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The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism
... Whatever one's view, if anthropology's interest in the state began from a desire to distance itself from its hegemonic theorizations in political theory, the ever-greater commoditization and corporatization of every facet of social life, the cosmopolitanization of elites, and the globalization and financialization of capital have all changed the nature of the "state-finance nexus" (Harvey 2010, Kalb 2023) and, with it, the nature of state talk. In addition to the conventional arenas of state power, such as citizenship (Greenhouse et al. 2002;Ong 1999;Petryna 2002;Povinelli 1998Povinelli , 2002 and the law (Nader 2002, Starr & Collier 1989, anthropologists now commonly see care (Muehlebach 2012, Stevenson 2014, Ticktin 2006, art (Brandel 2023), expertise (Boyer 2008, Mitchell 2002, kinship (Thelen & Alber 2018), witchcraft (Kapferer 2002, Siegel 2005, and humanitarianism (Cabot 2019, Fassin 2012) fundamentally as sites for the exercise of state power or resistance to it. ...
If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore recent literatures on everyday state practices in Central and Eastern Europe and South Asia to show how different regional histories and configurations of knowledge continue to structure our assumptions about the state and its functions as well as the grammar of our descriptions. We suggest that the state could prove to be a useful optic for the study of region, which provides an alternative to an overly rigid local/global dichotomy that continues to shadow our theorizations.
... Whatever one's view, if anthropology's interest in the state began from a desire to distance itself from its hegemonic theorizations in political theory, the ever-greater commoditization and corporatization of every facet of social life, the cosmopolitanization of elites, and the globalization and financialization of capital have all changed the nature of the "state-finance nexus" (Harvey 2010, Kalb 2023) and, with it, the nature of state talk. In addition to the conventional arenas of state power, such as citizenship (Greenhouse et al. 2002;Ong 1999;Petryna 2002;Povinelli 1998Povinelli , 2002 and the law (Nader 2002, Starr & Collier 1989, anthropologists now commonly see care (Muehlebach 2012, Stevenson 2014, Ticktin 2006, art (Brandel 2023), expertise (Boyer 2008, Mitchell 2002, kinship (Thelen & Alber 2018), witchcraft (Kapferer 2002, Siegel 2005, and humanitarianism (Cabot 2019, Fassin 2012) fundamentally as sites for the exercise of state power or resistance to it. ...
If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore recent literatures on everyday state practices in Central and Eastern Europe and South Asia to show how different regional histories and configurations of knowledge continue to structure our assumptions about the state and its functions as well as the grammar of our descriptions. We suggest that the state could prove to be a useful optic for the study of region, which provides an alternative to an overly rigid local/global dichotomy that continues to shadow our theorizations.
... In the context of the neoliberal, extractivist capitalism that prevails in both countries, the state usually takes the side of investors who want to obtain the land for profit-making purposes, thus shifting the political focus of formalization against Indigenous interests, As part of the politics of recognition that are key to racialized property law, the state positions itself as the central agent in defining indigeneity [37] and defines whose rights are recognized [38] 1 . In this legal framework, Indigenous people must navigate the double bind of being both Indigenous enough, yet not too Indigenous [39]. As Leemann shows in Cambodia, state laws regarding indigeneity are tied to so-called traditional livelihoods, and Indigenous status can be revoked by state officials, thus precluding Indigenous land claims [9]. ...
Indigenous Land law reforms in Paraguay and Cambodia proposed collective land titling to secure land tenure through community ownership. When we look at land formalization through a temporal lens, we see the on-the-ground dynamics of how communal title may or may not be achieved by examining the ethnographic case studies of Guarani and Bunong land titling. We argue that the temporality of land titling processes creates disjointed, shifting timelines mediated by relationships of power and disrupted by fast-tracked private and state concessions. This uneven relationship between time and titling interrupts, undermines and fragments Indigenous land possession with serious ecological and livelihood impacts.
... Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are commonly known as "1948 Palestinians" or "Israeli Arabs", due to their roots originating from those who remained during the creation of the settler-colonial state in 1948. As settler-state institutions are instrumentalized to neutralize Indigenous difference (Povinelli 2002), since the Nakba, Israel has implemented various legal, political, and social tools of oppression to neutralize Palestinian Indigenous identity, attempting to de-Palestinize them. Over time, Israel has gathered over 65 laws that violate 1948 Palestinian citizens' rights in all areas of life, from citizenship and residency rights to the right to political participation, land and housing, education, culture, and language, religious rights, and due process rights during detention, especially on alleged security-related charges. ...
A widespread revolt during the months of April and May 2021 in the Palestinian city of Jerusalem, also known as Habbet Ayyar, responded to Israeli actions aiming to ethnically cleanse and force out residents from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, where approximately 3000 people reside, and to limit the movement and entry of Palestinians to Al-Aqsa Mosque. These measures were met with an unprecedented wave of youth-led protests against the Israeli army, police, security agencies, and settlers. Habbet Ayyar stands out not only for its innovative and effective use of new media to amplify the protests beyond Israel’s sphere of influence and control, but also for the unity displayed by fragmented Palestinians as they confronted Israel. By exploring the larger historical and geographical context of the movement that led to Habbet Ayyar, this article aims to understand how Palestinians have utilized, for the past 20 years, new media as a battleground—despite enforced digital colonialism—and how these media served to articulate and create what I call a digital “floating homeland”. The concept of a “floating homeland” is useful for exploring how the Palestinian virtual social movement has redefined and reconnected with Palestine beyond Israel’s control and fragmentation. This digital homeland is constructed through new technologies that have reshaped Palestinian self-identification and allowed for a virtual and digital reconceptualization of a borderless Palestine.
... Mining is another example of anthropogenic activities by exploiting nonlife beings, such as coal, gold, copper, uranium, et cetera. Elizabeth Povinelli in her ethnographic work towards the indigenous Aboriginal-Australians in the Northwest coast of the Northern territory of Australia, provides the concrete evidences within the indigenous people themselves having different opinions regarding the mineral explorations in inert life of the desert (Povinelli, 2002). It shows the 'noble savage' problematics under the late liberal regimes which turned out to be more vastly opening the possibility of capitalism's discovery of life in "dead matter, or life in the remainders of life: namely, in coal and petroleum" (Povinelli, 2016, p. 180). ...
p class="Abstract">We are now living in the epoch of Anthropocene—the epoch wherein human and nonhuman beings have become increasingly involved. The Anthropocene was also a mark to determine human existence begin to overwhelm biological and geological forms and displace the Holocene era. Indonesia is the one in many countries facing ecological crisis. The widespread of global monocultures such as sugarcane, cacao, oil palm and tea plantations are examples of providing an intolerance of diversity, meaning that only putting human desires above all of nonhuman species. The era also shows the struggles for social justice towards nonhuman beings. Hence, this paper expects to discuss conceptual and pragmatical levels of the Anthropocene in the more-than-humans’ anthropological studies. Meanwhile, anthropology and any sub-disciplines take “ontological turn” into account. Talking ontological anthropology is also a way of rethinking and requestioning the division and dichotomy between nature and culture, technology and society, human, and nonhuman beings, and so on. So, our research question is how “ontological turn” contributes to making social justice towards multispecies and geological life. Justice has been a great deal to preserve only humans based on Eurocentric perception and thought. By giving social justice to more-than-human realms is also resolving both “epistemologies of ignorance” and indigenous-led decolonization. Alternatively, ontological anthropology provides the ability to give a “voice” to more-than-human beings in order to have equal footing as humans. Therefore, against the Anthropocene means collapsing ‘the divide’ between culture and nature, human and non-human, and so on. Besides, the turn to anthropology of ontology also means demanding collaborations and balance between humans and nonhuman beings in the Anthropocene. The introductory anthropology of ontology could potentially open pathways of future possibilities for methodological and theoretical standpoints towards more-than-human realms in Indonesia. </p
... In our post-Soviet and neoliberal era, the paradigm of citizenship and rights figures as the most accessible and 'legitimate' path to mobilize and voice dissent. Nevertheless, many scholars and organizers have cautioned against the structural limits this paradigm poses for far-reaching change, including decolonization (Coulthard, 2014;Hale, 2002Hale, , 2004Povinelli, 2002;Simpson, 2014). But rights also structure real, lived possibilities for groups that remain marginalized. ...
