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The Return of the Native

June 2003
Current Anthropology 44(3):389-402

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On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations proclaimed an International Year of the Worlds Indigenous People. A Decade for Indigenous Peoples was subsequently launched, to run from 1995 to 2004, and a Forum of Indigenous Peoples established. The inaugural meeting of the Forum, held in Geneva in 1996, was unfortunately disrupted by gatecrashers. A selfstyled delegation of South African Boers turned up and demanded to be allowed to participate on the grounds that they too were indigenous people. Moreover, they claimed that their traditional culture was under threat from the new African National Congress government. They were unceremoniously ejected, and no doubt their motives were far from pure, but the drama might usefully have drawn attention to the difficulty of defining and identifying indigenous people.

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Current Anthropology Volume 44, Number 3, June 2003

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The Return of the

Native

by Adam Kuper

On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations pro-

claimed an International Year of the World’s Indigenous

People. A Decade for Indigenous Peoples was subse-

quently launched, to run from 1995 to 2004, and a Forum

of Indigenous Peoples established. The inaugural meet-

ing of the Forum, held in Geneva in 1996, was unfor-

tunately disrupted by gate-crashers. A self-styled dele-

gation of South African Boers turned up and demanded

to be allowed to participate on the grounds that they too

were indigenous people. Moreover, they claimed that

their traditional culture was under threat from the new

African National Congress government. They were un-

ceremoniously ejected, and no doubt their motives were

far from pure, but the drama might usefully have drawn

attention to the difﬁculty of deﬁning and identifying

“indigenous people.”

The loaded terms “native” and “indigenous” are the

subject of much debate in activist circles.

“Native” still

has a colonial ring in many parts of the world, though

it has become an acceptable label in North America. It

is now always capitalized (Native), perhaps in order to

suggest that it refers to a nation of some sort, and in fact

the term “First Nations” is often used as an alternative

designation in Canada and the U.S.A. In international

discourse, however, the term “indigenous” is usually

preferred. This has a slightly foreign ring to English ears,

1. Versions of this paper were presented in June 2002 at the 23d

Congress of the Association of Brazilian Anthropologists and in an

address delivered at the opening ceremony of the Max Planck In-

stitute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. I also had the

opportunity to try out the argument in a small seminar of human

rights specialists at the London School of Economics under the

chairmanship of Stanley Cohen. Detailed comments on the paper

were made by Alan Barnard, Mark Nuttall, and Evie Plaice. Robert

Hitchcock kindly gave me copies of his unpublished papers on cur-

rent developments in Botswana.

2. Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge,

Middlesex UB83PH, U.K. (adam.kuper@brunel.ac.uk).

3. See, for example, the correspondence published in Anthropology

Today 18 (3) (June 2002):23–25 under the title “Deﬁning Oneself,

and Being Deﬁned As, Indigenous.”

but perhaps it comes across as more scientiﬁc. At the

same time, the names used for particular indigenous peo-

ples have undergone changes, and therefore we now

have, for example, Saami for Lapp, Inuit for Eskimo (see

Stewart 2002:88–92), and San for Bushman.

As is so often the way with this sort of relabelling,

“San” turns out to be a pejorative Hottentot—or Khoe-

khoe—term for Bushmen, connoting “vagabonds” and

“bandits” (Barnard 1992:8), but the principle is defensi-

ble. It is a good idea to call people by names they rec-

ognize and ﬁnd acceptable. Nevertheless, discredited old

arguments may lurk behind new words. “Culture” has

become a common euphemism for “race.” Similarly, in

the rhetoric of the indigenous peoples movement the

terms “native” and “indigenous” are often euphemisms

for what used to be termed “primitive” (cf. Be´teille1998).

Indeed, one of the major NGOs in this ﬁeld, Survival

International, began life as the Primitive Peoples’ Fund.

It has since changed its name, but clinging to the same

anachronistic anthropology it now promotes itself as a

movement “for tribal peoples.” Once this equivalence

between “indigenous” and “primitive,” “tribal,” “hunt-

ing,” or “nomadic” peoples is grasped, it is easier to un-

derstand why the secretary general of the United Nations

glossed “indigenous peoples” as “nomads or hunting

people” (Boutros-Ghali 1994:9). The indigenous peoples

forum from which the Boers were ejected was dominated

by delegations speaking for Inuit, San, Australian Abo-

rigines, Amazonian peoples, and others, precisely the

quintessential “primitive societies” of classical anthro-

pological discourse.

Not only has the ghostly category of “primitive peo-

ples” been restored to life under a new label but the UN

secretary general of the day, Boutros Boutros-Ghali,iden-

tiﬁed common problems that these peoples suffered in

the modern world: They had been “relegated to reserved

territories or conﬁned to inaccessible or inhospitable

regions” and in many cases “seemed doomed to extinc-

tion.” Governments treated them as “subversive” be-

cause they “did not share the sedentary lifestyle or the

culture of the majority. Nations of farmers tended to

view nomads or hunting peoples with fear or contempt.”

However, the secretary general noted that “a welcome

change is taking place on national and international lev-

els.” The unique way of life of indigenous peoples had

at last come to be appreciated at its true value. Organ-

izations of indigenous people had been formed. Collec-

tive rights in historical homelands were being recognized

and land claims pressed with some success (Boutros-

Ghali 1994:9–13).

The secretary general was certainly right to identify

new international thinking on these issues. The ILO

Convention no. 169 (1989) concerning Indigenous and

Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries laid down that

national governments should allow indigenous peoples

to participate in the making of decisions that affect them,

that they should set their own development priorities,

4. For a historical review of the notion of primitive society, see

Kuper (1988).

390 Fcurrent anthropology Volume

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2003

and that they should be given back lands that they tra-

ditionally occupied. This convention has been ratiﬁed

by Denmark and Norway among European states and by

Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Par-

aguay, and Peru in Latin America. However, no African

or Asian state has adopted it. (For a trenchant critique

of the logic of the Indian “tribal” movement, see Be´teille

1998.) More recently, a United Nations Draft Declaration

on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has been negotiated,

but particularly because of strong opposition from a

number of African states it has not yet been put before

the General Assembly.

The rhetoric of the indigenous-peoples movement

rests on widely accepted premises that are nevertheless

open to serious challenge, not least from anthropologists.

The initial assumption is that descendants of the original

inhabitants of a country should have privileged rights,

perhaps even exclusive rights, to its resources. Con-

versely, immigrants are simply guests and should behave

accordingly. These propositions are popular with ex-

treme right-wing parties in Europe, although the argu-

ment is seldom pushed to its logical conclusion given

that the history of all European countries is a history of

successive migrations. Even in the most extreme na-

tionalist circles it is not generally argued that, for in-

stance, descendants of the Celts and perhaps the Saxons

should be given special privileges in Britain as against

descendants of Romans, Vikings, Normans, and, of

course, all later immigrants.

Where hunters and nomadic herders are concerned, it

may be argued that they represent not merely the ﬁrst

inhabitants of a country but the original human popu-

lations of the world. In a certain sense primitive, abo-

riginal, humankind’s ﬁrst-comers, theirs is the natural

state of humanity. If that is so, then perhaps it follows

that their rights must take precedence. However, while

Upper Paleolithic hunters and gatherers operated in a

world of hunters, every contemporary community of for-

agers or herders lives in intimate association with settled

farmers. In certain cases, including those of the Kalahari

Bushmen and the Congo Pygmies, they interacted with

farming neighbours for centuries, probably for at least a

millennium, before the colonial period (see Wilmsen

1989a). Exchanges with farmers and traders are crucial

for their economy, and their foraging activities are geared

to this broader economic context. Moreover, the divide

between a foraging and a farming way of life is not nec-

essarily hard and fast. People may forage for some sea-

sons, even some years, but fall back on other activities

when times are tough. Alternatively, farmers may be

driven back on foraging as a result of war or natural

disasters. All this suggests that the way of life of modern

hunters or herders may be only remotely related to that

of hunters and herders who lived thousands of years ago.

Furthermore, even where technologies are very simple,

cultural traditions vary between regions rather than ac-

cording to modes of gaining a livelihood. For example,

5. For a convenient review of the institutions and treaties dealing

with human rights and indigenous peoples, see Roulet (1999).

Kalahari hunter-gatherers have more in common in their

religious beliefs or kinship systems with neighbouring

Khoi or Hottentot herders than with the Hadza of Tan-

zania or the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Congo,

many of whom lived until recently largely by foraging

(see Barnard 1992).

Several generations—in some cases many centu-

ries—of European settlement have also greatly compli-

cated the picture. Local ways of life and group identities

have been subjected to a variety of pressures and have

seldom, if ever, remained stable over the long term. It is

nevertheless often assumed that each local native group

is the carrier of an ancient culture. In familiar romantic

fashion, this culture is associated with spiritual rather

than with material values. It is unique and expresses the

genius of a native people. To be sure, it is conceded (even

angrily insisted) that the authentic culture may survive

only in rural enclaves, since (again in good romantic

style) native cultures are represented as being every-

where under threat from an intrusive material civiliza-

tion associated with cities, with stock markets, and with

foreigners. However, it is argued that the essence sur-

vives and can be nursed back to health if the resources

are provided. The alternative is represented in the bleak-

est terms. The loss of culture is sometimes spoken of as

a form of genocide. Even in less apocalyptic discourses

it is taken for granted that a people that loses its culture

has been robbed of its identity and that the diminution

of cultural variation represents a signiﬁcant loss for all

humanity.

