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Indigenous movements in Latin America, 1992-2004: Controversies, ironies, new directions
Abstract
This review examines literature on indigenous movements in Latin America from 1992 to 2004. It addresses ethnic identity and ethnic activism, in particular the reindianization processes occurring in indigenous communities throughout the region. We explore the impact that states and indigenous mobilizing efforts have had on each other, as well as the role of transnational nongovernmental organizations and para-statal organizations, neoliberalism more broadly, and armed conflict. Shifts in ethnoracial, political, and cultural indigenous discourses are examined, special attention being paid to new deployments of rhetorics concerned with political imaginaries, customary law, culture, and identity. Self-representational strategies will be numerous and dynamic, identities themselves multiple, fluid, and abundantly positional. The challenges these dynamics present for anthropological field research and ethnographic writing are discussed, as is the dialogue between scholars, indigenous and not, and activi...
... If the goal is to analyze such choices rather than judge them, an objective and neutral terminology is needed. (2019,96) Alongside these perspectives on culture and change among Colombian Indigenous groups, Jackson's work has also contributed significantly to our understanding of Indigenous movements and political organizing in Colombia and Latin America more generally, as surveyed in Jackson and Warren (2005, "Indigenous movements in Latin America, 1992-2004, and in their 2002 coedited volume. Jackson's 2019 book (particularly Chapter 4) explores these themes both retrospectively and prospectively, drawing on her decades of work with Indigenous activists in the Vaupés, in Bogotá, and beyond. ...
... This includes local knowledge of animals, plants, soils and landscapes, land and resource management systems, social institutions (taboos, customary rules, totems and proverbs), and worldviews or cosmology (spirituality, beliefs system, sacred natural sites) (see Berkes, 1999). Although the practice of TEK is as old as the ancient hunter-gatherer cultures (Berkes, 1993), the concept only gained international recognition in the 1980s (Jackson & Warren, 2005). Since then, there has been a proliferation of research on TEK at local, regional, and international levels. ...
... This has at least indirectly to do with the Indigenous mobilisations in that state, specifically with the Zapatista uprising in 1994. This movement has had a national and international impact on raising awareness on Indigenous rights and their emancipation, which has opened space for the reappraisal of Indigenous languages and cultures in the region and beyond (Jackson and Warren 2005). In other words, since the Zapatista uprising, critical changes have been taking place in Mexico. ...
In this paper we provide a critical account of selected key linguistic and cultural revitalisation experiences in Mexico. For this aim, the project entitled Proyecto de Revitalización, Mantenimiento y Desarrollo Lingüístico y Cultural (Linguistic and Cultural Revitalisation, Maintenance and Development Project), which has been developed for over two decades, is briefly reviewed. We also analyse some recent youth musical creations, most notably hip hop and rock, and their dissemination via social media. Together with the collaborations that such initiatives have established with different actors in Mexico and around the world, a brief review of revitalisation methodologies and their outcomes is presented. We consider the specific contexts, achievements and challenges of these efforts, hoping to provide an overall evaluation of best practices for language revitalisation. Highlighting their impact in reversing language shift, as a critical reflection on crucial language revitalisation issues, this review also serves to evaluate our own recent efforts, especially in the blossoming realm of the arts and the media.
... Conceptually, this local wisdom system is rooted in knowledge and traditional management approaches. Therefore, it has close relationships with the environment and natural resources, thereby leading to an understanding of the local, standard, or indigenous communities' ecological system, which prevents them from conducting activities capable of ecologically damaging the area (Jackson & Warren, 2005). In 2016, local communities rst managed Mangrove plants, which were more productive due to their ability to grow and breed endemic ora and fauna. ...
This research aims to identify gaps in indicators and variables of Collaborative Governance associated with Mangrove-based ecotourism in Bintan Island, Riau Islands, Indonesia. Furthermore, the conditions of Collaborative Governance are analyzed to obtain an ego-sectoral relationship between stakeholders with the development process carried out according to their respective visions and missions. This is qualitative research with primary and secondary data collected through interviews and transcripts. The data was analyzed using in-depth triangulation and NVivo software to determine the interpretive constructor. The results showed that stakeholders could use Mangrove conservation policies in Bintan Island to form bottom-up and top-down Collaborative Governance models. However, despite finding weak indicators and variables based on NVivo coding in the context of the priority Penta Helix model, the proposed model involving Penta Helix indicators can be implemented. Therefore, stakeholders can provide goods for Mangrove Ecotourism for domestic and foreign tourists
... In the Latin American region, Colombia and Venezuela, and more recently Chile, have reserved congressional seats for Indigenous representatives (Reuters, 2020;Van Cott, 2005). Indigenous peoples' legal, political, and cultural achievements also have been attributed to the emergence of Indigenous political parties (Beck & Mijeski, 2006;Jackson, 2002;Van Cott, 2005), changes in their electoral behavior (Brysk, 2000;Hale, 2002), connections to new populist and leftist movements (Madrid, 2005a, 2005b, Van Cotte 2005, Lucero & Garcia, 2007, permissive institutions, along with weak traditions of class-based organizing (Rice, 2017), and to the role of international factors, neoliberal economic policies, and the need for regime legitimacy (Jackson & Warren, 2005;Sieder, 2007;Van Cott, 2000a). Finally, scholars also have illustrated the empowerment effects that decentralization had on Indigenous communities (Otero, 2004;Pallares, 2002;Postero, ...
This study explores managerial preferences’ variation among mayors due to Indigenous identity. Specifically, we propose Indigenous identity is associated with more outward and collaborative managerial strategies, as well as more within-group collaboration. We test these hypotheses in a 2017 survey data of 43 Indigenous and 34 non-Indigenous sitting mayors, covering 77 Guatemalan municipalities. Findings are mixed. While different preferences in managerial styles exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous mayors, they mismatch our expectations. However, results suggest that the share of Indigenous population is associated with a stronger mayoral outward management orientation and a higher likelihood to collaborate with an Indigenous partner organization.
... The growing recognition of Indigenous and community rights over forests reflects shifts in development and environmental conservation theory, as well as self-identified and well organised forest-dependent communities staking their ancestral claims to land and resources. When faced with local protest while implementing reforms to decentralise forest governance and regularise landholding, major development donors, such as the World Bank, increasingly supported formalised, collective land rights arrangements (Jackson and Warren, 2005;Bryan, 2012;. Since the 1990s, the failure of exclusionary models to achieve biodiversity and forest conservation has also led to the inclusion of Indigenous and local communities via extractive reserves, Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories, and co-management arrangements. ...