This article is a response to Paul Kelly's discussion of Lenin and Mao in Conflict, War and Revolution: The problem of politics in international political thought (2022). Taking on a postcolonial perspective, it analytically expands how the book theorizes violence by understanding the violence of capitalist and colonial domination as a paradigm of war that structures pacified social relations and politics. The paper proposes that pacification, as a phenomenon that spans different kinds of modern nation-states, begs for a distinct theory of violence in international political thought. In so doing, it places Marxism, Post Colonialism, Coloniality/Decoloniality, Settler Colonial Studies, Anglophone Indigenous thought, post-structuralism and Brazilian Anthropology in conversation to reveal shared genealogies of anti-colonial, decolonial and anti-capitalist thought without uncritically collapsing these traditions.
This article examines the resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ presence and knowledge in environmental management in southeast Australia, a region with an ongoing history of settler colonial dispossession. Drawing on the concept of “survivance”, the article explores the dynamics of intercultural interactions between Indigenous organisations and settler state agencies through a focus on cultural fire management collaborations. These collaborations have grown significantly in scope and number over the past decade – notably in the aftermath of the 2019–2020 Black Summer wildfire season – with partnerships emerging at different scales and supported by different legal and financial arrangements. Based on interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals engaged in partnerships at local, regional, and statewide scales, the article reveals the forms of pragmatism, experimentation, and affect that sustain them within a broader settler colonial context. Rather than seeing such formations as co-optative or liberating, the article argues for their crucial importance in understanding Indigenous sovereignty as an emergent practice in tension with the settler state.
Indigenous communities in urban environments experience unique and enduring forms of colonialism. In the city of Bogota, Colombia, the Indigenous Muysca community of Suba experiences urban coloniality through various mechanisms such as displacement, environmental degradation, and epistemicide. Despite having their traditional territories abruptly urbanized, the Muysca engage in embodied practices of contestation through language revitalization, urban gardening, and the occupation of sacred places that have become urbanized. Drawing on ethnographic research with the Muysca of Suba framed within the Participatory Action Research methodology, I explore dwelling as an embodied, everyday experience rooted in place to illuminate the processes through which the Muysca interact with their environment to produce alternative socioecological lifeworlds in the city. These alternative ways of relating to the environment, which I refer to as Muysca dwelling, challenge the logic of the urban coloniality of nature that continues to drive Indigenous dispossession through urban development. By highlighting how the Muysca's embodied practices of dwelling unsettle technologies of urban coloniality of nature, I demonstrate how urban Indigenous temporalities and ontologies are cultivated within the city and reflect alternative processes of Indigenous revitalization and socioecological relations.
This paper reports on the remarkable resonances of ‘classical’ beliefs about Dreaming beings in ‘post‐classical’ beliefs about the spirits of the human ancestors and the remains of human ancestors. It provides an account of such ‘post‐classical’ beliefs derived from native title claim research in various jurisdictions, involving groups with relatively long and disruptive contact histories. Three kinds of contemporary beliefs and their context are described: (1) beliefs about the persistence of the spirits of human ancestors in their traditional country; (2) beliefs about the spiritual power of human remains; and (3) beliefs about the sacredness of traces of the activity of distant human ancestors. These ideas of continuing presence echo older ideas about Dreaming beings from the foundational epoch leaving powerful traces or spiritual essences in the landscape. In a similar way, contemporary beliefs about the spiritual power of human remains found in the landscape or repatriated from museum collections echo older ideas about the traces left by Dreaming beings and the mysterious powers of certain parts of the corpse. Together with the accumulation of knowledge about the sites of ancient Indigenous activity in the landscape, the discovery of human remains may provide a pathway to re‐sacralising (or re‐inscribing) the landscape. If this is correct, it complicates the characterisation of the historical transformation of Indigenous relations to land as one of secularisation. It also raises perennial questions about the viability of using such resonances as continuity arguments in native title claims.