Boutros-Ghali accordingly insisted that the indige-

nous-peoples movement was not only about land or

hunting rights. It was, even more fundamentally, con-

cerned with culture and identity. Indeed, beyondthe con-

ventional list of individual human rights something new

was at issue. “Henceforth we realize that human rights

cover not only individual rights,” Boutros-Ghali claimed,

“but also collective rights, historical rights. We are dis-

covering the ‘new human rights,’ which include, ﬁrst and

foremost, cultural rights....Wemighteven say that

there can be no human rights unless cultural authentic-

ity is preserved” (1994:13).

(He did not consider the pos-

sibility that “collective rights” might undermine “in-

dividual rights.”)

Finally, there is a strong ecological thread in the in-

digenous-peoples rhetoric. According to the dogma,

hunters are in tune with nature in a way that the ex-

ploitative and greedy farmers are not (see Brody 2001;cf.

Gill 1994 and Kehoe 1994). As Boutros-Ghali summed

up, in appropriately cliche´ d language, “It is now clearly

understood that many indigenous people live in greater

harmony with the natural environment than do the in-

habitants of industrialized consumer societies” (Boutros-

Ghali 1994:13).

An eloquent statement of the natural-harmony thesis

has been published recently by the anthropologist and

6. See Kuper (1999:chap. 7); see also Chanock (2000) for an inter-

esting discussion of the new prominence given to “culture” and

“cultural rights” in post–cold war international discourse.

kuper The Return of the Native F391

activist Hugh Brody (2001), but he has chosen to focus

on Canada’s far north, where the way of life has been

shaped for centuries by the international fur trade. Inuit

commercial hunters ﬂourished here, in time embracing

the new technologies of hunting riﬂes, motorized

sleighs, and radio communications, but this trade has

been in decline for decades, and the consumer boycott

of furs has made further inroads in the rump of the in-

dustry. Since the 1950s the Canadian government has

implemented a policy of sedentarization. Today there are

still a few part-time commercial hunters and, as else-

where in North America, some men still hunt for rec-

reation, but hunting is a marginal activity. Ethnogra-

phers have emphasized the continuing importance of

what Stewart calls “the imagery rather than the subsis-

tence aspects of hunting” (Stewart 2002:93; cf. Omura

2002). However, few could quarrel with Dorais’s (1997:

3) conclusion that “Inuit society, in many respects, is as

modern as its Euro-American counterpart.”

Some activists wish that the Inuit would take up hunt-

ing again and restore an ancient environmental balance,

but such hopes are not justiﬁed by experience. The 1971

Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act created 12 Native-

controlled proﬁt-making corporations, which now ex-

port resources to Japan and Korea. Recently the Inupiat

of Alaska’s North Slope have supported oil drilling on

the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

(although they are opposed by the Gwich’in Indians). In

Greenland, the Inuit-led Home Rule government regards

hunting as anachronistic and objectionable and favours

the exploitation of non-renewable resources (see Nuttall

1998).

Leaving aside the question of how the land might be

used, land claims on behalf of former “nomads” typically

raise very tricky issues.

Canadian courts have found that

it is difﬁcult to establish the boundaries of lands hunted

by former generations or to grasp how ancestral popu-

lations understood rights to resources and rights in land.

They must also consider whether rights exercised by

hunters are in some way equivalent to rights that arise

from clearing virgin lands for agriculture or to other com-

mon-law entitlements. Finally, they must decide

whether native chiefs legally entered into treaties that

alienated some or all of their lands.

Some activists argue that too much emphasis is placed

on treaties which may have been poorly understood by

the natives and that courts should recognize that there

are different cultural modes of encoding historical set-

tlements. Hugh Brody, a leading theorist of the Canadian

7. There is now a substantial literature on this issue; see, for ex-

ample, Wilmsen (1989b). For an excellent account of the Australian

situation see Hiatt (1996:chap. 2).

First Nations movement,

favours recourse to unwritten

historical resources, and in line with other Canadian ac-

tivists he suggests that if there are no appropriate oral

traditions the court should take evidence from shamans,

who are able to see in dreams the arrangements that their

ancestors made with the ﬁrst European settlers (Brody

2001:134–36).

Brody concedes that questions may be asked about the

factual status of oral traditions, let alone the dreams of

shamans, but he insists that there is a reliable test of the

historical value of these accounts. It all depends on who

tells them. “For the peoples of the Northwest Coast,”

he writes, “as to any hunter-gatherer society or, indeed,

any oral culture, words spoken by chiefs are a natural

and inevitable basis for truth” (Brody 2001:207). Now,

where chiefs exist, the word of one may carry weight,

but it will not necessarily be accepted as “a natural and

inevitable basis for truth” by anyone other than, perhaps,

the chief’s most loyal and trusting subjects. It is surely

unfortunate if advocates of native rights grant powers to

chiefs that they would be reluctant to allow to mere

kings or emperors or even to elected presidents. Anyway,

while some of the native peoples of Canada did have

hereditary chiefs, in other cases it is far from certain that

chiefs were recognized before the ofﬁce was established

by colonial authorities. There are also frequent disputes

about who should be chief, and land claims regularly pit

native against native, chief against chief (and anthro-

pologist against anthropologist). Precisely because myths

function as charters, there are inevitably competing sto-

ries, and disputes often rage over who owns a particular

story and who has the right to use it to back up claims

to resources.

Other problems arise when myths are compared with

historical or archaeological evidence. As a consultant to

Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in

the 1990s, Brody organized a historical workshop in

which archaeologists explained that the Arctic was col-

onized across the Bering Straits by way of a land bridge

that connected Siberia and Alaska (2001:113–14):

One of the workshop participants was a woman

from a Cree community who was enrolled in a

Ph.D. programme at a prestigious American univer-

sity. She was not happy about the Bering Strait the-

ory. She pointed out that her people, and most “In-

dian” people, do not believe that archaeologists

know anything about the origins of human life in

8. The blurb of his book presents Brody’s credentials: Oxford-ed-

ucated, he has taught social anthropology at Queen’s University,

Belfast, and in the 1970s “he worked with the Canadian Depart-

ment of Indian and Northern Affairs and then with Inuit and Indian

organisations, mapping hunter-gatherer territories and researching

Land Claims and indigenous rights in many parts of Canada. He

was an adviser to the Mackenzie Pipeline Inquiry, a member of the

World Bank’s famous Morse Commission and chairman of the

Snake River Independent Review, all of which took him to the

encounter between large-scale development and indigenous com-

munities. Since 1997 he has worked with the South African San

Institute on Bushman history and land rights in the Southern

Kalahari.”

392 Fcurrent anthropology Volume

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2003

the Americas. The idea that people ﬁrst came as im-

migrants from Asia was, she said, absurd. It went

against all that her people knew....There had been

no immigration, but an emergence. . . . She would

have nothing to do with so-called scholarship that

discredited these central tenets of aboriginal oral

culture.

This objection broke up the workshop. Brody recalls feel-

ing confused. Could something be true at the University

of Toronto but false in Kispiox?

Yet the Cree student had good reason to be troubled.

If their ancestors were themselves immigrants, then per-

haps the Cree might not after all be so very different

from the Mayﬂower’s passengers or even the huddled

masses that streamed across the Atlantic in the 1890s.

To be sure, the great population movements from Siberia

across the Bering Straits began a very long time ago, but

it was still relatively late in the history of the coloni-

zation of the world by fully modern humans. According

to a recent authoritative review, “nothing found thus far

challenges the view that signiﬁcant human population

movements through the area occurred only after the peak

of the last glaciation, 16,000 years b.c.” (Snow 1996:131;

see also Dillehay 2000: esp. chap. 2). These migrations

then continued for many millennia. The ﬁrst wave

passed quickly to the south, and the Arctic and Sub-

Arctic were settled at a later stage. The ancestral Aleut-

Inuit may have begun to colonize the far north only in

the past 4,000 years. The ancestors of the Cree are dated

from 3,000 years ago (Mason 2000), while the proto-Ath-

apascans are dated from 2,000 years ago (Clark 2000).

Precisely whose ancestors came and when may also

be problematic, and, of course, over the centuries com-

munities migrated, merged, died out, or changed their

languages and altered their allegiances. “Archaeologi-

cally well-known populations that predate the last 4,000

years may never be assigned clear linguistic identities,”

a modern authority concludes (Snow 1996:128). Conse-

quently, it is difﬁcult to sort out the various strains that

intermingled to produce the native populations with

whom the ﬁrst Europeans made contact in Alaska and

in the far north of Canada. However, it cannot be doubted

that some of the First Nations were not merely immi-

grants but actually colonizers. Innu, for instance, entered

the Quebec-Labrador peninsula only 1,800 years ago, dis-

placing and assimilating earlier populations (Mailhot

1999:51).

Ever-changing colonial and national contexts have, of

course, added layers of complexity to the histories of

populations that derived from the precolonial commu-

nities, and with the best will in the world it may not be

possible to return to a pre-Columbian state of nature. In

Labrador (to continue with a Canadian example), an or-

ganization called the Innu Nation demands the resto-

ration of ancestral lands. One difﬁculty it faces is that

the northern portion of its claim overlaps land claimed

by another ethnic movement, the Labrador Inuit Asso-

ciation. A further complication is that this area is also

home to another category of people, originally of Euro-

pean stock, known locally as the Settlers. Their presence

raises another sort of problem, one of principle. There

have been several generations of intermarriage between

Settlers and Inuit; both Inuit and Settlers are often bi-

lingual, and their ways of life are similar (see Plaice 1990,

Samson 2001). If the phrase has any meaning, one might

surely say that they have a common culture, though ap-

parently not a common identity. Under certain condi-

tions, Settlers are accepted as members by the Labrador

Inuit Association, but the Innu Nation regards them as

its main adversaries, and the government excludes Set-

tlers from collective land claims and treats them as

squatters because they cannot prove aboriginal blood-

lines. At the same time, a person who has lived his or

her whole life in, say, St John’s in Newfoundland and

does not speak a word of a native language may be

granted aboriginal status in Labrador having demon-

strated a sufﬁcient proportion of aboriginal ancestry.

