With 246 pages of text, 1724 footnotes and a bibliography of 726 books, Frank Graziano's sweeping contribution to the new cultural studies is a gold mine of data for the student or the casual reader of Latin American history and religion. Rather like a catalog than a thesis, Graziano offers an exposition of the amazing and often bizarre millennial phenomena that have flourished in the New World of Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking America. Graziano calls it "an exposition more than an argument" and follows in the line of scholars like Bernard McGinn and Norman Cohn in their "pursuit of the millennium" to uncover eschatological rhetoric and deeds among both the common people and the intellectual elite. The author has also brought together in one book what has appeared in diverse publications only in Spanish or Portuguese.
First, some definitions. Graziano debates the value of employing terminology like apocalypticism and millenarianism but does not seriously consider using either chiliasm or eschatology. He might have done better with the last two. For our author, the term "millennialism" does not refer so much to the thousand-year reign of Christ or the saints (Revelation 20:1-6) as to religious and political movements led by charismatic, utopian reformers who used the eschatological and apocalyptic language as their frame of reference and impetus for activity. This inclusive term allows Graziano to roam across five centuries and the vast cultural territory of indigenous, European and Europeanised peoples who inhabit his New World. Millennial rhetoric is the common thread examined in syncretic, post-conquest cases. Graziano makes a helpful distinction between "endogenous" and "exogenous" millennialism. The former is self-propelled by salvation agendas of non-oppressed and often imperial peoples (i.e., Europeans) who pursue an eschatology construed in positive terms; the latter emerges in response to external factors that threaten societal or cultural survival and that demand violent action to eradicate a threat or revive an idealised former way of life. The rest of the book is a demonstration of these two conflicting ideologies in the New World.
Indeed, even the very term "New World" conjures up images employed by biblical characters like Isaiah and Ezekiel, or the secular utopians Karl Marx and George Orwell. In Latin America, such language betokened the myths and metaphors of an earthy Paradise, a return to the innocence of Eden, a New Jerusalem reinterpreted with local colour and domesticated, a Religion 34 (2004) 75-92