In 2011, the International Labour Organization adopted a new Domestic Workers Convention, a change that generated struggles internationally around recognizing domestic labor as a form of work. Recognition as a worker is meant to redress the particularities that render the exploitation of domestic workers so intimate, painful, and naturalized. A decade after the Convention's passage is a reasonable period in which to assess its impact, as the papers in the special issue do in a variety of sites. The introduction discusses the limitations of the regulation of work in changing domestic workers' conditions. First, labor studies scholars have shown how contracts can cement inequalities. Second, attempts to standardize domestic labor through work contracts and the law rely on liberalism's supposedly unparalleled capacity to correct historical harms and perfect human relations. Moreover, studies in legal pluralism highlight the ways that informal work is organized according to social conventions. Forms of resistance by domestic workers indicate that they use a sense of rights based both on their status as workers and from other social domains to negotiate employment conditions. This leads us to the conclusion that all forms of energy expended, both paid and unpaid, should be considered forms of work.
Much anthropological scholarship on war—particularly “civil war”—focuses on violence perpetrated between organized political groups within the confines of a national space. In contrast, this article examines how “internal armed conflict” manifests across international borders, irrupting as interpersonal violence in spaces that are supposedly external to war. More specifically, I demonstrate how “the Colombian armed conflict” unfolds between refugees and their persecutors in Quito, Ecuador, through fleeting encounters based upon processes of life‐threatening recognition. These everyday encounters constitute “intimate war,” a relational condition of world‐making involving terrifying social attachments—threatening verbal and physical gestures and cues—between “strangers,” or people who are not necessarily familiar with each other. In this context, refugees enact strategies of evasion to avoid detection by their persecutors, such as bus hopping, visually scanning their surroundings, and avoiding other Colombians. Terrifying encounters across borders, and refugees’ strategies to avoid them, unsettle normative assumptions about the desirability of recognition, where and how war happens, and what constitutes escape.
This article analyzes representations of Brazilianness at festivals in Toronto, Canada, to understand how ethnoracialized groups are negotiating cultural commodification and neoliberal entrepreneurship. At these festivals, Brazilian immigrants employ specific semiotic assemblages to present themselves as a culturally rich, entrepreneurially successful group. They uphold Canadian multicultural ideals while avoiding negative stereotypes associated with Latin Americans. Entrepreneurship is thus a key idiom through which ethnoracial and cultural differences are managed and transformed for profit within a neoliberal regime where minoritized groups compete for visibility and resources. Current forms of cultural commodification therefore merit study because they illuminate how capitalism reproduces ethnoracial inequalities.
The expansion of mining in Ecuador has stirred resistance among some Indigenous peasant communities in the name of territorial
rights; others have offered their land and labour to mining companies. In this and similar land grab contexts, Indigenous
peasant communities are often broadly represented as natural resisters or as corrupted collaborators, which, we argue, does not
account for how peasants with territorial and/or land rights weigh their options. In Napo province, we examine how peasants
have adjudicated contradictory socioeconomic pressures and, in turn, opted to work with miners. We highlight the methodological
and political implications of centering how local ‘participants’ in land grabs experience untenable choices or ‘double binds’ to
understand the efficacy of land grabs and the obstacles to resistance.
This article examines the growing bauxite mining activities aimed at extracting aluminum ore in the Netharhat Valley, located in the Gumla and Latehar districts of Jharkhand. Adivasis share an inseparable relationship with land and forest, which play a vital role in shaping their identity and social structure. However, the introduction of new mining frontiers has ushered in persistent extraction challenges in Adivasi’s life. Although capitalist varied interests promise Adivasis for development imperatives and their chance to uplift themselves through mining, the outcomes are both complex and multifaceted. The current situation is marked by complexity as the introduction of the new mining frontiers has skewed the balance. The article illustrates the diverse consequences of extensive mining on the Adivasis and their diminishing control over land and forests. It illustrates the varying stances on the issue of mining, and their differing opinions have created divisions among the villagers based on class, economic priorities and market opportunities. The introduction of new resource frontiers has weakened village egalitarianism and institutions, allowing for mining capitalism to penetrate the Adivasi heartlands.