In short, for the Canadian government native claims

to land are based not only on descent but on a calibrated

measure of descent. One has rights only if one has a

certain number of appropriate grandparents. This might

fairly be called the Nuremberg principle. A drift to rac-

ism may be inevitable where so-called cultural identity

becomes the basis for rights, since any cultural test

(knowledge of a language, for example) will exclude some

who might lay claim to an identity on grounds of de-

scent. In the indigenous-peoples movement, descent is

tacitly assumed to represent the bedrock of collective

identity.

The Canadian situation is not unique. Courts in Aus-

tralia, New Zealand, and the U.S.A. have also been per-

suaded to grant land rights to indigenous peoples. In

many Latin American countries there have been mass

movements of “indigenous peoples” that purport to

speak for a majority of the population, but there are also

movements of small minorities of “hunting peoples”

that demand the return of ancestral homelands, and their

claims have been sympathetically considered by some

governments. In most Asian and African countries, how-

ever, government policy has been ﬁrmly (not to say op-

pressively) assimilationist with respect to minorities of

formerly foraging peoples and nomads. Occasionally, as

in the case of the Bushmen of Botswana and Namibia,

they have been treated as victims of poverty requiring

economic aid.

Botswana’s treatment of its Bushman minority has

been in the news recently, and the case is instructive.

On April 19,2002, a Botswana court refused to order the

government to continue to provide services to people

living in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. This case

had been supported by a number of NGOs, notably Sur-

kuper The Return of the Native F393

vival International, which organized vigils outside Bo-

tswana embassies, and the judgement was given prom-

inent coverage in the serious U.K. press. The Times

(April 22), for example, under the headline “Last Bush-

men Lose Fight for Right to Be Nomads” reported that

“sub-Saharan Africa’s last nomadic people have lost a

legal battle against being evicted from their ancient

homeland, ending 40,000 years of a hunter-gatherer

lifestyle.”

Even when Botswana was still a British colony (the

Bechuanaland Protectorate), Bushman policy had at-

tracted international attention from time to time. In

1958 the colonial government appointed a Bushman Sur-

vey Ofﬁcer, George Silberbauer, a district commissioner

who had been trained in anthropology, and asked him to

review the situation of the Bushmen and to come up

with a fresh policy. In his report, Silberbauer estimated

the country’s Bushman population at around 25,000, but

he noted that only some 6,000 lived by hunting and gath-

ering and so should be classiﬁed as what he called “wild”

Bushmen

(1965:14). Silberbauer was engaged in post-

graduate research on the G/wi-speakers west of Ghanzi,

and his main proposal was that the government should

establish a game reserve in the G/wi area in which only

“wild” G/wi and, in the east of the reserve, some

G//ana would be allowed to hunt. The government ac-

cepted this recommendation, and the Central Kalahari

Game Reserve was established in 1961 with a territory

of 130,000 square kilometers and an estimated Bushman

population of some 3,000, although some hundreds of

Kgalagari cattle farmers also found themselves within

its borders. The second-largest game reserve in Africa, it

occupies an area larger than South Korea or Portugal and

about the same size as Bangladesh and Nepal.

The original policy was radically incoherent. Was this

supposed to be a reserve for wild animals or for “wild

Bushmen”? Who could live there, and what rights would

they enjoy? A few non-G/wi Bushmen migrated into the

reserve, but they were not entirely welcome. What about

the Kgalagari pastoralists who made their homes there

before the proclamation of the reserve? And what about

the majority of Bushmen in the country, who had no

claims there at all? Botswana became independent in

1966, and the new political class was generally unsym-

pathetic to the policy behind the reserve and tended to

point to a clear parallel with the South African Bantustan

system. Initially, the Botswana government—like its co-

lonial predecessor—was nevertheless prepared to make

allowances in order to allay international concerns, but

in the late 1970s the situation changed and government

policy hardened. During the drought years of the late

1970s and early 1980s many people left the reserve,

though perhaps intending to return. (G/wi had long been

accustomed to labour migration to the Ghanzi farms in

9. Silberbauer used this term to describe Bushmen “who are able

to subsist on the proceeds of their hunting and foodgathering and

who either live in remote areas without moving out on any visits,

or who only make brief visits in some years to Ghanzi farms or

Bantu-owned cattle-posts, for the purpose of trading or ﬁnding food

and water” (Silberbauer 1965:14).

hard times.) The government established a settlement

with a school and clinic outside the reserve and tried

with some success to persuade Bushmen to congregate

there.

Two sets of considerations were crucial in the change

in ofﬁcial thinking.

First, environmentalists com-

plained that residents were keeping donkeys and goats

that interfered with the game and that they were engaged

in poaching. This was to turn the conventional appeal

to environmental values against the Bushmen. Second,

ofﬁcials were committed to a national policy of bringing

aid and development to what were called Remote Area

Dwellers, a term coined precisely to avoid ethnic dis-

crimination. Ofﬁcials found the special provisions made

for people in the reserve an expensive anomaly. As a

minister of local government put it in a letter to the

Botswana Centre for Human Rights in January 2002,“We

as Government simply believe that it is totally unfair to

leave a portion of our citizens undeveloped under the

pretext that we are allowing them to practise their cul-

ture” (Hitchcock 2002a:2). Yet while senior members of

government rejected the argument from culture, there

was a feeling that the Bushmen were simply backward

and had to be civilized. The permanent secretary in the

Ministry of Local Government was reported in the press

as remarking, in terms which would have been familiar

to his colonial predecessors, that “Botswana owns the

Basarwa and it will own Basarwa until it ceases to be a

country; and they will never be allowed to walk around

in skins again” (Hitchcock 2002b:18).

In May and June 1997 more than 1,100 people were

moved in trucks to two settlements outside the reserve,

where the usual depressing concomitants of forced re-

settlement soon manifested themselves in the form of

alcoholism, domestic violence, and the spread of petty

crime. In November 2001 the government announced

that it would no longer provide public services or welfare

payments to anyone remaining in the reserve. At this

point 500–600 people remained within its borders, and

it was an appeal on their behalf for services to be restored

that the court rejected in April 2002. These actions were

taken in the face of international protests. Indeed, there

was something of a backlash in government circles

against the activities of NGOs, notably Survival Inter-

national. The Botswana government has concluded that

some international agencies are effectively proposing a

form of apartheid and sabotaging a rational policy of

development.

On the face of it, the situation in South Africa is very

different to that in Botswana. Bushmen, or San, within

South Africa were generally believed to have died out or

to have been assimilated by the late 19th century. The

Hottentots, or Khoi, had been largely acculturated to the

so-called Coloured group, though there are some bilin-

10. Survival International has insinuated that the real reason for

the population removal is that a deal has been hatched between De

Beers and the government to exploit diamond resources in the area,

although if diamonds were found in the reserve they would be at

the disposal of the government, since the reserve is designated as

state lands (Survival International, news release, April 19,2002).

394 Fcurrent anthropology Volume

, Number

, June

2003

gual Afrikaans-Nama-speakers in the northern Cape.

Moreover, at the time of the political transition the ANC

was unsympathetic to any movement of ethnic assertion

within the country. In 1996, when he was deputy pres-

ident, Thabo Mbeki represented the Khoi and San as

South Africa’s ﬁrst freedom ﬁghters but in the conviction

that they had since passed from the scene.

The gov-

ernment was evidently caught by surprise when the in-

digenous-peoples movement was taken up by UN agen-

cies and NGOs in South Africa began to champion the

cause of the country’s own indigenous peoples.

The ﬁrst movement to achieve prominence was the

Griqua movement—or, rather, movements, since there

were competing organizations that claimed to speak for

the Griqua people. The Griqua emerged on the frontier

of the Cape colony in the late 18th century. At ﬁrst they

called themselves Basters, but the missionaries per-

suaded them to adopt a less shocking name. They were

largely Khoi, or Hottentot, by ancestry, but they were

Christians and spoke Dutch. Equipped with horses and

guns, they operated as cattle ranchers and freebooters.

In 1804 they settled under the auspices of the London

Missionary Society at Klaarwater, later called Griqua-

town. In the course of the next generation the commu-

nity split, there were various migrations, and treaties

were made and abrogated with the Boer republics. Later

in the 19th century descendants of the original com-

munity, by now largely landless, were divided between

three widely separated settlements and increasingly as-

similated into the broader Cape Coloured society (see

Ross 1976).

Under apartheid, many Griquas were initially classi-

ﬁed with the Bantu-speakers, but they managed to get

themselves reclassiﬁed as Coloureds, which was a more

privileged situation. In the 1990s, however, some Griqua

politicians declared that they were Khoi and San, indig-

enous people, and demanded restitution of ancestral

lands and representation in the House of Traditional

Leaders. Support was forthcoming from the United

Nations Indigenous Peoples’ Forum. The government

was ready to treat with them but became frustrated when

the various Griqua spokesmen refused to agree on a sin-

gle representative body for purposes of negotiation. To

sort out the claims to leadership, ofﬁcials consulted gov-

ernment anthropologists. Ironically, this was a return to

the practices of the apartheid regime. These selfsame

government anthropologists had been accustomed to

similar duties when they were employed by the Depart-

ment of Bantu Affairs. Now, redeployed to the Depart-

ment of Constitutional Development, they found them-

selves faced with the familiar task of identifying the

traditional leader, although as its happens they were un-

successful on this occasion. The rival claimants to the

Griqua leadership came together only for brief ofﬁcial

11. Mbeki said: “I owe my being to the Khoi and San whose desolate

souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape—they who

fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever

seen, they who were the ﬁrst to lose their lives in the struggle to

defend our freedom and independence, and they who, as a people,

perished in the result” (quoted in Bredenkamp 2001:192).

visits from Nelson Mandela or the U.S. ambassador. To-

day the various Griqua settlements seem to have opted

rather more enthusiastically for participation in evan-

gelical Christian movements (Waldman 2001).

