.