In Dili, a new generation of Timorese “foodies” are reshaping the culinary landscape by formulating “Timorese Cuisine.” Armed with mobile devices and active on social media, they seek to build Timor's reputation as a tourist destination by managing consumers' appreciation for “local foods” through a novel “gastro‐aesthetics” a culturally inflected field of qualities which contribute to judgements of the “pleasantness,” “beauty,” or “goodness” of food. But bringing Timorese foodways into correspondence with global consumer tastes unsettles their qualitative characteristics and their medical, moral, and cosmological meanings. With cultural politics dominated by resistance heroes and the Indonesian‐educated “new generation,” this movement marks a youthful contribution to Timor‐Leste's viability through entrepreneurialism. As the country's fossil fuel economy is challenged by climate change, and tourism promoted as a sustainable alternative, configuring “Timorese Cuisine” is an element of nation‐ branding at once elevates and diminishes the efficacies of “local foods” as social substances.
Drawing inspiration from new work across the fields of political ecology, plantation and abolition studies, critical Indigenous studies, and racial capitalism, this Introduction to a special issue of The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology locates extraction within an account of property as a system of racialized exploitation. Aware of the risks of a cosmopolitics that romanticizes non‐Western value systems as largely untouched by extractivism, in this Introduction and in the articles themselves, we center the question of how Indigenous communities and others navigate extractivism in places and landscapes that have been deeply impacted and partly transformed by resource mining, agrarian monoculture, and deforestation. In voicing demands not subordinated by a materialist and secular language of resource exploitation, these accounts invite a less deterministic account of “our” late capitalist present. We contend that just as extraction is not monolithic, neither are its refusals, resistances, and alternatives.
The Australian state and much of the settler polity maintain an unresolved contradiction between fully acknowledging Indigenous people and upholding a system predicated on the assumption of their socio-political inferiority. This tension inflects a public sphere in which Indigenous people frequently deploy truth-telling as an epistemic strategy, albeit one that involves a balance between challenging cultivated silences and/or colonial triumphalism and the costs of repetitive epistemic labour. The landscape of communicative exchange thus outlined suggests the need for a more nuanced assessment of the decolonial potential of truth-telling about colonial violence in Australia, given a contemporary context wherein settler individuals and institutions increasingly attempt to elicit such testimony from Indigenous people. Discourse analysis of media items published in 2020 about 26 January, Australia's national day, reveals Indigenous people’s resistance against both colonial untruths and the racialised epistemic power differential enabling their circulation.
This article explores how people formulate alterity as a responsive endeavour as they seek to live well in a context of profound marginality at the edges of a Malaysian rainforest. It argues that Batek people often narrate, encounter, and enact alterity – drawing distinctions between themselves and Others – through and in relation to acts of sharing. By exploring a diverse set of instances in which decisions about how and whether to share produces moments of tension, this article investigates the conditions of alterity that underlie sharing's very possibility. This involves asking not only how alterity is produced among Batek people, but also how it is extended outwards, both to those Batek term gɔp (outsiders), and to the dead people who continue to intrude in their lives. Through tracing these everyday moments where alterities are worked out between Batek and gɔp , and the living and the dead, it becomes apparent that as people encounter often‐unpredictable Others, an attitude of what Renato Rosaldo calls ‘social grace’ comes to the fore. Retheorizing alterity in the light of ‘social grace’ demonstrates it to be a responsive, indeterminate process of managing detachment and connection through the immediacy of the diverse encounters and ruptures of everyday life.