On another front, however, the South African govern-

ment did make a grand gesture. A (khomani San As-

sociation was set up to make claims to rights in the

Kalahari Gemsbok Park, an enormous game reserve that

had been established in 1931. There were only about a

dozen people in South Africa who could still speak the

(khomani language, but the movement was strongly

supported by an NGO based in Cape Town. Rather

vaguely speciﬁed rights of “ownership” in the park were

symbolically handed over to “the (khomani people.”

People classiﬁed as (khomani were also allowed to

graze stock in certain areas. This more speciﬁc and prac-

tical right was crucial. As Steven Robins has pointed out,

while “San livestock farmers are often perceived to be

less authentically San by donors, for many Kalahari San,

goats and sheep have been, and continue to be, their main

strategy for survival” (Robins 2001a:24,b). Unfortu-

nately, these privileges have created tensions between

those classiﬁed as San and other local residents, who had

been classiﬁed as Coloured under apartheid. And just as

under apartheid, people have been obliged to reformulate

their ethnic identities in order to get access to resources.

Williams Ellis, describes, for example, Oom Frik, who

“says he is not a San, but he is part of them by virtue

of his grandmother having been a ‘pure San,’ she had

according to him the correct phenotypic features” (Ellis

2001:259).

The change of ANC policy is at least in part a response

to agitation by NGOs, with their international connec-

tions (Robins 2001b). The government could not ignore

these pressures while it harboured aspirations to recog-

nition as Africa’s leading actor in the ﬁeld of human

rights. Moreover, ANC leaders were committed to ges-

tures of restitution for the injustices of apartheid. Sym-

bolic acts of solidarity with San are now popular, and on

the occasion of South Africa’s Sixth Freedom Day, on

April 27,2000, President Mbeki unveiled the new na-

tional coat of arms, which displayed at its centre two

ﬁgures from a Bushman rock painting. Below is a text

from an extinct Cape Bushman language, !ke e: /xarra

//ke, which has been translated as “Unity in Diver-

sity”—the motto of the New South Africa, though the

precise meaning of this passage in an obscure, dead lan-

guage is a matter of some scholarly controversy.

(The

motto of the old Union of South Africa was “Unity Is

Strength.”) The advantages of this ofﬁcial gesture are

nevertheless apparent enough. None of South Africa’s 11

ofﬁcial languages is being privileged. The only ethnic

group that is given special status has long vanished from

the scene. And the new symbol may boost South Africa’s

reputation in the ﬁeld of human rights, since in some

12. Alan Barnard writes (personal communication) that the literal

translation of the motto is !ke (“people” or “men”) e(“who,” plural)

/xarra (“different”) //ke (“meet, be together with”).

kuper The Return of the Native F395

circles today the litmus test is a government’s policy on

indigenous peoples.

The indigenous-peoples movement has been fostered by

the UN and the World Bank and by international devel-

opment agencies and NGOs. Despite the fact that the

ideas behind the movement are very dubious, the mo-

tivation is surely generous. Whatever the reasons behind

it, a grant of land to poor people may be a good thing

even if very large tracts of land are sometimes being

handed over to extremely small communities—or,

rather, to small categories of people deﬁned in terms of

descent. But I am doubtful about the justice or good sense

of most of these initiatives. Policies based on false anal-

ysis distract attention from real local issues. They are

unlikely to promote the common good, and they will

certainly create new problems. Wherever special land

and hunting rights have been extended to so-called in-

digenous peoples, local ethnic frictions have been ex-

acerbated. These grants also foster appeals to uncom-

fortably racist criteria for favouring or excluding

individuals or communities. New identities are fabri-

cated and spokespeople identiﬁed who are bound to be

unrepresentative and may be effectively the creation of

political parties and NGOs. These spokespeople demand

recognition for alternative ways of understanding the

world, but ironically enough they do so in the idiom of

Western culture theory. Since the representations of

identity are so far from the realities on the ground and

since the relative wealth of the NGOs and the locals is

so disparate, these movements are unlikely to be dem-

ocratic (see Sieder and Witchell 2001).

Why have these discredited ways of thinking become

so inﬂuential once again? As always, our conceptions of

the primitive are best understood as counters in our own

current ideological debates (see Kuper 1988:7–9). The im-

age of the primitive is often constructed today to suit

the Greens and the anti-globalization movement. Au-

thentic natives represent a world to which we should,

apparently, wish to be returned, a world in which culture

does not challenge nature. At the same time, the move-

ment exploits the very general European belief that true

citizenship is a matter of ties of blood and soil. In Europe

today, this principle is used to justify anti-immigrant

policies. The obverse of this, however, is the painless

concession that faraway natives should be allowed to

hunt in their own Bantustans. And so the indigenous-

peoples movement garners support across the political

spectrum for a variety of different, even contradictory

reasons. (The founder of Survival International, Robin

Hanbury-Tenison, recently achieved new prominence as

chief executive of the Countrywide Alliance, a move-

ment formed to oppose the banning of fox hunting in

Britain.) But whatever the political inspiration, the con-

ventional lines of argument currently used to justify “in-

digenous” land claims rely on obsolete anthropological

notions and on a romantic and false ethnographic vision.

Fostering essentialist ideologies of culture and identity,

they may have dangerous political consequences.

Comments

keiichi omura

Faculty of Language and Culture, Osaka University,

Osaka

560-0043

, Japan (bxg

06636

@nifty.nc.jp). 5i03

Kuper tells us that essentialism is still one of the most

crucial issues that we must address if we are to avoid

making the same mistakes as the modern anthropology

criticized by postmodern and postcolonial anthropology

as a collaborator of colonialism. This is because, as is

demonstrated in this article, although the indigenous

peoples movement has certainly contributed to the pub-

lic recognition of collective rights and empowerment of

indigenous people, such as the establishment of Nunavut

Territory in Canada, its theoretical and conceptual foun-

dation is an essentialist ideology that creates and am-

pliﬁes the differences among ethnic groups and thus ex-

acerbates ethnic frictions. As Kuper suggests, we should

not only criticize the theoretical foundation of essen-

tialist ideology but also propose an alternative to it, for

without some reformulation of culture and identity the

“primitive” will be restored to life under the veil of the

“indigenous.”

How shall we begin to propose such an alternative? I

think that a clue to this problem is suggested, although

not clearly stated, in this article, especially in the dis-

cussion of the discrepancy between the reality of indig-

enous peoples and the basic premises of the indigenous

peoples movement. Kuper examines the assumptions

underlying the indigenous peoples movement, such as

the premise that each indigenous group constitutes the

original inhabitants of a country and is the carrier of an

ancient culture in which humans live in harmony with

nature, and concludes that these assumptions are open

to serious challenge. In reality, contemporary indigenous

groups have experienced continual sociocultural change

in the course of the complicated modern history of hu-

mankind—migrating, merging, changing their lan-

guages, social organizations, and modes of subsistence,

altering their allegiances, and inﬂuencing each other. No

indigenous group has lived in complete isolation and

kept its way of life unchanged since the beginning of

humankind. In this sense, the society and culture of

every contemporary indigenous group is a complex of

various elements resulting from historical interactions

that is still in the process of change. Nevertheless, as

Kuper points out, in the political arena and the courts

the deﬁnition of “indigenous” and the authentic images

of indigenous peoples are based on the assumptions of

ties of blood and soil derived from the Euro-American

essentialist or nationalist ideology of culture and iden-

tity mentioned above, that is, constructed regardless of

the reality of indigenous peoples’ societies.

396 Fcurrent anthropology Volume

, Number

, June

2003

This discrepancy throws light on two aspects of the

sociopolitical situations of indigenous peoples. First, it

indicates that indigenous peoples are still subordinate to

Euro-American society because it is that society that

deﬁnes indigenousness and controls decision making on

indigenous problems. At the same time, however, it in-

dicates that indigenous peoples have the potential for

redeﬁning indigenousness. For example, as I have shown

(Omura 2002), Inuit people continually redeﬁne their

ethnic imagery in everyday life in accordance with

changing conditions in an effort to construct a positive

ethnic identity. Through this redeﬁnition, Inuitness as

deﬁned by Inuit people themselves allows the adoption

of new customs, such as jig dancing, tea drinking, and

even trapping and driving snowmobiles, all introduced

as the result of contact with Euro-American society. Seal

hunting with riﬂe and snowmobile, regarded as deviation

from authentic “tradition” and criticized by environ-

mentalists in the seal fur war (Wenzel 1991), has become

“tradition” as deﬁned by Inuit people. Moreover, some

descendants of non-Inuit identify themselves as Inuit

and are recognized as such in their community because

they were adopted and brought up by Inuit. According

to Briggs (1997), furthermore, some half-qaplunaak

(white)–half-Inuit elders are respected as Inuinnat (real

Inuit) because their behavior conforms to Inuitness.