Addressing poverty is an urgent global priority. Many of the world's poor and vulnerable people live in or near forests and rely on trees and other natural resources to support their livelihoods. Effectively tackling poverty and making progress toward the first of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” must therefore consider forests and trees. But what do we know about the potential for forests and tree-based systems to contribute to poverty alleviation? This Special Issue responds to this question. It synthesises and presents available scientific evidence on the role of forests and tree-based systems in alleviating and, ultimately, eradicating poverty. The articles compiled here also develop new conceptual frameworks, identify research frontiers, and draw out specific recommendations for policy. The scope is global, although emphasis is placed on low- and middle-income countries where the majority of the world's poorest people live. This introductory article stakes out the conceptual, empirical and policy terrain relating to forests, trees and poverty and provides an overview of the contribution of the other seven articles in this collection. This Special Issue has direct implications for researchers, policymakers and other decision-makers related to the role of forests and tree-based systems in poverty alleviation. The included articles frame the relationships between forests, trees and poverty, identify research gaps and synthesize evidence to inform policy.
... For instance, in Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia, deforestation rates were lower on titled Indigenous territories compared to matched areas outside by 3-88% between 2001 and 2013 17 . However, these studies focused on countries where strong Indigenous movements influenced constitutional reforms, resulting in greater governmental and legal recognition and protection of Indigenous rights and land titling 22,23 . In much of Africa and Asia, enhanced recognition and protection is at best nascent or, at worst, governance and law work against Indigenous land rights 4 . ...
Area-based protection is the cornerstone of international conservation policy. The contribution of Indigenous Lands (ILs)—areas traditionally owned, managed, used or occupied by Indigenous Peoples—is increasingly viewed as critical in delivering on international goals. A key question is whether deforestation and degradation are reduced on ILs pan-tropically and their effectiveness relative to Protected Areas (PAs). We estimate deforestation and degradation rates from 2010 to 2018 across 3.4 millon km² (Mkm²) ILs, 2 Mkm² of PAs and 1.7 Mkm² of overlapped Protected Indigenous Areas (PIAs) relative to matched counterfactual non-protected areas. Deforestation is reduced in ILs relative to non-protected areas across the tropics, avoiding deforestation comparably to PAs and PIAs except in Africa, where they avoid more. Similarly, degradation is reduced in ILs relative to non-protected areas, broadly performing comparably to PAs and PIAs. Indigenous support is central to forest conservation plans, underscoring the need for conservation to support their rights and recognize their contributions.
... The growing recognition of Indigenous and community rights over forests since the 1980s reflects shifts in development and environmental conservation theory, as well as selfidentified and well-organized forest-reliant communities staking their ancestral claims to land and resources. When faced with local protest while implementing forest governance reforms, major development donors, such as the World Bank, increasingly supported formalized, collective land rights arrangements (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015;Bryan, 2012;Jackson and Warren, 2005). Since the 1990s, the failure of exclusionary models to consistently achieve biodiversity and forest conservation without negatively affecting human rights has also led to the inclusion of Indigenous and local communities in forest management via extractive reserves, Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories, and co-management arrangements (Brockington, 2004;Hutton et al., 2005). ...
This article examines global trends likely to influence forests and tree-based systems and considers the poverty implications of these interactions. The trends, identified through a series of expert discussions and review of the literature, include: (i) climatic impacts mediated through changes in forests, (ii) growth in commodity markets, (iii) shifts in private and public forest sector financing, (iv) technological advances and rising interconnectivity, (v) global socio-political movements, and (vi) emerging infectious diseases. These trends bring opportunities and risks to the forest-reliant poor. A review of available evidence suggests that in a business-as-usual scenario, the cumulative risks posed by these global forces, in conjunction with limited rights, resources, and skills required to prosper from global changes, are likely to place poor and transient poor households under additional stress. The article concludes with an assessment of how interventions for enhancing forest management, combined with supportive policy and institutional conditions, can contribute to a different and more prosperous future for forests and people.
... A organização dos povos guarani que vivem no território brasileiro, em comissões articuladas ao movimento indígena mais amplo, é relativamente recente e acompanha as mudanças no cenário indigenista no Brasil e em toda América do Sul. Jackson e Warren (2005) mostram que as reformas constitucionais que ocorreram em vários países do continente, no final do século XX, levaram à valorização das diferenças e da indianidade, num contexto transnacional de defesa dos direitos humanos e do ambientalismo (ver também Oliveira 2001). ...
O artigo descreve e analisa eventos alimentares produzidos entre os Guarani-Mbya, tendo como pano de fundo o reordenamento das alianças com os brancos decorrente das mudanças nas políticas indigenistas brasileiras, as quais são parte do fluxo democrático que surge na América Latina em fins do século XX. Propõe-se examinar as práticas alimentares guarani-mbya para mostrar como se dão, no âmbito local, as redes de relações que incluem os Guarani-Mbya e os brancos. Por outro lado, aspectos sociológicos e cosmológicos particulares à alimentação mbya são destacados. Através dos modos de preparar, servir e comer que configuram o evento alimentar mbya, evidencia-se o movimento alternado que se direciona, ora para o interior, para a parentela com o foco no grupo de residentes, ora para o exterior, quando a comensalidade agrega parentes e não parentes, das esferas local e multilocal, com um alcance que se estende aos brancos. A etnografia identifica, assim, um vetor centrífugo e outro centrípeto na comensalidade guarani-mbya.
... As an international norm and concept, self-determination is rooted in freedom and equality for individuals and groups, in a way that entitles them to participate, change, or transform governing institutional orders, including those that are seen as a remedy of historical marginalized processes (Anaya, 1996). Broader purposes and goals of indigenous self-determination movements can entail 1) greater autonomy from a nation-state as a form of self-government; 2) greater participation in decisionmaking institutions at higher political levels such as legislatures or electoral coalitions; or 3) institutional changes that expand indigenous self-determination or seek to obtain state power to achieve social change (Hawkes, 2002;Jackson and Warren, 2005;Cornell, 2015;Petray and Pendergrast, 2018;Merino, 2020;Sidorova and Rice, 2020). The literature of self-determination emphasizes plurality and diversity of indigenous activism to continuously contest hierarchical relationships between governors and their subjectivities, while understanding how these produce and expand their self-determination through state, market, civil society, coalitions, and everyday practices (Gonzales and Gonzalez, 2015;Merino, 2020). ...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Peruvian government failed to protect its sparsely populated Amazon region. While infections were still rising, resource extraction was quickly approved to continue operations as a declared essential service that permitted an influx of workers into vulnerable indigenous territories despite weak or almost absent local healthcare. This article analyzes territorial counteraction as an indigenous response to pandemic national state failure, highlighted in a case of particularly conflictive stakes of resource control: Peru’s largest liquid natural gas extraction site Camisea in the Upper Amazon, home to several indigenous groups in the Lower Urubamba who engaged in collective action to create their own district. Frustration with the state’s handling of the crisis prompted indigenous counteraction to take COVID-19 measures and territorial control into their own hands. By blocking boat traffic on their main river, they effectively cut off their remote and roadless Amazon district off from the outside world. Local indigenous control had already been on the rise after the region had successfully fought for its own formal subnational administrative jurisdiction in 2016, named Megantoni district. The pandemic then created a moment of full indigenous territorial control that openly declared itself as a response and replacement of a failed national state. Drawing on political ecology, we analyze this as an interesting catalyst moment that elevated long-standing critiques of inequalities, and state neglect into new negotiations of territory and power between the state and indigenous self-determination, with potentially far-reaching implications on state-indigenous power dynamics and territorial control, beyond the pandemic.