In April 2023, the U.K. government announced that misogyny would not be categorized as a hate crime stating that this “may prove more harmful than helpful.” This article argues that before and beyond hate crime, misogyny, understood as the hatred of women (from the Greek misein [hate] gynae [women]), is the foundational logic of our legal, social, and political order in the west. This constitution of hate relies on the active dehumanization, exploitation, and ownership of women’s bodies by the institution of white men through making women the object of the “colonization of the everyday.” This exhausting hatred is enacted through repetitive, unceasing, and everyday violence toward women. Simply put, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist democracy is only sustained through violence against women. Hating women is, therefore, not a pathology of society but rather is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight. Misogyny ensures the precarity of women’s bodies and women’s status as trespassers in everyday spaces that are deliberately always already misogynistic. Given the foundational nature of misogyny, did the government have a point in excluding endemic violence against women from hate crime as “more harmful than helpful?” Is hate crime merely constitutive of a cultural matrix of misogyny? This paper enacts a decolonial feminist prism to disrupt the cultural condition of misogyny by thinking hate crime together with legal-political constitutional and cultural change. The paper explores violence against women set against the historical emergence of misogyny from Greek dehumanization, to medieval persecution of “witches,” the muzzling and banning of women from public spaces, Shakespeare’s “Taming,” to contemporary femicide rates. Interrogating hate crime through this prism offers nuanced routes for how to disrupt the legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new. Misogyny is enduring.
Addressing the climate crisis requires renewable energy, however, developing renewable energy should be equitable. In this article, we analyze a 15-year-old transnational hydroelectric power development conflict involving Indigenous rights in Mapuche-Williche territory, Chile and a Norwegian state-owned company, Statkraft. We seek to advance the field of energy justice by evaluating injustices in this transnational conflict. At the heart of the conflict is a threatened Ngen Kintuantü (the spirit guardian Kintuantü), which is part of a ceremonial and pilgrimage site of utmost importance in Williche territory. We argue that epistemic justice-the radical inclusion of different ways of knowing-can be a central tenet to understanding and redressing the harms connected to energy development, especially via networks of solidarity with Indigenous rights claims. Yet currently, the right to consent for energy projects,-which is informed by the international legal mechanism Free, Prior, and Informed Consent and Chile's codification of a less stringent Indigenous consultation-is limited by its formation within liberal legality. Despite these limitations, the Traditional Organization of the Ayllarewe of Ngen Mapu Kintuantü, an organization of Mapuche-Williche communities, is crafting and demanding their own form of territorial consultation. Drawing from a solidarity network of research across the Global South and North, we find that existing tools like FPIC can and must be strengthened through Indigenous and local guidance, but that justice, in a broader sense, cannot be achieved without returning land and broader legal reforms.
In 2017 a seemingly small change in Pakistan's questionnaire for the upcoming national census sparked vociferous debates about religious identity and the politics of recognition. The questionnaire added “Scheduled Caste” as a separate religion, whereas previously it had appeared as a Hindu subcategory. Some saw this bureaucratic shift as a cynical attempt to further diminish Pakistan's precarious Hindu minority, reopening old wounds about religious nationalism. Anti‐caste progressives, however, saw an opportunity to imagine alternative political horizons for minority citizenship. How do untimely state projects render new political aspirations legible? As shown through ethnographic attention to rumors, enumerative practices, and census campaigns, the tools of bureaucratic documentation can reactivate unsettled histories, helping people imagine new possibilities from the state's margins.
Peru introduced co‐managed Reservas Comunales (Communal Reserves) as an alternative to the ‘fortress conservation’ approach that characterises other protected areas where Indigenous Peoples tend to be excluded from both the physical space and managerial aspects of conservation regimes. Although these Reserves are lauded internationally as supporting Indigenous Peoples' self‐determination, this article examines the challenges that arise from the cogestión (co‐management) regime for Indigenous organisations and communities. Focusing on the ‘responsibilisation’ relationships created in the co‐management of two Communal Reserves, the article reflects on the different trajectories of this transfer of responsibilities, and the processes through which Indigenous co‐management organisations are expected to adopt the government's conservation goals.