Therefore, it may be said that the reality of indigenous

peoples eludes deﬁnitions and imagery constructed in

terms of Euro-American essentialist ideology, and the

redeﬁnitions of identity and culture that indigenous peo-

ple continually execute in their everyday life erode the

basis of that ideology even though they are still under

its dominion. If this is so, then it is on the daily practice

of indigenous peoples that we should focus.

evie plaice

Department of Anthropology, University of New

Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada E

(plaice@unb.ca). 6i03

In 1969 the newly elected and much lauded Canadian

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was about to launch his

“just society.” Key to his campaign was a white paper

on Indian affairs that recommended dismantling the In-

dian Act. Underpinning Trudeau’s “just society” was the

belief that all Canadians should be treated equally. The

notion was not new. In 1949, when Newfoundland joined

Canada, Joey Smallwood had argued that his new prov-

ince contained only Canadians: Newfoundland had no

“Natives.” For that reason, the Indian Act was never

applied to Newfoundland’s several thousand aboriginal

inhabitants. Smallwood soon realized, however, that he

was now responsible for maintaining Native commu-

nities that elsewhere in Canada fell under the federal

budget. The rather hamﬁsted attempts to share this bur-

den have hampered aboriginal relations in the province

ever since and are at least partially to blame for the rather

messy state of affairs to which Kuper alludes in “The

Return of the Native.”

The vehement Native rejection of Trudeau’s proposed

policies in 1969, however, took the government by sur-

prise. Any threat to the protection of Native minority

status was interpreted as a blatant attempt at assimila-

tion, later appraised as “cultural genocide.” The liberal

notion of a just and equal society has been viewed with

deep suspicion by Native Canadians ever since. Never-

theless, Kuper’s attack on the growing indigenous rights

movement is timely because it brings us back to a nec-

essary position of equilibrium. There is no way forward

from the many racially motivated points of tension that

plague current affairs except by recognizing that all hu-

mans are equal, regardless of race and ethnic background.

Quite apart from questioning the very premise of using

race as a justiﬁcation for claiming special rights, Kuper

raises questions about the inherent problems of identi-

fying exactly who qualiﬁes as “indigenous,” “aborigi-

nal,” or “Native” and in what contexts. All of these di-

lemmas are apparent in the cases with which I am

familiar, and they are not easily addressed or set aside.

The difﬁculty lies elsewhere, however: in history, con-

text, and location. Invariably issues of prior rights—and

their fellows, the insidious rights based on racial, cul-

tural, and ethnic differences—are championed from a po-

sition of injustice, inequality, and disenfranchisement.

Trudeau’s version of the “just society” was trounced

because it came with a legacy of racist policies that had

shaped Canadian Native relations since the birth of the

Indian Act in 1876 and had in fact been copied by postwar

South African apartheid. In its nation-building enterprise

Canada had dealt with the “Indian Problem” by swinging

between the two opposing positions of separation and

assimilation in such a way that, by the mid-20th century,

most aboriginals were either living on reserves as reg-

istered Indians receiving certain beneﬁts but denied full

Canadian status or living off-reserve with no such ben-

eﬁts and only limited access to the economy. In either

case, the policies had succeeded in isolating Native Ca-

nadians, who were living in poverty with the highest

rates of youth suicide and teenage pregnancy, the short-

est life expectancy, and the lowest incomes of any group

in the country. This appalling state of affairs is persis-

tently paraded on national television, most recently in

the form of gas-snifﬁng pre-teens in the Innu commu-

nities of Labrador, where youth suicide is the highest in

Canada and accidental immolation not infrequent.

The Native scepticism that had greeted Trudeau’s at-

tempts to dismantle the Indian Act was well founded.

To the cynical at least, the rapid development of the

Canadian North over the ensuing decades exposed the

“just society” as no more than a ruse to cover an intended

“land grab” resulting in large-scale resource extraction

that seldom beneﬁted the local, especially Native, in-

habitants of the North. Smallwood, for example, suc-

ceeded in converting Labrador into a vast mining and

hydro-electric enterprise. It would be naive to think that

Trudeau was not aware of the pressure to develop the

North, even if his assimilationist policies are not inter-

preted as complicit.

Rights of any sort that are based on recognizing racial

kuper The Return of the Native F397

difference are indefensible, but the attempt to redress

past and present wrongs with the likes of the Forum of

Indigenous Peoples is at least understandable. Should

Western liberal democracies not attempt to succour the

vulnerable? Do countering policies such as afﬁrmative

action and “Citizen Plus” not perform this task ade-

quately? Or are they always likely to be corrupted by

nationalist movements such as those that produced Na-

zism and apartheid? Kuper’s example of the disruptive

Afrikaners is telling. The problem here may be one of

deﬁnition, but the issue goes a good deal farther when

the intrinsic meaninglessness of arguing for special prior

rights comes into play. Groups the world over have been

invaded and conquered, usually with devastating con-

sequences. The difﬁculty we ﬁnd ourselves in currently

is that it is unpalatable to watch on the sidelines while

those recently conquered suffer a fate shared by millions

throughout history whose societies have disintegrated.

In a liberal Western democracy, we prefer to soften the

blow with seemingly racist policies while doing very lit-

tle to prevent the inevitable outcome: the loss of a dis-

tinct way of life in favour of supporting the majority

status quo. We justify our complacency with Darwinian

arguments about the survival of the ﬁttest or the prin-

ciples of democracy while making the most of the de-

velopment opportunities that arise. In the end, only an

adherence to the notion of human rights gives us the

semblance of moral progress.

The position of anthropology in this debate is decid-

edly uncomfortable. In its guise as the discipline inter-

ested in cultural diversity, it could be construed as the

academic wing of the indigenous rights movement,

whose role is to advocate the rights of vulnerablecultural

minorities. Anthropology is also motivated by the rela-

tivist argument that all cultures must be respected as

equal. This is only one side of the anthropological coin,

however. The inseparable other is understanding human

commonality. How do we accommodate the two? Ku-

per’s position may well be the only tenable one, yet it

does not address the inequality we are left with in the

wake of misguided, misplaced, or blatantly racist policies

of the past. Nor does it appear to safeguard us from the

perpetuation of an often racially biased status quo and

the seemingly inevitable erosion of diversity.

alcida rita ramos

SQN

107

, Bloco

, Apto.

601

, Brası´lia, D.F.

70 743-

090, Brazil (arramos@unb.br). 6i03

One wonders what the point of Kuper’s paper really is.

Is it a criticism of cultural diversity, a protest against

self-serving NGOs, or a repudiation of pseudo-ethnic

claims? Perhaps it is all three together. His discomfort

with the term “indigenous” is understandable, but to say

that its usage by “the indigenous peoples movement” is

a euphemism for “what used to be termed ‘primitive’”

is to blame the conquered for the conqueror’s bad lan-

guage. Similarly, if the “image of the primitive is often

constructed today to suit the Greens and the antiglob-

alization movement” it is hardly the fault of the indig-

enous peoples. This phrase, added to another about the

“agitation by NGOs, with their international connec-

tions,” is reminiscent of the rhetoric of some oppressive

governments that, in disclaiming the political agency of

indigenous peoples, attribute their actions to the manip-

ulative powers of non-Indian agitators. One can see why

such a cliche´ is used by authoritarian governments, but

coming from an anthropologist it is, to say the least,

puzzling.

Again, Kuper asserts that “ ‘culture’ has become a com-

mon euphemism for ‘race.’ ” With no further clariﬁca-

tion this statement becomes yet another cliche´ , lacking

the depth and elegance of Verena Stolcke’s (1995) anal-

ysis of what she called “cultural fundamentalism,” the

crypto-racism that plagues Western Europe today. To put

in the same category indigenous claims for legitimate

difference, Nazi racism, and South African apartheid is

to miss the point of differential power. In other words,

to put Western powers of conquest on an equal footing

with ethnic demands for recognition is either to ignore

or to minimize the violence of Western expansion. True,

there are plenty of conﬂicting situations in which ethnic

groups are pitted against each other for or against de-

velopment (or local investment along the lines described

by Sahlins [1992] as “develop-man”). Such are the risks

of hasty generalizations.

Kuper generalizes about the motivations of indigenous

peoples, about NGOs, about national situations, and

about anthropologists. Behind the politically correct crit-

icisms of “essentialist ideologies” there is an embrace

of development that does not withstand critical analysis

(Rist 1997, Perrot et al. 1992). Kuper seems concerned

that indigenous movements will rock the boat: “Wher-

ever special land and hunting rights have been extended

to so-called indigenous peoples, local ethnic frictions are

exacerbated.” This argument is akin to the subterfuge

according to which miserable British workers were quite

contented with their lot until Marx came along. Perhaps

the aftermath of apartheid has cautioned Kuper against

the mess caused by ethnic battles, but in Latin America

we cringe at the paper’s ﬁnal statement: “The conven-

tional lines of argument currently used to justify ‘indig-

enous’ land claims rely on obsolete anthropological no-

tions and on a romantic and false ethnographic vision.

Fostering essentialist ideologies of culture and identity,

they may have dangerous political consequences.” “Ob-

solete,” “romantic,” “false” are all adjectives that re-

quire much demonstration lest they remain at the sub-

level of insults.

Poor argumentation contributes to the paper’s sour ﬂa-

vor. The repeated attempts to reduce complex issues to

simple statements can be illustrated in two examples.

One is the contradiction between the disparaging rejec-

tion of the use of the Cree shamanic idiom as legal ev-

idence for land rights and his charge that, in making

their legal claims, indigenous spokespeople “ironically

enough . . . do so in the idiom of Western culture theory.”

From this perspective it seems that indigenous peoples

can never win. The other example is the following non

398 Fcurrent anthropology Volume

, Number

, June

2003

sequitur: “Since the representations of identity are so far

from the realities on the ground and since the relative

wealth of the NGOs and the locals is so disparate, these

movements are unlikely to be democratic.” First of all,

it would be remarkable if representations and realities

actually coincided. As for the rest of the sentence, I con-

fess that the logic escapes me. If NGOs were as deprived

as the locals, what utility would they have? I also fail to

see what democracy has to do with ideal versus real and

the amount of NGO resources. Moreover, are spokes-

people unrepresentative everywhere? Are new identities

fabricated wherever they emerge? Are NGOs well off

everywhere?

