Indigeneity Landscape and History - Conclusion (original) (raw)
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EXPLORING INDIGENEITY: Introductory Remarks on a Contested Concept
While popular images tend to depict indigenous people as having lived a " simple " and unspoiled lifestyle before they became threatened by the " evils " of modernity and (neo)colonial exploitation, there is evidence for the argument that, in many parts of the world, indigenous people were neither " locally locked " in the deep forest or remote hills, nor socioculturally " isolated, " dissociated from others and the outside world. Historians, political scientists, and anthropologists have shown that trade networks reached not only over great distances but also to remote places, and that, even though they may have been able to elude the power of state societies (Scott 2009), people living in those places were never completely isolated. This makes it even more astonishing that the notion of indigeneity has become a universalist concept that has gained global recognition for representing exactly this: a population that is economically " backward, " due to a lack of modern technology , and politically " independent, " due to the freedom from external forces and global capitalism, and therefore in need of protection. Such images tend to ignore the fact that it was colonialism itself that produced the well-known image of the noble or dangerous savage: simple, innocent, even childish, yet untamed and therefore threatening people, who lived in harmony with nature. But while colonial and postcolonial imaginations rested upon the idea that human progress is inevitably connected with a clearly defined path towards modernization, today's discourse on indigeneity considers the indigenous " way of life " as being endangered by the latter, and therefore as requiring protection. [See for details: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/GerharzIndigeneity\]
Entry on the keyword "Indigeneity" for Keywords for Environmental Studies (NYU Press), edited by Joni Adamson , William A. Gleason and David Naguib Pellow. About the book: Understandings of “nature” have expanded and changed, but the word has not lost importance at any level of discourse: it continues to hold a key place in conversations surrounding thought, ethics, and aesthetics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Sixty essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, each written about a single term, reveal the broad range of quantitative and qualitative approaches critical to the state of the field today. From “ecotourism” to “ecoterrorism,” from “genome” to “species,” this accessible volume illustrates the ways in which scholars are collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to reach shared understandings of key issues—such as extreme weather events or increasing global environmental inequities— in order to facilitate the pursuit of broad collective goals and actions. This book underscores the crucial realization that every discipline has a stake in the central environmental questions of our time, and that interdisciplinary conversations not only enhance, but are requisite to environmental studies today.
Yankwik Mexikayotl, 2014
This paper explores the issue of defining the term "indigeneity." The term has been used over the years by scholars and activists that work on indigenous issues, but it's precise meaning is rarely ever explained. There is merit in leaving the term undefined and allowing for open-ended interpretations; however, this application has its limitations, and those are the subject here. The author also takes a bold step and proposes a working definition of "indigeneity" - a definition that has been picked by scholars of indigeneity and decolonial studies, including Walter D. Mignolo.
Progress in Human Geography, 2017
In this, the second of three reports on indigeneity in geography, the focus is on the social differentiation within embodiments, subjectivities and social positionings within and across indigenous groups. Indigeneity is a social-corporeal positioning within socially-differentiated fields of power, history and relations with land and earth. As a consequence, geography focuses on temporally- and spatially-specific processes by which embodiments and epistemic positions are produced, expressed and diversified. Also significant are the ongoing relations of power at multiple scales that entail the production of indigenous bodies as the marked outcomes of colonial-modern distributions of harm. Taken together, these analyses suggest that the embodiment of indigeneity arises from colonial-modern mediations of intersectional social hierarchies, resulting in multifaceted patterns of differentiated agency.