... With the help of NGOs, the hunter-gatherers in the southern Cameroonian forests were able to express their connection with the international notion of 'indigenous people' and demand solutions to their specific problems, namely, forest degradation, poor living conditions, non-recognition of ancestral land rights, poor access to revenue from forest taxes (wildlife and community forests), little access to citizenship and weak representation in political bodies; they also presented the problem of the autonomy of the Pygmy chieftainships visà-vis their Bantu neighbours (Assembe Mvondo 2006b, Bigombe Logo et al. 2006, ILO, MINAS and MINEPAT 2008. Partly for the historical reasons mentioned above, these demands are not supported by a well-structured, truly indigenous movement, as in Latin America (Jackson and Warren 2005) although there are several associations: Baka associations such as ASBAK (Dkamela 2003), Bagyeli associations such as ADEBAGO (Abe Eyebe 2009) and local NGOs such as CADDAP, which is run by a Baka woman. These initiatives are usually backed by international NGOs that establish national partnerships to support the indigenous organisations. ...
In Indigenous and rural communities of the Global South, relationships between humans, water, and life are understood and organized in various ways, with water often viewed as intrinsically linked to land. These resources not only serve the tangible purpose of supporting livelihoods but also form a fundamental basis for intangible aspects such as culture, identity, and epistemic-ontological foundations. In this article, the interconnected rights to both water and land for these communities are conceptualized as "hydro-territorial rights"
(HTRs). This concept encompasses the formal and/or customary norms and practices related to the ownership, access, control, and use of both land and water, which are regarded as interrelated entities. Theoretically, this article draws on rights-based critical institutionalism and political ecology approaches to natural resource governance, including the legal-pluralist distinction between de jure rights on paper and de facto rights in
practice. The aim is to identify and comparatively analyze contentious situations and conflicts surrounding water
and land rights in rural Indigenous contexts across three postcolonial settings in the Global South. Methodologically,
we employ a comparative strategy based on theory and literature reviews to examine conflictual hydroterritorial rights situations within selected Indigenous localities in Bolivia, India, and Tanzania. This analysis is complemented by interviews with local actors and observations in these three settings. Among our findings, we highlight both conflicts and temporary alliances between local and external interests, as well as practices and mechanisms related to the colonial legacy. We also explore how contemporary capitalist developmental interventions in these areas have impacted communities’ access to and rights over local water and land resources, resulting in significant consequences for local livelihoods and ethno-cultural-territorial identities.
Numerous studies have focused on how states, bureaucracies, and social movements make race. Less explored, however, are the intrastate bureaucratic jurisdictional struggles to determine the official ethnoracial categorization of populations. Drawing on 19 interviews with government officials and Indigenous leaders as well as a content analysis of regulation and news, I examine the implementation of the Law of Prior Consultation in Peru. This law is unique because it establishes “objective” and “subjective” criteria that allow the state to determine who should be considered Indigenous in Peru. I show that official indigeneity arises from competition between government agencies. Officials from these agencies seek to demonstrate who has the stewardship to define who should be considered Indigenous by interpreting and reinterpreting the law’s criteria. My research also highlights the dynamics of resistance/accommodation between Indigenous organizations and official indigeneity.
Assessments of resilience and sustainability are increasingly important for mitigating the effects of climate change, especially in rural areas such as the Southern Great Plains (SGP) in the United States. While ecological and economic research on rural sustainability is necessary, we argue that a social approach is essential to understanding how to promote resilient futures. Social capital facilitates access to, and transference of resources individuals need to achieve individual and collective ends. Over the past three decades, research on social capital has advanced across multiple disciplines to address a variety of social phenomena, issues, and outcomes. Building on previous research in the SGP, we focus on community-level social capital through a qualitative content analysis of 65 key informant interviews across the three counties in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Colorado. Findings suggest that while in-group social capital is strong, resistance to outsiders and government distrust create significant barriers to promoting more resilient communities. Our study contributes to a prolific body of literature on rural sustainability and disaster mitigation. It also develops important insights into the dynamic, contingent, and interdependent nature of social capital. We conclude with recommendations on how to promote community agency while cultivating collaborative relationships between rural communities and government institutions in the interest of rural resilience.
The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe and analyze how Mayan language instructors in the Faculty of Humanities at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala use technology in their classrooms. In this research, indigenous professors shared their experiences as Kaqchikel and K’iche’ language instructors at the higher education level. A narrative qualitative case study was applied to discover the practices and insights of two Kaqchikel Mayan language instructor and one K’iche’ Mayan language instructor by addressing the following questions: (1) How do the professors use technology while teaching IDI3 Mayan Language in the Faculty of Humanities at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala? (2) In what ways do indigenous language speaker professors describe their experience of teaching their language and culture to Spanish language speaking at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala? (3) In what ways do students engage with the use of technology for the purpose of acquiring language skills in the Mayan language as a third language? The findings showed that teachers know how to use technology and why they don’t use it in the classroom. These findings reveal Mayan instructors’ experiences and remembrances of teaching Mayan language and culture to undergrad students who are mostly Spanish speakers.
Furthermore, the participants agreed on how students’ engagement increased by combining a variety of class activities and technological tools to learn the language. These results suggest that there would be value in the creation of a variety of workshops of how to use technology in the classroom. This may be possible by providing different professional growth opportunities.
Este trabajo colectivo constituye una muestra significativa de la escena musical del rap en lenguas originarias con la que hemos trabajado desde el ADLI, por lo que no fue suscitado al azar, aunque éste haya jugado un papel en su configuración. Se invitaron vo- ces de todo tipo que se consideraron representativas y con quienes de una u otra manera ya se estaba trabajando en Festivales e incluso producciones musicales (e.g. ADN MAYA). No todos pudieron acudir a la cita (entre otros, Pat Boy, el Mágico, Maria Reyna), porque existía un plazo de entrega. Esto se compensa con muestras de este trabajo musical y líri- co en espacios digitales, concretamente en el sitio Tlacuatzin.com, con lo que este libro también es de libre acceso y busca presentarse en soportes multimedia, queda abierto a la crítica y el comentario, recreando la conversación. El resultado incluye un conjunto de algunas de las voces primigenias más representativas de la escena musical no solo rapera originaria, no solo en México.