Particularly regarding the thorny issue of ethnic re-

surgence what we need is serious anthropological re-

search, rather than casual generalizations, and open-

minded anthropologists who neither adopt indigenous

causes as an article of faith nor reject ethnic struggles

as racist manipulations by unscrupulous opportunists.

What is an appropriate analysis for South Africa will not

be for Amazonia. The enormous differences in historical

trajectories, political conjunctures, and local responses

should prevent us from assuming that in telling one story

we tell them all. This capacity to address broad issues

without losing sight of “the realities on the ground” is,

after all, a major asset of our anthropological training.

steven robins

Department of Sociology, University of Stellenbosch,

Private Bag X

1, 7602

Matieland, South Africa

(robins@netactive.co.za). 15 i 03

Kuper’s article is an eloquent critique of the essential-

izing tendencies of the discourses promoted by indige-

nous peoples movements, and it raises some troubling

questions. For example, does the radical disjuncture be-

tween indigenous identity narratives and everyday lived

realities delegitimize the indigenous rights movement?

Who is to authenticate and legitimize these narratives?

Kuper’s caricature of indigenous rights activists as

misguided romantics does not do justice to the rhetorics

and strategic priorities of activist logics. Mainstream ac-

tivists, NGOs, development consultants, and trade

unionists regularly essentialize their “clients”—“sub-

sistence farmers,” “female-headed households,” “work-

ing class,” and so on—without necessarily discrediting

their political projects. Indeed, such rhetorical strategies

often make for effective activism. Gayatri Spivak’s con-

cept of “strategic essentialism” is useful for understand-

ing such situated activist logics (see Robins 2001b).

Moreover, essentialist constructions of identity are not

necessarily incompatible with an active embrace of the

contradictions of modernity and its bittersweet fruits.

Although ethnographic examples of the integration of

modern, industrial technologies into indigenous cultural

repertoires—“indigenous modernities”—represent a sig-

niﬁcant challenge to the Western dichotomy between

“the traditional” and “the modern,” such binary think-

ing persists. For example, the San are still expected to

perform as authentic “bushmen” in their everyday lives

if anthropologists and land-claims judges are not to dis-

miss their identity claims as false and opportunistic. No

one expects “the English” to perform their Englishness;

being English allows one both to be “modern” and to

make claims on an idealized English past of kings and

queens, castles, medieval villages, and pastoral land-

scapes.

As Sahlins (1999:140) notes, the survival of indigenous

peoples is often dependent on modern means of produc-

tion, transportation, and communication that they pay

for with money acquired from public transfer payments,

resource royalties, wage labour, or commercial ﬁshing.

Rather than being swallowed up by the homogenizing

forces of modernity and globalization, however, many of

them recast their dependencies on modern means of pro-

duction in order to reconstitute their own cultural ideas

and practices (1999:ix). Similarly, indigenous groups are

drawing on the resources of a global civil society to re-

constitute themselves as “traditional communities.”

Kuper seems to expect indigenous peoples to conform to

their primordial identity narratives in their everyday

lives when they often ﬁnd themselves having to respond

to contradictory demands that they be both Late Stone

Age survivors and modern citizens of the nation-state.

It is unlikely that activists’ “benign essentialism” con-

stitutes a threat to democracy as Kuper suggests, and

surely it is inappropriate to compare San and Inuit iden-

tity politics to the violent outbursts of ethno-national-

ism, racism, autochthony, and xenophobia in parts of

Europe and Africa. Finally, is “a drift to racism” really

“inevitable where so-called cultural identity becomes a

basis for rights”? I think not. Let me illustrate my ar-

gument by drawing on the case of the South African San.

During the 1980s, anti-apartheid activists focused on

populist class-based forms of political mobilization and

popular land struggles rather than on “cultural” strug-

gles. Intellectuals in the popular left tended to be dis-

missive of such struggles; from their perspective (see Ma-

gubane 1973, Mafeje 1971, Boonzaier and Sharp 1988)

ethnicity and “tribalism” constituted forms of “false

consciousness” promoted by the architects of Pretoria’s

homelands and separate-development policies. With the

end of apartheid, “ethnicity” and “race” replaced “class”

as the keywords of the new ofﬁcial political discourse,

and NGOs and indigenous peoples’ organizations began

to promote self-determination and cultural rights for in-

digenous peoples. It was in this context that “indi-

genous” Nama, San, and Griqua ethnic revitalization

movements took place.

In 1999 members of the “(khomani San community”

achieved the return to them of land in and around the

Kalahari Gemsbok National Park from which they had

been forcibly removed in the 1960s.

Many of them had

been regularly performing for tourists at a “bushman”

1. The land restitution act does not recognize “tribes” or “indige-

nous” or “aboriginal” land rights. Achievement of restitution is

possible only for individuals or communities that were forcibly

removed through racially based legislation subsequent to 1913.

kuper The Return of the Native F399

village a few hundred kilometres from Cape Town, and

their repertoire of performances was strategically de-

ployed during the land-claim process. The 1999 land

handover ceremony was the culmination of extensive

NGO lobbying of government and massive media cov-

erage that helped the (khomani San land claim “jump

the line” in a process in which tens of thousands of

claims were competing for attention. A senior Depart-

ment of Land Affairs (DLA) ofﬁcial in Pretoria told me

that the case had been prioritized by the minister of land

affairs and the president in an attempt to acknowledge

the wounds of San genocide and land and cultural dis-

possession. It had captured the president’s vision of the

African Renaissance and the government’s desire for rec-

ognition as a leader in the promotion of human rights

in Africa. Essentialist constructions of San cultural con-

tinuity by the (khomani San, the South African San

Institute, the media, and the government fuelled this

agenda and provided a group of superexploited and hy-

permarginalized ex-farm workers and their families with

visibility and support that strengthened their case. This

was indeed an instance of “strategic essentialism” in

action.

For Kuper, while the motivation for such interventions

by activists and indigenous movements may be “gen-

erous,” their political consequences are generally un-

desirable. If we were to accept his gloomy prognosis, it

would make sense to lobby the South African govern-

ment to call off its land-reform programme. To deny

communities access to signiﬁcant material resources as

reparations for past injustices because they deploy es-

sentialist ideologies of culture and identity would be a

serious disservice to a tradition of anthropology and ac-

tivism that has sought to reconcile a “cultural politics

of recognition” with redistributive justice. Deconstruct-

ing essentialist ideologies of culture and identity should

be merely a ﬁrst step toward understanding and situating

local constructions of “truth,” not the goal of anthro-

pological practice. Surely anthropology should not strive

to reduce subaltern voices and histories to a sanitized

and standardized version of the anthropologist’s “truth.”

Kuper’s masterful analysis of global discourses on indi-

geneity fails to convey a sense of the unruly and con-

tested character of the creation of histories and identities

“from below.” Is this thorough dismissal of the logics of

indigenous identity politics a sign of a growing desire to

return to good old-fashioned ethnographic authority?

james suzman

African Studies Centre, Cambridge University,

Cambridge CB

RQ, U.K. (jms

209

@cam.ac.uk).

5i03

Despite the fact that the indigenous rights doctrine is

out of step with much contemporary anthropological

thinking, few anthropologists have openly criticized it.

Of the few who have, most have been careful to add the

caveat that their critique is intended for theoretical con-

sumption only. To this extent Kuper’s piece is a welcome

contribution to debate on an issue that has avoided con-

fronting the implications of some potentially critical

problems. Indigenousness, as Kuper shows, is no more a

justiﬁcation for claiming special rights in perpetuity

than having red hair, white skin, or blue blood.

It would of course be easy to overlook the theoretical

poverty of the indigenous rights discourse were it a uni-

versally effective tool for solving those problems it sets

out to deal with, viz., the precarious status of nominally

indigenous minorities in some countries. While the in-

digenous rights message has arguably beneﬁted minority

populations in the Americas and the Antipodes, its in-

vocation elsewhere has sometimes been counterproduc-

tive. The precarious status of San peoples in southern

Africa, for example, shows ﬁrst that it is not always pos-

sible to identify who is indigenous and who is not, sec-

ondly that those peoples best placed to claim the privi-

leges due to indigenes are not necessarily those most in

need of assistance, and thirdly that a focus on indige-

nousness may well reinforce the very structures of dis-

crimination that disadvantage these peoples in the ﬁrst

place (Suzman 2001,2002).

Indigenous rights instruments claim what credibility

they have mainly because of their applicability to situ-

ations in which the descendents of indigenous peoples

form clearly identiﬁable and, most important, conspic-

uously marginalized minorities. Were the special

“rights” and privileges demanded in ILO 169 bestowed

upon indigenous populations that formed empowered

majorities they would be considered discriminatory and

offensive. As Kuper points out, the same broad concep-

tion of culture underwrites both the indigenous rights

movement and the political ideology of Europe’s far

right. While it is a somewhat crude comparison, the lan-

guage of ancestry, bodily substance, and land that Ingold

(2002) shows to be at the heart of the indigenous rights

narrative is not dissimilar to the Nazis’ “blood and land”

slogan still popular among right-wing groups. Given that

few European proponents of indigenous rights would

consider such thinking acceptable or appropriate in their

homelands, this suggests that the contemporary indig-

enous rights discourse is the progeny of a worldview that

conceptually differentiates a First World ordered around

market forces and civil society from a Third World com-

posed of organic islands of discrete culture (Chanock

2000). Kuper is clearly correct to assert that indigenous

is a contemporary gloss for “primitive.”

