Per axelsson and Peter sKΓΆld (eds.) Indigenous Peoples and Demography: The Complex Relation between Identity and Statistics new York and oxford: berghahn books, 2011. xi + 341 p. $120.00.demographers, like government statisticians, mostly deal with sharply defined categories. where such categories do not emerge naturally, they try to impose them, often forgetting the messiness of that step in the clarity of subsequent statistical analysis. an important instance of this categorical problem arises in gauging ethnicity-whether, as once commonly, defined in terms of proportional ancestry or, as now increasingly, seen as a matter for self-identification. the case of indigenous peoples, the subject of the papers collected in this book, encounters the further challenge of deciding what indigeneity means. the editors duck this question, leaving it to their contributors. they offer a series of partial criteria (historical continuity, attachment to the land, cultural conservatism, subjection to paternalistic policies,β¦) that seem to amount to knowing them when we see them. as to boundaries, the modern test for inclusion, beyond simple assertion, is being accepted as a member by others in the group. the 16 chapters are studies of the population histories of particular indigenous groups, drawing both on official statistics and on the methods of historical and anthropological demography. most of the groups are in the circumpolar north-in Scandinavia, latvia, and Russia. there are also three chapters on the americas, one each on australia and new Zealand, and a somewhat anomalous one on britain (asking "who are the british?"). acknowledged to be missing are treatments of indigenous remnant groups in asia and africa. the authors survey the generally bleak history of government approaches to the "statistical construction" of indigenous people, which were variously aimed at rationalizing and recording policies of protection, assimilation, or simple dispossession. they note the fragmentary data on pre-contact population numbers, the scale of the post-contact collapse, and evidence of recent population upswings resulting from heightened natural increase and strengthened identity politics (and, in some cases, identity economics). Parallels and contrasts among the situations described are covered briefly in an introduction and in the epilogue ("From indigenous demographics to an indigenous demography"). the book originated in a 2006 workshop at umeΓ₯ university in northern Sweden (the editors are with the university's Centre for Sami Research). lengthy chapter bibliographies, index.-G.mcn.