Post‐structuralism's focus on hegemonic power, subjection, and political opportunity remains pre‐eminent in political anthropology, but its appropriateness for the post‐neoliberal conjuncture is up for question. While the arrival of neoliberal multiculturalism brought contingent identities and strategic deployment of culture‐as‐product into focus, questions remain about how and why some groups mobilize to claim cultural rights while others decline to do so. For this reason, this article returns to an earlier concern in Latin American political anthropology with cultural differences in the conceptualization and execution of political organization and power. This argument is based on two ethnographic case studies—from the Venezuelan Pume and the Ecuadorian Shuar—that demonstrate the contemporary significance for indigenous politics of evolving autochthonous notions of power and their expression in conventional forms of social organization. These politico‐cultural qualities are already constituting the form and objectives of indigenous political action prior to their expression in the public fora whose terms and opportunities are often presented as driving indigenous people's politics. Such an approach is important for understanding the dilemmas of solidarity as indigenous groups become more empowered and diverse in their political orientations.
This is an Original Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Heritage & Society on 2023, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/2159032X.2023.2226570
Heritage has been widely discussed in Latin America in general, and in Argentina in particular, in the last two decades. There have been debates about heritage within academic circles, especially in the social sciences and humanities, it has been a concern of state public administration, linked to tourism development, and it is frequently mentioned in the media. Furthermore, heritage has become an arena of dispute and struggle of subordinate groups who are in the process of regaining their identities and cultural ways, achieving social visibility, and making their voices heard. This paper explores the relationship between heritage and Original Peoples in Argentina from the indigenous point of view. Throughout this article, readers will find different indigenous voices explaining what they consider Indigenous Peoples’ main patrimony, what type of relations they establish with it, and how heritage is involved in their current projects, claims, and struggles, especially over their ancestral territories. As shown in this paper, Indigenous Peoples in Argentina seek to recover their heritage to re-establish the order and balance of the territorial forces and to demonstrate their pre-existence: that is, that they were in certain places before the formation of the modern nation-state and, therefore, that they have rights over these lands. In addition, claims and disputes over heritage are favoring the re-emergence and strengthening of indigenous spirituality and cultural practices.
This article argues that since the recovery of democracy in Chile in the early 1990s, the state has been reshaping the Indigenous socio‐political landscape by adopting neoliberal multiculturalism as a governance model. By not posing significant challenges to the state's neoliberal political and economic priorities, Indigenous cultural activity has been carefully channelled to meet state expectations of what constitutes urban indigeneity. Drawing on the minority and multicultural studies literature and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses how Mapuche civil society navigates the complexities of two relational models of state/ethnic minority interaction: ethno‐bureaucracy and strategic essentialism. Although Mapuche associations have tried to accommodate their interests within the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism, the article argues that this governance model has established incentives for inclusion and exclusion in the socio‐political apparatus, resulting in a fragmentation of the Mapuche associative landscape in urban Chile.
Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy – to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.
The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this text also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology. The first section of the text provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica, and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of book. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies—from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations—and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The book concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods.
Using collaborative research methods with local organisations, this study analyses collective trauma in Colombia’s Pacific coast. It examines ethnoterritorial groups, or collectivities whose identities and political organising reflect a distinct territorial consciousness characterised by intercultural, environmental and socio-economic relationships to land. ‘Peer interviewers’ adapted research instruments and ethics to their communities, highlighting oral testimonies and the collective construction of knowledge. They connected emotionally and intellectually with their people revealing key information about harmful events undermining the life-worlds of their communities. Building on this work, the article breaks the trauma process into different phases starting with traumatogenic events that cause communal distress and produce a social and signification crisis. It claims that territories represent a form of knowledge and produce feedback effects in the trauma process that help people connect emotionally and strategically with place. The article concludes that harmful events are not the same as collective trauma. Collective trauma is constructed in a process of signification that uncovers and interprets a negative collective impact and delimits the group of sufferers.
Narrativas poderosasdescrevem as nações latino-americanas comofundamentalmente mestiças. Essas narrativasdificultaram o reconhecimento do racismona região, mas as recentes viradasmulticulturalistas aumentaram oreconhecimento das culturas e das identidades negras eindígenas. O multiculturalismo podefocar em questões de identidade evisibilidade e abordar formas despreocupadas de racismo,mas também pode desviar a atenção doracismo estrutural e da desigualdaderacializada e, assim, restringir iniciativas antirracistasmais amplas. Além disso, múltiplos entendimentos decomo o racismo e o antirracismo seinserem em projetos de transformação socialtornam o racismo uma questão complexa emultifacetada. Os sete ensaios de Contra oracismo investigam atores no Brasil, Colômbia,Equador e México que vão além da política dereconhecimento para abordar desigualdadesestruturais e construir um terreno comum comoutros grupos marginalizados. Asorganizações deste estudo defendem uma abordagem detransformação estrutural social quepromova alianças, seja inclusiva e inspiradapor uma imaginação radical.
In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well-being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correia’s ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America’s settler frontiers.
Esther Jean Langdon tem uma longa, densa e impactante trajetória nas antropologias brasileira, latino-americana e mundial. Esta coletânea é uma homenagem a sua vida, sua obra e seu percurso de pesquisa e ensino. Reunimos em torno do tema-síntese de uma antropologia da práxis um conjunto de textos de antropólogos e antropólogas sobre as temáticas centrais de seu trabalho: xamanismo; práticas e políticas em saúde; narrativa, ritual e performance; e uma parte final com histórias e memórias de sua trajetória. Os textos são reverberações diretas ou indiretas da obra e da atuação acadêmica de Jean, marcadas pela perspectiva de uma antropologia da periferia, do sul global e plural, e por sua imensa capacidade de trabalhar em parceria não apenas com colegas de diferentes partes do mundo, mas principalmente com seus sujeitos de pesquisa e interlocução. Sua antropologia da práxis traz também uma concepção da antropologia como práxis social, atenta à sua contribuição para uma sociedade mais justa, igualitária e de plenos direitos.
Indigenous resistance has been a central aspect of Latin American history since the Spanish invasion and, in the late twentieth century, Indigenous movements emerged as some of the most significant social actors in the region. This was related to the collapse of Leftist class‐based politics as well as the use of extreme state violence against the Indigenous in the context of civil wars and other struggles. Correspondingly, scholarship on the Indigenous has shifted in focus from issues of cultural extinction and survival to the relationship of Indigenous movements to nation‐states, transnational networks, issues internal to Indigenous movements, decolonization, and new methodological approaches.
This pioneering work explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between these conflicts and changes in collective self-identification, claim-making, and rent-seeking dynamics? And how, in turn, are these changes driven by broader institutional, legal and policy reforms? By shifting the focus to the 'post-recognition,' this unique study sets the agenda for a new generation of research on the practical consequences of the employment of ethnic-based rights. To develop the core argument on the links between recognition reforms and 'recognition conflicts', Lorenza Fontana draws on extensive empirical material and case studies from three Andean countries – Bolivia, Colombia and Peru – which have been global forerunners in the implementation of recognition politics.
