The Indians of Brazil have been much in the news
lately. In the summer of
1988, Kayapo from the
northern state of Para sat
for several weeks in the an- techambers of parliament while delegates drafted the new constitution of Brazil. They were there, in tribal paint and feathers, to urge the delegates to guarantee Indian rights. In March 1989, the same Kayapo In- dians played host to a week-long Indian summit meeting at Altarnira in the heart of the Amazon to protest the building of dams t...
RAD ON 0
by Richard N.Adams
etween 1979 and 1984, the government of Guatemala added a particularly tragic chapter to this century's chronicle of "civilized" bru- tality. In the name of quell-
ing a leftist insurgency movement in the northern departments of the nation, the successive military regimes of General Lu- cas Garcia and General Rios Montt directed a campaign of mass terror against the na- tion's Indian population-a campaign so bloody that it recalled the worst atrocities of...
Guatemala is the only country in Central
America with a large In-
dian population. The In-
dians, mostly of Mayan
ancestry, are probably a majority, although it is hard to know for sure since there is much debate over who is, and who is not, an indigena. Once a fam- ily of Indians moves to the city, they can turn themselves into ladinos (as mestizos are called in much of Central America) af-ter a couple of generations if they learn to think and behave like ladinos-that is, if they speak o...
am a fortyish, middle-class, black American male, with a teaching po- sition at a large state university in California. I have owned my own home for more than ten years, as well as the two cars that are the minimal requirement for life in California. And I will confess to a moderate strain of yuppie hedonism. Year after year my two children are the sole representatives of their race in their classrooms, a fact they sometimes have difficulty remembering. We are the only black family in our subur-...
Ivan Sanders
nce upon a time there
was a region of Europe
united not so much by
language or even history
but something more
elusive-by hard-to-de-fine common sensibilities and affinities. What is referred to ever more longingly to- day as Central Europe has in reality always been a crazy quilt of nationalities inhabiting countries wedged between the vastness of Mother Russia and the paternal rigor of Germany. Yet, because many of these countries were for centuries under Aus- trian tutelage, th...
nce upon a time there
was a region of Europe
united not so much by
language or even history
but by something more
elusive-by hard-to-de-fine common sensibilities and affinities. What is referred to ever more longingly to- day as Central Europe has in reality always been a crazy quilt of nationalities inhabiting countries wedged between the vastness of Mother Russia and the paternal rigor of Germany. Yet, because many of these countries were for centuries under Aus- trian tutelage, their pe...
In my stepfather's cellar I was waiting for the Russians. I was 20 years old, a deserter, with false military identity papers; if I were to befound out by the National Socialists or by the field gendarmerie, I could be shot or hanged on the spot. I had left my unit, an anti-aircraft battery in the Hungarian army, in November of 1944.
It is easy to wax euphoric over the events that swept Eastern Europe
in 1989. The images-flashed
across television screens or played
upon the pages of newspapers and
magazines-still remain fresh in memory: In Hungary, the funeral and re- burial of Imre Nagy, leader of the 1956 Revolution; in East Germany, the joyous flood of people streaming through the Ber- lin Wall, that symbol of division and Cold War; in Poland, the beaming face of Lech Walesa, his Solidarity trade union relegalized; in...
id-December 1989, poetry buffs
in Poland received a Christmas
present they had long been waiting
for: the first "official" (that is, nei-
ther underground nor emigre)
publication in Polish of the se- lected poems of Russian-American Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. The fact that the book was just a reprint of an earlier emigre edition could not detract from the readers' satisfaction: Another taboo had been bro- ken, another long-vilified author had made his way into aboveground circulation....
t is not by chance that psychoanaly-
sis was born in Vienna and came of
age there. In Sigmund Freud's
time-that is, in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries-the cultural
atmosphere in Vienna encouraged a fascination with both mental illness and -sexual problems which was unique in the Western world-a fascination that ex-tended throughout society, even into the imperial court which dominated Viennese social life. The origins of this preoccupation can be traced to the history of the city it...