Nomads of the Long Bow: the Siriono of Eastern Bolivia

Holmberg, Allan R., Nomads of the Long Bow: the Siriono of Eastern Bolivia, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950.

Available online.

Reviewed in American Anthropologist © 1951.

From The Myth of the Passive Indian:

In 1950 the anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg published his classic text Nomads of the Longbow, a study of the Bolivian natives known as the Sirionó. Holmberg had lived with the Indians and studied their habits for two years. His assessment, which generations of scholars took as gospel and applied to other indigenous groups, was that the Sirionó were an unimpressive people who had existed for thousands of years without innovation or progress. He claimed the Sirionó had no real history prior to European contact, when Western influences at last put them on a path to genuine social evolution. Holmberg was wrong.