This pioneering work explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between these conflicts and changes in collective self-identification, claim-making, and rent-seeking dynamics? And how, in turn, are these changes driven by broader institutional, legal and policy reforms? By shifting the focus to the 'post-recognition,' this unique study sets the agenda for a new generation of research on the practical consequences of the employment of ethnic-based rights. To develop the core argument on the links between recognition reforms and 'recognition conflicts', Lorenza Fontana draws on extensive empirical material and case studies from three Andean countries – Bolivia, Colombia and Peru – which have been global forerunners in the implementation of recognition politics.
This article investigates how Xinka indigeneity disrupts the dominant order in Guatemala. Our analysis below focus on Xinka politics in a Rancièrian sense. Our main objective is to understand how, and to what extent, the Xinka are becoming visible bodies, sayable names, and audible voices, thus, disrupting the status quo in Guatemala. This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship examining the complex and heterogeneous political positions of indigenous peoples in Latin America under processes of state decentralization, economic privatization, and market deregulation, which transform the relationships between states and indigenous peoples and influence indigenous forms of organizing. Using the case of the Xinka conflictual engagement with a mining project as a lens we argue that Xinka opposition to mining articulates indigeneity and political mobilization, thus disrrupting the current social order in Guatemala. The Xinka become political subjects by claiming and exercising capacities they allegedly lack and by enacting rights they are not entitled to claim. The Xinka act as if they already possess that which is denied to them to challenge the inegalitarian partition of the sensible: what can be named, what can be seen, what can be counted. Their activism and their various tactics render their position, as rights-holders, explicit and accessible to an audience. These tactics include their irreverence as expressed in monitoring and deciding who is allowed to transit through a national road, bringing their cases to domestic and foreign courts, as well as detaining policemen and employees of the mining company. As we will discuss, the Xinka identity is not fixed in some essentialized past, but rather, it is a process that conjoins a collective position and the political subjects who articulate the position.
This paper offers a brief overview that seeks to make a series of approaches to an undeniably complex topic: the struggle of indigenous peoples in the context of colonialization processes worldwide, national and local scales. This survey first characterizes, systematizes, and relates the efforts made by some 350 million people worldwide (including more than 15 million indigenous people from Mexico) to safeguard their unique historical and cultural identity in the face of their respective mainstream society over the past sixty years. This will provide a basis to look at the challenges that a country like Mexico faces in preserving the spatial or territorial matrix that guarantees the sustenance and survival of these peoples, and their beliefs, traditions, ways of life, and deep knowledge regarding the conservation and regeneration of natural resources for the benefit of all of human society. At this level of analysis, this study seeks to gain deeper insights into strategies for preserving and regenerating habitat used by an ancestral Zapotec community living in the Chinantla Highlands region, in the northern mountain ranges of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The paper concludes by highlighting the strengths of a historical memory that hews to epistemological categories utterly different from those prevailing in Western culture in the day-today engagement of these cultures with their land and their natural surroundings.
The expectations of intercultural discourse promoted by international cooperation in Peru does not seem to hold against the tensions formed from negotiating development. Instead of a depoliticised understanding of interculturality – found in the literature about Peru and elsewhere – the findings of this research urge to expose the complexity of intercultural practice. This call for the re-politicisation of cross-cultural interactions under the umbrella of interculturality. To sustain my argument I will present the case of Andean communities and development experts encounters amid a development action-research project. This case serves to understand that even in the occasions in which heterogeneous groups are supposed to benefit from interaction, there are tensions arising from it. Hence, making such tensions an inseparable element for the analysis of intercultural practice.
Autonomy carries the promise of resolving longstanding distributive inequalities between indigenous and non-indigenous groups. Yet, contemporary autonomy arrangements have often been associated instead with a reduction in native communities' access to needed public goods and services. I situate these negative effects within a broader autonomy-representation dilemma: autonomy provides indigenous groups with more responsive coethnic leaders, but these leaders frequently face difficulties in collecting and deploying revenue. These capacity constraints often arise from the way national governments have recognized autonomy. As such, pursuing coethnic representation within the state might—under certain conditions—be more likely to provide indigenous groups with needed goods and services. Drawing on natural experimental evidence and an original survey of indigenous community presidents from Peru, I first demonstrate that achieving coethnic political representation within the state can expand indigenous groups' access to the public good they most need: water. I then illustrate how capacity constraints that arise from autonomy have prevented native groups in Bolivia's autonomous municipalities from achieving similar distributive gains. Ultimately, the findings provide insights for understanding the sources of—and potential institutional remedies for—indigenous groups' unequal access to local public goods in the Americas and beyond.
Past research has shown that national language policies can attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and that potential FDI-host countries coordinate their domestic language policies in anticipation of this. While the increased FDI-inflows arising from such language policies may benefit some members of society, these shifts in policy can adversely affect those whose spoken languages are not perceived as beneficial for attracting FDI inflows – primarily indigenous language speakers. This paper develops a theoretical framework to accordingly suggest that FDI inflows have contributed to declines in the usage and protection of indigenous languages in recent decades. This hypothesis is tested on a country-year sample of Latin American countries for the period 1988–2018. In evaluating this hypothesis with the aid of a newly constructed and comprehensive measure of time varying indigenous language usage spanning 20 Latin American countries and 30 years, FDI is determined to be a statistically significant contributor to the decline of indigenous language usage in contemporary Latin America.
This chapter briefly reviews the differential ways non-human life became bound up in colonial and neo-colonial projects, and though its central focus explores how concerns for non-human life animate indigenous, decolonial and anticapitalist politics in Latin America today. We draw upon scholarship that has explored the symbolic and material absorption of other beings into politics—through discursive regimes, practices of governance, and contests over resources and the equitable distribution of environmental risk. This chapter focuses attention on efforts to include nonhuman entities in the polity, or the arena of political consideration, which is predicated on two related propositions that we describe. First, nonhuman entities have political standing because they are actors in the world in ways that Eurocentric political traditions and ontologies have failed to recognize. Second, recognition of ontological difference, or the possibility of other worlds, is inherently a political challenge to Eurocentric and colonial ways of knowing and acting in the world. Latin American Indigenous and social justice movements have been critical to this reconstitution of the political.
In this article, I argue that imagining the end of ends through narratives about the end of the world and the undead may be mobilised to address a crisis of ends and means. Specifically, I analyze jokes and fantasies that my indigenous Shuar interlocutors from the Ecuadorian Amazon shared with me in the context of protests in favour of the construction of a road on their territory. What brings them together is the operation they perform on previously existing material, systematically inverting them to make of death and extermination an object of desire. Furthermore, I show that fantasising the extermination of all Shuar or joking about having sex with the undead means imagining the end of kinship as desirable and makes it possible to perceive more clearly the failure of indigenous politics.