Social Anthropology, 2007
Alan Barnard presents a well considered critique of Kuper's rejection of the 'indigenous peoples' notion, by arguing a case for its validity, as a relational, legal concept-'a useful tool for political persuasion'-and a concept that is contingent historically and situationally, and not capable of being captured within one nomothetic definition. The author's 'third solution' along such lines is as cogent as it is practical and provides a way out of the definitional conundrum that engulfs the 'indigenous peoples' concept. It is also sensitive to the political problems, needs and aspirations of indigenous groups and the anthropologists who work among and for them. I appreciate Barnard's sensitivity on this score-his recognition that the indigenous peoples debate transcends the theoretical and ideological sensitivities of anthropologistscholars of the western academy. 'Indigenous' is a term applied to people-and by the people to themselves-who are engaged in an often desperate struggle for political rights, for land, for a place and space within a modern nation's economy and society. Identity and self-representation are vital elements of the political platform of such peoples. Politics, in the regions and the time the article is situated in-post-apartheid South and southern Africa-is all about identity, among various ethnic groups, with claims-after generations of oppression by the apartheid state-to rights, land and competing claims to 'first people' status and standing. Like Kuper and Suzman and others, I am disturbed-although not as much as they are, for reasons I will explain below-by the essentialism, primordialism and primitivism, as well as the residual colonialism, inherent in these conceptualisations of identity, which are so much out of step with where anthropology has got to in its post-modern, post-colonial period. Yet, as an anthropologist-one who has been in the southern African field for a fair bit of time, and throughout the politically turbulent 1990s-I also find myself in a dilemma on this issue. To 'the people'-in my case the San, or Bushmen, who over the past dozen years have become much stirred up politically, have organised themselves and are active on many fronts-'cultural identity' has become an extremely important matter. Self-representation is something people expend cultural and political energy on. 'Cau ba kg'õè dim dàò me e', explains Xguga Krisjan of the Kuru Development Trust's Cultural Centre in Ghanzi, Botswana. 'Culture is a way of life' that defines and differentiates the San people in their ethnically pluralist environment. It gives sense and direction to the people, for, as declared in a speech in November 1998 by KDT's indigenous spokesman Robert Morris, 'a nation without a culture is a lost nation' (the nation referred to being the ncoa khoe, the Ghanzi San's term of self-designation). The logo of the San organisation 'First Peoples of the Kalahari' is a fire surrounded by a circle of footprints, flanked by a digging stick on the left and hunting bow on the right-the most salient cultural symbols of these trance-dancing (erstwhile)
Indigeneity : Making and contesting the concept
The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society , 2021
The identities and identification of Indigenous peoples can encompass racial ideas and notions of biological inheritance or difference – and therefore be grounds for racist discourse – though indigeneity is not itself an exclusively racial discourse. However, while a modern discourse of indigeneity is often used to protest state and corporate incursions onto Indigenous soil and build transnational solidarity, it can also be used by states and political parties to exclude others and outsiders. But today, the discourse, of indigeneity emphasizes the survival and continuity of distinct identities despite colonial attempts to eliminate and dispossess Indigenous peoples. The contested politics of indigeneity demonstrate how deeply felt as well as indeterminate such a discourse is, one that is both 'other' to the west and also profoundly entangled within western thought.
Old Wang squatted over a wild banana stalk, slicing it up to feed the pigs. He wore a knit polyblend cap and blue sports coat over his tall gaunt frame, and his machete maintained a rhythmic pattern as he told me of his youth. In the 1930s, Wang had lived in a small upland village. He would travel to a town near the banks of the Mekong River to buy supplies like salt, lead for bullets, and Thai cloth, and during one of these journeys he saw a group of men point at him. They talked among themselves, but loud enough to be heard by him and others. Wang put down his machete and repeated in a whisper what they had said about him decades earlier: "Look, there is one, a tu zhu ren, from the mountains."
Between Ecology and Indigeneity
Borderlands
We live at a time of unprecedented ecological and sociopolitical crisis-climate change, pandemic, extinction, inequality, and repression-yet everywhere it is underpinned by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the persistent refusal of Indigenous authority and sovereignty. Bringing together concerns about bio-and necropolitics, habitat destruction and animal cruelty, corporate-colonial modes of conservation, whitened food systems, and settler-colonial systems of land, business and environmental law, this special issue highlights enduring structures of injustice and creative lines of Indigenous resistance, authority, and cultural-political transformation.
Indigeny–exogeny: the fundamental social dimension?
Anthropos: International Review of Anthropology and Linguistics 111: 513–531, 2016
The indigeny–exogeny dimension has received little attention from sociologists and anthropologists, even though it underlies most of the problems they have been interested in. Exogeny (inherited estrangement from place) is the basis of modernity and of several earlier social forms. Reciprocally, indigeny (inherited embodiment by place) is the key factor in generating the cultural attitudes and social forms that are usually characterised as “traditional”. This claim is discussed with reference to such issues as the difference between tribality and indigeny; relations between indigenes and exogenes; the linkage between exogeny and relative economic success; ideological uses of indigenism and exogenism; the relations between exogeny, politics and culture.