When the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990, it marked an important shift in relations between tribal communities and non‐tribal museums in the United States. By listening to how different speakers at the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office talk about repatriation and reclamation, we can see that these processes involve more than the return of ancestors and belongings; they also influence how people speak about and express group identity. In discussions about repatriation, Hopi community members frequently talk to outsiders and adjust to their ways of speaking, if only temporarily. I compare two instances in which speakers creatively used possessive constructions to convey different scales of identity and argue that Bakhtin's concept of “addressivity” illuminates connections between the two. More broadly, I suggest that this concept is useful for thinking about how relationships between tribal and non‐tribal institutions might continue to be transformed in ways that are responsive to contemporary Indigenous claims and presence.
This article explores how sound technologies are deployed by government agencies to produce legitimacy in the struggle over oil pipelines in British Columbia, Canada. Activists seeking to stop the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines have mobilized noise and silence as tactics of protest and refusal. For example, one thousand demonstrators make a cacophony outside a Vancouver hotel in protest of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Communications technology, though, is deployed here by the state to compress and control. In one of the hotel's small, impregnable conference rooms, public hearings over the pipeline are taking place—only the public is not allowed inside: the proceedings are being livestreamed to a hotel two kilometers away. On unceded Coast Salish territory, the legitimacy of pipeline hearings is also contested because the continued existence of Indigenous legal orders represents a challenge to the pipelines in question. Technological mediation makes it possible to satisfy one requirement of legitimacy: democratically granted representative power. The challenge to the legal system highlighted by the continued existence of the Indigenous, though, is managed through audile techniques deployed as anthropotechnologies. The implications for a politics of sound must be considered in light of sound's mediation, which is never politically neutral.
The festive celebration known as FandangObon is made possible by workshops and satellite performances that artivistas (art activists) stage throughout the year in a variety of community venues. The event transforms the annual Japanese American Buddhist Obon ceremony honoring ancestors into an antiracist polycultural performance. Through improvisation and invention, colorfully adorned participants blend the dances, songs, and costumes of the Japanese bon odori circle with Mexican son jarocho fandango practices and West African ballet and egungun drum and dance circles. Each of the groups represented in FandangObon brings to the mix its own form of circle dancing, collective singing, and instrument playing, yet bon odori, fandango, and egungun do not fuse together seamlessly in these gatherings. Instead they coalesce as a conversation among equals in which each tradition remains faithful to itself in the process of making changes through engagement with others The concepts of amplification, counterpublics, and fugitive spaces of belonging serve in this article as central interpretive frames of a cultural critique of the historical and cultural conditions for the celebration's emergence, articulation, and implementation (Marcus and Fischer 1986).
Over recent decades, there have been increased public debates about rising level of ethnic and religious diversity and their implications for social cohesion and intercultural relations. These contestations are often situated within a diversity governance continuum with two opposing and often extreme poles both in the policy arena as well as the academic literature. The first pole sees diversity as potentially contributing to social fissures and intercultural discord. The second pole highlights the benefits of an acceptance of diversity for cross-cultural awareness and social peace. Using empirical evidence from a multi-year project, this article assesses the key assumptions underlying these oppositional approaches through a study of the provision of social services to multicultural communities and its association with civic engagement and national belonging. Study findings show that access to multicultural services is significantly associated with higher levels of civic engagement among migrants, rather than social exclusion and urban segregation.
This article brings together theories of truth in legal anthropology and the anthropology of religion to highlight how legal institutions can co‐opt hate crime laws and reproduce patterns of sociopolitical oppression. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research on the social life of India's only hate crime law – the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA), which punishes violence against Dalit (ex‐untouchable) communities – the article argues that hate crime cases involve a clash between three different truth logics: attributive truth or credibility; formal juridical truth regimes defined by evidentiary technicalities; and a distinct mode of experiential‐discriminatory truth, which is defined by its processual character. As Indian police and judiciary conflate these truth logics in practice, they publicly and legally erase realities of caste discrimination and (re)construct marginalized communities like Dalits as greedy and unreliable narrators.