The growing literature that analyzes the production of ethnoracial categories has focused primarily on the role of nation-states, social movements, and transnational trends. The internal institutional debates that influence these processes have received limited attention, and the role of census-takers in particular remains largely unexplored. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 54 census-takers in the 2017 Peruvian National Census, this paper argues that census-takers are influential actors in the production of ethnoracial categories and can be considered street-level bureaucrats. In our study, census-takers’ interpretations of the ethnoracial question and categories emphasized dimensions of race and ethnicity that increased the likelihood of residents to identify as mestizos. These findings suggest that, despite their temporary role, census-takers are important actors in the production of ethnoracial categories in societies where these are contested.
Latin American indigenous territories (both rural and urban) are experiencing a resurgence of academic interest, partly for their potential to 'repoliticise nature' in response to the 'ruinations' of colonialism and extractive capitalism (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; de Sousa Santos, 2014). As these debates on territory develop in social science, I draw from de Sousa Santos’ work on the epistemologies of the south (2018), which explores the knowledges created in resistance, with political ecology, which approaches nature as produced through politics, history and culture, to offer an empirical reading of the relationships between place, knowledge and the ‘repoliticisation of nature’ in the TIPNIS, Bolivia. Specifically, examining how protected area conservation is being rearticulated within agendas for territorial autonomy during a conflict over extractive infrastructure. In doing so, I reveal how conservation has informed the repoliticisation of nature in the TIPNIS, opening up trajectories for recognising and supporting plurality, difference and autonomy as they are permeated and created within dominant political economies and ecologies.
Why do some indigenous groups achieve coethnic political representation while others do not? In this paper, I highlight the primary role of communal property in shaping indigenous representation. While scholars often laud the developmental benefits of communal land titling, I argue that formalizing collectively held land can inhibit indigenous coordination to achieve political representation. Where communal land is informally held, indigenous groups are more likely to invest in traditional institutions that facilitate collective action to elect coethnic candidates to political office. Conversely, titling communal property secures indigenous land access but in the process erodes traditional institutions that would otherwise promote collective action during elections. I test my argument using a multi-method approach that includes interviews and experiments with three-hundred Peruvian indigenous leaders, historical land-title data, and information scraped from mayoral candidate CVs. The findings suggest that the oft-cited economic benefits of collective property may generate negative political effects.
Existing work on state building focuses on the creation of modern bureaucracies and institutions for education and taxation but generally neglects to point to communal property regimes as tools of statecraft. Political science scholars who focus on ethnic communal lands in the Americas emphasize the rise of formal multicultural institutions, including Indigenous land rights, but are skeptical about governments’ willingness to title large extensions of land to Indigenous or other ethnic groups because of opposing economic interests. Focusing on the titling of 12 percent of Honduras’s territory between 2012 and 2016, this article uses semi-structured elite interviews, land titling data, field notes from three months in rural and urban sites in Honduras, and drug-trafficking reports to examine the motivation of officials in the central government. Evidence suggests that the central government views and uses ethnic land titling as a strategy to reclaim territorial dominance in contested locations that lack state presence.
Social citizenship, understood as the exercise of a body of rights to welfare which the state — in representation of society — grants all human beings as a guarantee of their dignity, has become a key component of modern democracy (Marshall 1964).1 However, the acceptance of social citizenship was a long and difficult process. As Bryan Turner (1990) has shown, its formal recognition was not achieved merely through the benevolence of enlightened parliamentarians, but was rather a result of the struggles of organisations and parties representing the interests of less privileged classes during different historical periods. Thus, social citizenship has implied the rise and consolidation of class identities vis-à-vis a state which implements certain social policies. Over the last 30 years, in many countries across the world, including those of Latin America, a new struggle has emerged: the struggle for the right to different cultural and ethnic identities, where the latter are understood to be distinct from national identities officially proclaimed by national states. This idea has been defined as cultural citizenship (Kymlicka 1996; Pakulski 1997; Rosaldo 1997), or ethnic citizenship (de la Peña 1995 and 1999), the search for which also implies the reconfiguration of ethnic subjects themselves in the context of their relationship with the state (Sieder and Witchell 2001).
Two of the most striking aspects of social change in recent decades in Latin America have been the rise of indigenist movements and the spread of evangelical Protestantism. To date they have been analysed separately, but this article shows that a comparison of the two in the context of Bolivia can prove highly productive. Although in many respects evangelismo and katarismo are diametrically opposed, there are some striking similarities. They draw their adherents from the same social base, undermine the notion of a homogeneous nation-state and also clearly reject the position of cultural mestizaje at the root of Bolivian state ideology. Thus, at a time when cultural forms are supposed to be becoming more common in Latin America and around the world, these two social movements explicitly contest hybridity.
Alors qu'une campagne contre le cinquieme centenaire de la decouverte de l'Amerique se manifeste, une opposition chez les Amerindiens entre les « indigenas » et les « populares » s'affirme sur les questions de l'imperialisme et du colonialisme, sur la culture nationale et les heros, sur l'Etat et la spiritualite
RESUMEN
Este artículo analiza el trabajo de dos agencias gubernamentales mexicanas con migrantes oaxaqueños y de otros estados del sur de México a la península de Baja Cal ifornia, localizada en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, durante la segunda mitad de los 1990s. Sostengo que las agencias gubernamentales promovieron que los migrantes se identiiquen como indígenas y que refuercen lo que oicialmente se entiende por su organización social tradicional. El Instituto Nacional Indigenista y la Dirección General de Educación Indígena llegaron a redeinir y expandir la categoría de indígena para mantener la frontera étnica en una situación de migración y cambio cul tural. El trabajo que los funcionarios indigenistas realizaron en los años noventa tuvo efectos complejos en Baja California: Por un lado, los migrantes reconocieron estar al tanto de sus derechos y sentirse orgullosos de su identidad étnica gracias al trabajo insti tucional. Por otro lado, el tipo de identidad promovido por las agencias estatales mexi canas no reconoció necesariamente su historia y sus experiencias, sino que les impuso una identidad indígena genérica. Esto tuvo lugar en un contexto en el que gran parte de los migrantes desean asimilarse a la sociedad nacional para mejorar económica y social‐ mente ya que trabajan en la agricultura de exportación por sueldos más bajos y en peo res condiciones que los mestizos.
▪ Abstract The phrase “identity politics” has come to encapsulate a wide diversity of oppositional movements in contemporary Latin America, marking a transition away from the previous moment of unified, “national-popular” projects. This review takes a dual approach to the literature emerging from that transition, focusing on changes in both the objects of study and the analysts' lens. Four questions drive this inquiry: When did the moment of identity politics arise? What accounts for the shift? How to characterize its contents? What consequences follow for the people involved? Past answers to such questions often have tended to fall into polarized materialist and discursive theoretical camps. In contrast, this review emphasizes emergent scholarship that takes insights from both while refusing the dichotomy, and assigning renewed importance to empirically grounded and politically engaged research.