Key concepts in the indigenous rights narrative are

derived from a conspicuously “Western” lexicon. Thus,

for many “indigenous” people, the formal assertion of

their rights as indigenes often involves the novel invo-

cation or reconceptualization of concepts such as “his-

tory,” “culture,” and “tradition.” Culture in these in-

stances ceases to be grounded in a continuity of practice

and instead becomes the primary vehicle for the artic-

ulation of identity. Interestingly, situations portrayed as

battles for “cultural survival” by the indigenous rights

movement are often considered by the people concerned

to be battles about livelihood, liberty, poverty allevia-

tion, and access to development or social services. In-

400 Fcurrent anthropology Volume

, Number

, June

2003

deed, when and if culture enters into local narratives, it

is usually as an adjunct to other concerns. Southern Af-

rica’s San people are frustrated not because they cannot

pursue their “traditional culture” but because they are

impoverished, marginalized, and exploited by the dom-

inant population.

Thus, while the indigenous rights message may pro-

vide succour to Europeans anxious to convince them-

selves of the sanctity of other ways of being and doing,

it also fuels ethnic tensions in Third World states at-

tempting to build a national identity from the debris of

colonial ﬁefdoms. As a result, proponents of an unso-

phisticated indigenous rights message are easily dis-

missed by anxious Third World governments as unin-

formed and arrogant neocolonials.

Many ethnically fragmented African states that have

had to cope with the legacy of colonial divide-and-rule

policies have developed ﬂexible and imaginative ap-

proaches to addressing the tensions experienced by their

peoples between their status as “citizens” on the one

hand and their status as “subjects” on the other (Mam-

dani 1996). Debate on the question of collective versus

individual rights in these states is inevitably bound by

the immediate need to develop practically effective pol-

icies towards the accommodation of minority concerns.

Not unsurprisingly, these debates expose the tautological

twists and loops of the “rights conundrum” (see Nhlapo

1999) that has hamstrung the ratiﬁcation of the UN’s

declaration on the rights of indigenous people. They also

suggest that any further elaborations on the basic indi-

vidual human rights doctrine must be responsive to local

peculiarities rather than the pursuit of universal appli-

cability. Broad critiques such as Kuper’s may stimulate

those involved in minority rights issues to generate al-

ternative approaches to dealing with the problems ex-

perienced by marginalized minorities.

adam kuper

Uxbridge, U.K. 3ii03

Suzman remarks that “the indigenous rights doctrine is

out of step with much contemporary anthropological

thinking.” This is true, although it must be admitted

that it is thoroughly in step with certain strands of cul-

tural theory. Some commentators, however, take the

view that academic judgements on the premises and

logic of the doctrine are neither here nor there—that

perhaps the rhetoric does come across as essentialist and

romantic but, as Robbins remarks, “such rhetorical strat-

egies often make for effective activism.”

Unfortunately, activism, however well-intentioned,

does not always work out for the best. The case studies

I summarize in my paper indicate, hardly surprisingly,

that if policies are based upon fantasies about primordial

hunters rather than on local realities they are liable to

have unfortunate consequences. And a misleading rhet-

oric is bound to have its costs. Suzman points out that

the indigenist discourse promotes stereotypes of primi-

tive tribesfolk. In consequence it “may well reinforce

the very structures of discrimination that disadvantage

these peoples in the ﬁrst place.” Appeals to “culture”

may persuade Western audiences, but they can com-

pletely drown out the voices of local people. As Suzman

notes, San people in Southern Africa “are frustrated not

because they cannot pursue their ‘traditional culture’but

because they are impoverished, marginalized, and ex-

ploited by the dominant population.”

Perhaps, then, the rhetoric may be not only bad an-

thropology but bad tactics as well. Ramos warns, how-

ever, that any criticisms should be muted. Critics pro-

vide ammunition to sinister forces with decidedly

unpleasant agendas, including “some oppressive govern-

ments that, in disclaiming the political agency of indig-

enous peoples, attribute their actions to the manipula-

tive powers of non-Indian agitators.” I accept that this

is a real problem, but I am reluctant to go along with

self-censorship. Are we to tell our students that for po-

litical reasons we—and they—should pretend to believe

in ideas that have no intellectual justiﬁcation? Must we

criticize Victorian evolutionism when it is invoked to

justify discrimination against a minority population but

endorse it, or keep silent, when this logic is put to use

to support land claims on behalf of the same minority?

Should we ignore history for fear of undermining myths

of autochthony?

Even if we could accurately weigh up the medium-

and long-term political costs and beneﬁts of saying this

or that, our business should be to deliver accurate ac-

counts of social processes. If anthropology becomes, as

Plaice remarks, “the academic wing of the indigenous

rights movement,” if we report only what is convenient

and refrain from analysing intellectual confusions, then

our ethnographies will be worthless except as propa-

ganda. Even as propaganda they will have a rapidly di-

minishing value, since the integrity of ethnographic

studies will be increasingly questioned by the informed

public.

Omura and Robbins raise the possibility that the in-

digenist rhetoric can be self-correcting. Imaginative new

twists may be introduced, adapted to local circum-

stances. (An interesting example involving the Canadian

Inuit is presented in Morin [2001].) Beth Conklin de-

scribes such a case in her contribution to the recent

American Anthropologist symposium “Indigenous

Rights Movements” (Hodgson 2002a)

. Conventional en-

vironmental arguments in favour of land grants to in-

digenous peoples are discredited in Brazil. Indigenous

leaders have been implicated in too many well-publi-

cized instances of ecological vandalism. Some activists

therefore choose rather to emphasize the ancient folk

wisdom of shamans. As Conklin explains, this allows

2. The introductory essay (Hodgson 2002b) reviews recent litera-

ture. This issue appeared after my paper had been circulated for

commentary.

kuper The Return of the Native F401

them “to construct new discourses about indigenous

peoples’ identities” by appealing to fashionable ideas

about “indigenous knowledge.” She points out further

strategic advantages. Brazilian nationalists were reluc-

tant to alienate vast swaths of forest to particular ethnic

minorities, but they are happy to agree that native ex-

perts have some sort of collective copyright in ancient

medical lore. Awkward questions about political repre-

sentation can also be avoided: “Whereas the ﬁgure of the

‘chief’ can raise the empirically testable question of

whether a certain individual has or deserves his people’s

support,” Conklin suggests, “the ﬁgure of the shaman

circumvents such questions” (2002:1053–55). In other

words, spiritual leaders are not required to be democrats.

This is creative enough, but I do not see that the new

doctrines represent a more reliable basis for social policy

than the old pieties of the indigenist movement.

Omura and Ramos emphasize, very properly, that not

all indigenous movements are the same, which I would

have thought a good argument against saddling them all

with the same ideology. A number of recent ethnogra-

phies do bring out the speciﬁcs of local situations and

examine the strategies of particular state agencies of

NGOs. In an exemplary essay published in the recent

American Anthropologist symposium, Kirk Dom-

browski lays out the interplay between U.S. government

agencies, agro-businesses, and native leaders in the de-

velopment of the Alaska Native Timber policies. He

ﬁnds that industrial timber and pulp producers in south-

eastern Alaska recognize Native claims for tactical rea-

sons, since this helps them to evade environmental laws

that were intended to curb production. He also reports

that “two classes of Natives” have emerged, one made

up of people who became shareholders in terms of the

Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 and the

other of people, born afterwards and known as “New

Natives,” who are not shareholders and do not share in

the proﬁts of the native corporations. Locally led evan-

gelical Christian churches are now organizing a popular

opposition to the indigenist movement (Dombrowski

2002).

But while local case studies are often illuminating,

various indigenist movements do share many features,

both ideological and tactical. In part this is because

American and Canadian activists have fostered a com-

mon approach, and the role of international agencies and

NGOs deserves more scholarly attention than it is get-

ting. Several anthropologists have related the emergence

of the indigenous peoples movement to an even more

widespread fashion for movements of ethnic assertion.

Attempts have been made to identify the global forces

that produce them (see, e.g., Friedman 1994, Hannerz

1996). The example of racial and ethnic movements in

the U.S.A., the end of the cold war, and the rise of NGOs

are all relevant. The Internet has become the indispen-

sable medium of internationalization. Big business

sometimes intervenes, although I doubt that it is helpful

to attribute the current wave of indigenist movements

to the mysterious workings of an otherwise poorly de-

ﬁned process of “globalization” or to the malign work-

ings of “late capitalism” that Dombrowski invokes. Per-

haps capitalism is not as late as all that. Certainly

globalization is neither as new nor as global as is widely

assumed. The discourse on globalization recalls Victo-

rian ideas about the inexorable spread of civilization.

Like the old enemies of civilization, those who inveigh

against globalization seem to expect the Noble Savage

to stand in its way, like Obelix the Gaul hurling menhirs

at the Romans.

Finally, Plaice expresses the fear that we may be forced

“to watch on the sidelines while those recently con-

quered suffer a fate shared by millions throughout his-

tory whose societies have disintegrated.” Yet she herself

has demonstrated that ethnographers can contribute

fresh and realistic deﬁnitions of social problems by

coolly analysing the ﬂuid and complex situations on the

ground and dissecting the goals of various agents. Such

studies clarify the pros and cons of speciﬁc public poli-

cies, and that is a worthwhile objective.

I am grateful to the colleagues who have responded to

my paper and helped to advance the argument.