Provides a detailed treatment of an important topic that has received no scholarly attention: the surprising transformation of indigenous peoples' movements into viable political parties in the 1990s in four Latin American countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela) and their failure to succeed in two others (Argentina, Peru). The parties studied are crucial components of major trends in the region. By providing to voters clear programs for governing, and reaching out in particular to under-represented social groups, they have enhanced the quality of democracy and representative government. Based on extensive original research and detailed historical case studies, the book links historical institutional analysis and social movement theory to a study of the political systems in which the new ethnic cleavages emerged. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications for democracy of the emergence of this phenomenon in the context of declining public support for parties.
The increasingly multicultural fabric of modern societies has given rise to many new issues and conflicts, as ethnic and national minorities demand recognition and support for their cultural identity. This book presents a new conception of the rights and status of minority cultures. It argues that certain sorts of rights for minority cultures are consistent with liberal democratic principles, and that standard liberal objections to recognizing such rights on the grounds of individual freedom, social justice, and national unity can be answered. However, no single formula can be applied to all groups, and the needs and aspirations of immigrants are very different from those of indigenous peoples and national minorities. The book analyses some of the issues, which, though central to an understanding of multicultural politics (such as language rights, group representation, land rights, federalism, and secession), have been surprisingly neglected in contemporary liberal theory.
One of the more remarkable developments that took place in Latin America during the last two decades of the twentieth century was the emergence of indigenous peoples as new social and political actors and their implantation in the national consciousness of the region’s countries. The changing relationship between national states and indigenous peoples in Latin America mirrors to a certain extent the re-emergence of indigenous issues in international legal debates since the early 1980s. However, it is remarkable, considering that throughout most of their modern history the Latin American republics had practically ignored the indigenous component of their national identity.1
This chapter examines some economic and agrarian dimensions of Latin America’s multicultural challenge. Given that the impetus for state reform is coming from the indigenous movement, the main emphasis is on issues of indigenous rights and development. Yet the move for multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism and multilingualism (the ‘three Ms’) clearly embraces more than indigenous peoples alone. A feature of the constitutional reforms of the 1990s, notably in Colombia and Ecuador, has been to extend to certain rural black communities the special collective land rights that had previously been recognised only for indigenous peoples. The growing recognition of differentiated rights over land and related natural resources, based at least in part on factors of ethnic origin and historically based patterns of land and resource use, has as yet unforeseen consequences for Latin America. If such trends were to extend to Brazil, for example, the implications would be immense. The concept of differentiated citizenship, and its implications for land and resource rights, would take off on a new and more complex plane.
In 1993 the Peruvian Constitution was reformed and the International Labour Organisation Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples was ratified by the Peruvian government. A similar process of constitutional reform had occurred in Colombia in 1991, and subsequently took place in Peru in 1993, Bolivia in 1994, Ecuador in 1998 and Venezuela in 1999.1 This meant that for the first time in the history of the Peruvian republic, the multicultural nature of the nation was formally recognised in the constitution, as was indigenous customary law and a special jurisdiction for its exercise by campesinos and native peoples. With this change, the nineteenth century constitutional ideal of a culturally homogeneous nation-state was abandoned. At the same time, the new Magna Carta parted company with the Kelsenian model of legal monism based on the correspondence between state and law.2 With the recognition of a multicultural identity and of legal pluralism, the new constitution represented the first step towards the construction of a multicultural state in Peru. However, a preliminary assessment of the seven years since the reform reveals an unsatisfactory record in the implementation of the pluralist principles enunciated in the constitution, particularly in terms of the special jurisdiction for campesinos and native peoples.
In the 1990s most Latin American countries underwent significant constitutional reforms. Almost all of the new constitutions incorporated language that formally recognised the identities and rights of their indigenous populations for the first time. Among the first states to do so were the central Andean countries, following the lead of neighbouring Colombia, which introduced the then-most-extensive constitutional regime of ethnic rights in Latin America in 1991.
Recent legislative changes throughout Latin America have produced a swathe of new laws that include multicultural agendas (Stavenhagen 1996). These laws cover a range of areas, including good governance, constitutional reform, decentralisation and resource management. The main objective of multi-ethnic policies is usually to achieve social inclusivity. However, as Lopez’s (1993) study of the evolution of the terms ‘pluri-cultural’, ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘pluri-national’ in Ecuador during the indigenous uprisings of 1990 and 1992 illustrates, specific terminology emerges as the result of strategic representations made by different groups about particular events and debates. This chapter examines how such processes of representation are becoming important in the context of specific development projects and indicates how the representation of people as ‘indigenous’ or not indigenous — regardless of the validity of these labels — shapes the outcome of the application of new laws.
This chapter aims to analyse the negotiations which took place between representatives of civil society — both indigenous and non-indigenous — and delegates of the Ministry of Education in Guatemala to design and implement a comprehensive educational reform. This reform was stipulated in two of the Peace Accords signed between the Guatemalan government and the insurgent Unidad Nacional Revolucionaria Guatemalteca (URNG): the Accord on the Rights and Identity of Indigenous Peoples, signed in March 1995, and the Accord on Socio-Economic Issues and the Agrarian Question, signed in September 1996. Focusing on the question of ethnicity, an attempt is made to highlight the imbalances and struggles that occurred in two of the commissions created by the Accords: the Parity Commission for Educational Reform (COPARE) and the Consultative Commission for Educational Reform (CCRE).2 These difficulties occurred despite the general principles accepted by the parties to the peace negotiations, which included the pacific resolution of differences, tolerance, solidarity and unity in diversity.
In 1994 a package of measures aimed at modernising the state was approved in Bolivia. These reforms, in turn, affected the traditional functions and role of indigenous campesino organisations. An examination of the Bolivian experience allows us to analyse the extent to which the rhetoric of multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity on the part of popular organisations is able to adapt to a new scenario. The policy shift which began in 1994 and its impact on the indigenous campesino movement is analysed here from two opposite poles: the new local municipal governments and the legal restructuring which took place at national level. The first section briefly maps out the historical context leading up to 1994, followed by an analysis of the principal changes that were introduced thereafter. The second half of the chapter examines the reactions and adjustments made by the indigenous campesino sector in response to the new municipal context and the role of popular struggle and of indigenous campesino parliamentarians in drafting new laws.
Deborah Yashar analyzes the contemporary and uneven emergence of Latin American indigenous movements--addressing both why indigenous identities have become politically salient in the contemporary period and why they have translated into significant political organizations in some places and not others. She argues that ethnic politics can best be explained through a comparative historical approach that analyzes three factors: changing citizenship regimes, social networks, and political associational space--providing insight into the fragility and unevenness of Latin America's third wave democracies.
Through examination of the Zapotec movement in Juchitán, Mexico, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Pan-Mayan movements in Guatemala, and the Afro-Reggae Cultural Group in Rio de Janeiro, this article will show that social movements are best analyzed through a combined focus on the circuitous historical pathways of their origins and emergence and on the diverse pieces of representation and meaning out of which they are made. This dual focus, in turn, enables us to understand how political actors form, the places where politics occurs, and the resignifications that lie at the heart of political conflict.
White public space is constructed through (1) intense monitoring of the speech of racialized populations such as Chicanos and Latinos and African Americans for signs of linguistic disorder and (2) the invisibility of almost identical signs in the speech of Whites, where language mixing, required for the expression of a highly valued type of colloquial persona, takes several forms. One such form, Mock Spanish, exhibits a complex semiotics. By direct indexicality, Mock Spanish presents speakers as possessing desirable personal qualities. By indirect indexicality, it reproduces highly negative racializing stereotypes of Chicanos and Latinos. In addition, it indirectly indexes "whiteness" as an unmarked normative order. Mock Spanish is compared to White "crossover" uses of African American English. Finally, the question of the potential for such usages to be reshaped to subvert the order of racial practices in discourse is briefly explored.
The current situation in Colombia's Vaupés region involves a complicated mosaic of various change agents, colonists, and indigenous communities. This paper discusses the role of the anthropologist investigating ethnic nationalism in such a setting, asking questions about: (a) the best position to take with respect to helping local communities carve out geographical and cultural space for themselves; (b) how best to help Indian organizations, when requested, understand the costs and benefits of proposed development projects; (c) how best to analyze, write about, and interact with local indigenous organizations and the communities they represent when different factions see things differently; and (d) in such cases, who constitutes a concerned anthropologist's constituency? The general issue of what the role of anthropology should be in such highly politicized situations is also considered.
As discourses of human and cultural rights have become increasingly globalized, indigenous groups have progressively adopted them in their struggles for greater legal recognition within the state and/or autonomy from state control. The formulation of their rights claims in terms of cultural identities—i.e. `indigenous rights'—has strategic value for promoting their goals in the context of the globalization of human rights, but how such formulations are understood by local actors, as well as the effects these formulations have on social and cultural norms in local contexts, is perhaps less clear. This article considers how local understandings and identities are shaped by engagement with the networks of actors and legal regimes associated with cultural rights. The Chiapas case suggests that there are simultaneous and contradictory processes of cultural homogenization and the generation of increased cultural diversity at work in this engagement, and also raises some questions generated by the inherent definitional contradictions regarding what constitutes Indianness globally, nationally, and locally.
The discussion will examine the changes marking the socioeconomic evolution of the Ecuadorian highlands over the last 30 yr. Then, based on a conceptualization of the three essential components of collective action. It will examine the instrumental orientation, organizational foundations, and expressive significance of the Indian protest of June 1990. The article will conclude with some general reflections on the levantamiento as a turning point in the trajectory of the Ecuadorian Indian movement, calling attention to conditions that are changing its orientations and prospects. -from Author
A partir du cas de l'expulsion des Tukano par les soldats de l'armee bresilienne, l'A. analyse l'evolution des associations laiques indigenistes et la maniere dont les indiens sont consideres depuis que les groupes de soutien, comme les organisations non gouvernementales, ont adopte un systeme bureaucratique (« routinisation de l'heroisme » selon Weber). Creation de l'image de l'Indien parfait et hyperrealite. Le probleme des relations entre l'Indien et les organisations se posent tout comme celles de l'Indien avec les ethnographes : anthropologie et indigenisme formeraient un bon partenariat.
Latin American Research Review 38.2 (2003) 220-233
Using a variety of disciplinary lenses, the books collected here explain how indigenous peoples in Latin America struggle toward a myriad of goals: for the survival of their historically rooted yet constantly changing cultures; for title to and control over traditionally held territories; for the right to define themselves individually and collectively in relation to other groups in society; for the right to control images and representations of "the Indian" that are offered by non-indigenous intellectuals, the state, or others; for access to economic resources to maintain their preferred modes of economic production and to improve what are often miserable and unhealthy living standards; for the right to participate in public decision-making as individual citizens and as collectively recognized "peoples" or "nations"; and for the right to be indigenous and a full and equal citizen of a Latin American nation at the same time. The books include accounts by participants in or supporters of indigenous struggles (Selverston, Ticona, authors in the Assies, et al. book such as Orellana and Yrigoyen), academics native to and intimately connected to the national context of the struggles they analyze (de la Cadena, most of the Assies, et al. authors), and "outsider" scholars who bring greater cultural and professional distance to their work (Assies, Brysk, Garfield, Hoekema, Stonich and most of her authors, and Van der Haar).
This collection exemplifies two trends representative of the recent wave of studies of indigenous struggle that began in the early 1990s. First, indigenous struggles in the 1980s became more overtly political as indigenous movements were able to gain national and even international political space. In response, as Les Field observed in a 1994 review essay for LARR, anthropologists had by the early 1990s become increasingly focused on indigenous resistance to the nation-state. Political resistance, in fact, had become "the primary characteristic of Indian ethnicity" (Field 1994, 239). "More and more, the arena of the nation-state and the relationship between indigenous peoples and nation-states is the central one of analytic as well as political activity" for social scientists (ibid., 248).
The increasingly political importance of indigenous social movements attracted the attention of political scientists. In the mid-late 1990s, political scientists studying Latin America—who mainly have ignored the topic of race or ethnicity—increasingly devoted attention to indigenous peoples as important political actors in their own right. They moved beyond the classist peasant studies of the 1960s-1980s to embrace more culturalist approaches that appreciate the ethnic and racial dimensions of indigenous political resistance. In addition, political scientists are studying indigenous political struggles as a means toward understanding the quality of democracy in Latin America (see Andolina 1999; Collins 2000; Mattiace n.d.; Van Cott 2000; Yashar 1998, 1999). While some anthropologists continue to focus...
In this paper, I recount narratives of two violent events, and of enduring feelings of blame, guilt, and complicity in Tecpán, Guatemala, a mostly Maya town in the highlands. Many locals had followed all the coverage of September 11. Just months later, this city that always sleeps witnessed its own arresting moment, the "tragedy of June 10 (2002)," an anti-tax demonstration that began peacefully but became violent when, it is said, local gang members tried to assassinate the mayor. In this emerging democratic public sphere, being seen or heard can be politically empowering and potentially dangerous. Social experiences of the protests had to conform to "post-war" idioms that increasingly privilege ideals of compromise, equality, and harmony. But, casting those ideals against televised experiences of 9/11, locals produced ways of seeing and hearing violence—and conceptualizing blame—that differ from both the discourses of retaliation and innocence that overwhelm the U.S. and the flattening idiom of democratic compromise that dominated so-called "reconciliation meetings" with the mayor. The protests speak to a number of contradictions involved in processes of economic and political decentralization in Guatemala. Silently embedded in local claims that "there is nothing to see here" is a history of violence, ongoing forms of social suffering, and the hard feelings that continue to link this sleepy little town to "decentralized" agencies. That Guatemala is not yet decentralized enough emerges finally as the dream of one local daykeeper, who already saw the tragedy of June 10 in his sleep months prior, who didn't warn his friends since they would not have believed him, and who still feels guilty.