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GEOFORUM

Alexander Osipov

Biometric IDs, indigeneity and exclusions among the non-pastoral Fulani at Agogo, Ghana

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2025

Isaac Owusu Nsiah

The use of digitized biometric methods to certify citizenship has increased in Africa. The embrace of the new biometric ID systems has been justified to ensure inclusive development, especially among marginalised groups. Paradoxically, the emergent ID systems further exacerbate existing institutionalized and social exclusions. Evincing this proposition, this research focuses on the second or third-generation non-pastoral Fulani and their descendants at Agogo in the southern part of Ghana. It critically analyses the Fulanis exclusionary and discriminatory experiences during the Ghana Card and voter ID registration. Using a qualitative case-study methodology, the findings illuminate how institutional discrimination (through bureaucratic discretionary power) and politicization of citizenship impact exclusions and bureaucratized processes of citizen registration and certification. The exclusionary experiences of the Fulani are tied to the idea of indigeneity, a colonially constructed and exclusionary political marker of a supposed ‘real Ghanaian’. Thus, indigeneity is integral to regimes and infrastructure of Ghanaian citizenship and specifically underpin the Ghana Card and the voter ID that socially sort, classify and categorize differentiated citizenship. This work argues that, in the context of SDG 16.9 (identity for all) and desirability for biometric ID systems to ensure inclusivity and enhance subalterns’ engagement in society, the Ghana card and voter ID in attempt to certify citizens, reproduce and consolidate existing exclusions, especially indigeneity-based and ethnicized differentiation of citizens. Thus, the nature of exclusionary tendencies does not emanate solely from the biometric identification infrastructure but rather its institutionalization with an existing exclusionary citizenship regime.

Science as Other than Itself: Strategic Anti-essentialism and Keeping-While-Disposing among Indian Rationalists

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2024

India’s rationalists work toward the disposal of attitudes they consider to be unscientific and to promote respect for and understanding of scientific evidence. Rationalists tend to see the relationship between science and religion as zero-sum: there is a fundamental disjuncture between science—arrogated to themselves—and religious mentalities. Figures like religious gurus have embraced certain scientific techniques—for example, chemistry methods to enact “miracles” and digital communication technologies to enhance and distribute their auras—but such techniques have only subverted science: science is employed to make itself disappear; or, if it is made visible, it is only as something other than itself. Yet this “misuse” of science finds a reflection in the rationalists’ own attempts to inculcate scientific attitudes: they think and hope they are communicating science, but it may be received as something other than itself. Rationalists recognize that their efforts at debunking superstitious attitudes and practices are not always effective. What is significant is that some activists respond by strategically pausing their own essentialism in order to establish and disseminate temporary relations between their own agenda and understandings of reality that are otherwise essentially antithetical to that agenda precisely in order to extend it. We show that rationalists are surprisingly flexible in pursuing their agenda: science may be pursued “unscientifically,” and secularity via religion. While this complicates existing perceptions of an atheist essentialism that sees only immutable and irreconcilable differences between science and religion, it also sheds light on “struggles about collective nonreligious identities” (Quack, Schuh and Kind 2020), as found within the Indian movement. The article also explores debates internal to the movement concerning the way to situate rationalism in regard to inherited tradition.

El retorno del nacionalismo romántico en el discurso sobre los pueblos indígenas

Article

Jan 2025

Wolfgang Gabbert

En la llamada era de la globalización, se ha invocado a menudo el fin del Estado-nación como forma predominante de organización sociopolítica. Por el contrario, los conceptos clave del pensamiento nacionalista romántico, surgidos en Europa en el siglo XVIII, están en auge en todo el mundo. Sobre la base de los procesos de diferenciación social en muchos países y mediados a través de las organizaciones internacionales y la política internacional, se han convertido en los fundamentos ampliamente reconocidos para la constitución de unidades políticas. Esto se nota, por ejemplo, en las discusiones sobre la autonomía y el reconocimiento del derecho indígena en América Latina. Frecuentemente se emplean conceptos semejantes al «Volksgeist» (espíritu del pueblo), elaborado por Johann Gottfried Herder y otros, y la idea de que cada «pueblo» se caracteriza por un idioma, una cultura e instituciones sociales comunes. El artículo muestra que existen paralelismos en las condiciones socioestructurales en las que surgieron las ideologías nacionalistas y étnicas en Europa a principios del siglo XIX y en América Latina en la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Sostiene que, en los debates sobre la autonomía, se suele ignorar la poca antigüedad de la etnogénesis de los grupos indígenas y su creciente diferenciación social, que es un factor crucial para explicar el surgimiento de las organizaciones indígenas a nivel local, nacional e internacional. Las reformas constitucionales y legales en América Latina no conservan tradiciones ancestrales, sino que dan lugar a la aparición de nuevas formas de participación política y práctica jurídica.

Gendered Geographies of Care: Women as Health Workers in an Indigenous Health Project in the Peruvian Amazon

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022

Daniela M. Peluso

NGOs, 'Bushmen' and Double Vision: The ≠ khomani San Land Claim and the Cultural Politics of 'Community' and 'Development' in the Kalahari

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2001

Steven Robins

This article focuses on the ambiguities and contradictions of donor and NGO development discourses in relation to local constructions of 'community', cultural authenticity and San identity. It deals specifically with the cultural politics of the successful 1999 ≠ khomani San land claim in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. The study investigates local responses to state, NGO and donor discourses on indigenous identity and 'cultural survival'. It shows how strategic narratives of community solidarity, social cohesion and cultural continuity, were produced by claimants and their lawyers during this process. In the post-settlement period, however, social fragmentation and intra-community conflict between 'traditionalists' and 'western bushmen' became increasingly evident. These conflicts drew attention to the difficulties of creating community solidarity and viable livelihood strategies in a province characterised by massive unemployment and rural poverty. The paper suggests that these divisions were also a product of the contradictory objectives of NGOs and donors to provide support for traditional leadership, San language and 'cultural survival', and to inculcate modern/western ideas and democratic practices. Furthermore, despite the thoroughly hybridised character of contemporary San identity, knowledge and practices, San traditionalists appeared to stabilise 'bushman' identity by recourse to notions of a 'detribalised Other' – the 'western bushmen' living in their midst. It is evident, however, that the 'traditionalist' versus 'western bushman' dichotomy is itself at the heart of donor and NGO development agendas. Consequently, the donor double vision of the San – as both 'First Peoples' and modern citizens-in-the-making – contributed to these intra-community divisions and conflict.

Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places

Book

Jan 2002

Ulf Hannerz

Quaqtaq: Modernity and Identity in an Inuit Community

Book

Jan 1997

Louis-Jacques Dorais

Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples

Book

Feb 1992

Alan Barnard

The Khoisan are a cluster of southern African peoples, including the famous Bushmen or San 'hunters', the Khoekhoe 'herders' (in the past called 'Hottentots'), and the Damara, also a herding people. Most Khoisan live in the Kalahari desert and surrounding areas of Botswana and Namibia. In spite of differences in their way of life, the various groups have much in common, and this book explores these similarities and the influence of environment and history on aspects of Khoisan culture. This is the first book on the Khoisan as a whole since the publication in 1930 of The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa, by Isaac Schapera, doyen of southern African studies.

Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy, and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic

Book

Dec 1991

George Wenzel

From trait to emblem and back: Living and representing culture in everyday Inuit life

Article

Jan 1997

J.L. Briggs

Scholars have discussed at length, and in a variety of ethnographic contexts, the ways in which ethnic imagery is created and manipulated by groups in conflict, or merely in contact, to further their goals. However, much more attention has been paid to the public, political arena than to the idiosyncratic, private feelings and concerns about ethnicity that are often the stuff of everyday life in multicultural, multiethnic communities. This paper suggests possible emotional origins for emblems that Canadian Inuit often use in differentiating themselves from Qallunaat (Euro-Canadians), and argues that in the private lives of Inuit, these cultural characteristics only occasionally do duty as culture-markers. In other contexts they recede back into the general pool of culture traits, where their practical qualities - and perhaps their relevance to non-ethnic dramas - are more important than their ability to signal Inuit identity. Vignettes of three Inuit men who live culturally complex lives are presented, showing how differently they use ethnic emblems.

The African Customary Law of Marriage and the Rights Conundrum

Article

Jan 2000

T. Nhlapo

The Idea of Indigenous People

Article

Apr 1998

Andre Beteille

Malgre les nombreux changements de la pratique anthropologique depuis une cinquantaine d'annees, notamment une amplitude des objets de recherche, les societes dites traditionnelles, primitives, orales, simples font toujours l'objet de l'interet privilegie des ethnologues. Si la terminologie utilisee pour designer ces societes a ete modifiee au cours du temps (afin de s'eloigner, entre autres, des theories evolutionnistes), les definitions restent encore imprecises, en particulier celle de tribu. L'expression peuple autochtone, utilisee depuis peu, laisse apparaitre une idee de morale et d'ethique mais ne peut s'appliquer qu'a des contextes particuliers, a l'instar de la notion de tribu, et peut alimenter des ideologies diverses qui pronent les liens du sang et de la terre et pour lesquelles les ethnologues ne mesurent peut-etre pas les utuilisations ambivalentes.

Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion In Europe

Article

Feb 1995

Verena Stolcke

What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century

Article

Oct 1999
ANNU REV ANTHROPOL

Marshall Sahlins

[Figure: see text] ▪ Abstract A broad reflection on some of the major surprises to anthropological theory occasioned by the history, and in a number of instances the tenacity, of indigenous cultures in the twentieth century. We are not leaving the century with the same ideas that got us there. Contrary to the inherited notions of progressive development, whether of the political left or right, the surviving victims of imperial capitalism neither became all alike nor just like us. Contrary to the “despondency theory” of mid-century, the logical and historical precursor of dependency theory, surviving indigenous peoples aim to take cultural responsibility for what has been done to them. Across large parts of northern North America, even hunters and gatherers live, largely by hunting and gathering. The Eskimo are still there, and they are still Eskimo. Around the world the peoples give the lie to received theoretical oppositions between tradition and change, indigenous culture and modernity, townsmen and tribesmen, and other clichés of the received anthropological wisdom. Reports of the death of indigenous cultures—as of the demise of anthropology—have been exaggerated.

The Return of the Native

Abstract

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