In the context of a steadily decreasing Indigenous population, active military occupation, and a documented history of human rights abuses perpetrated by Indonesian state security forces, Black Indigenous Papuans have uttered phrases like extinction , and we will be gone in public and private spaces. These utterances often follow an indictment of Indonesia's national family planning program as a key node of state apparatuses of domination and, by extension, genocide. Amid Indonesia's global health success story of a historically lauded national family planning model, I examine the emergence of a local pronatalist program in which health workers are both providers and deniers of access to birth control. Through highlighting this story of Indigenous refusal and racial survival in the terrain of women's reproduction the stakes of a necropolitical environment marked by occupation, population control, and fears of genocide are brought into high relief.
Presented as the eyes, ears, and voice for the Canadian Armed Forces in the Canadian Arctic, Canadian Rangers within the first Canadian Ranger Patrol Group (1CRPG) are applauded as being positive and progressive examples of state‐Indigenous relations. Located in almost 70 communities across the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, the Yukon and Atlin, British Columbia (BC), Canadian Rangers in 1CRPG are viewed as a critical part of the arctic defense strategy and a cheap and easy way to maintain arctic sovereignty, especially in predominately Indigenous communities in the high arctic. Focusing on how Rangers and Ranger Instructors talk and think about the pay system, this article examines how value is ascribed to Rangers depending on their ability and desire to financially invest in the organization. Studying the polarity, this article analyzes how the military—which prides itself on employing Indigenous people as part of arctic defense—reinforces colonial ideologies and relational structures of Indigenous communities' dependence on state aid. However, this, I argue, further entrenches dangerous colonial stereotypes that (Indigenous) members make poor economic choices and are thus responsible for continuing their ongoing poverty and inferiority.
Cultural loss has been neglected in the study of Aboriginal Australia. This neglect reflects the impact of changes in Australian society involving the recognition and celebration of Indigenous culture. Yet new jurisprudence relating to compensation under Australian land rights legislation has refocused attention on cultural loss. This article draws on ethnography from North West Queensland's Gulf Country to examine how the concept of loss relates to change. Reflecting on the rise of the juridical notion of a “compensable act,” I ask, When does “loss” occur and to whom, and what solace may be found for cultural loss? I argue that these questions focus attention on the fraught relationship between Indigenous people, anthropology, and the law in Australia, while also offering an opportunity to reformulate those relations.
Australian Aboriginals comprise a heterogeneous set of indigenous peoples, made up of more than 200 language groups, each characterized by regionally distinct cultural practices. Pan‐Aboriginal identification has mobilized a postcolonial politics of writing from an indigenous Australian perspective, one that has been both nationally and transnationally influential. Aboriginal people have been writing since as early as their first contact with the European phonographic alphabet. To date, the database BlackWords: Aboriginal Writers and Storytellers records more than 5000 published Aboriginal authors, who have produced work in forms as diverse as poetry, plays, and short and long prose fiction. Much of this work is imbued with both political charge and aesthetic depth. Nonfiction prose has also been a feature of Aboriginal writing since colonization, covering history, journalism, academic criticism, and, most significantly, life writing. In each genre, questions of politics and identity tend to be central themes, diversely addressed.
Collective land titling often drags on for decades, while private land concessions and holdings do not face the same problem, creating 'leftovers' of land available for Indigenous peoples to attempt to collectively title. In two ethnographic case studies in Cambodia and Paraguay, we analyse community-based Indigenous land titling by focusing on the on-the-ground dynamics of property relations, Indigenous livelihood shifts and ecological change. In both countries, large agricultural players implemented a staggering change in local landscapes through deforestation, configuring new realities that in turn feed into local environments and titling processes. Adapting their livelihoods to living in the leftovers, in Cambodia, the Indigenous Bunong shifted from rice to rubber as they navigated the slow titling process. In Paraguay, some Indigenous Guarani shifted from corn to cattle by renting out their collectively titled land. The case studies show that the liberal titling approach to secure Indigenous lands overestimates the ability of title to remove land from capitalist logics such as the push to rent or sell, while some spaces of autonomy are opened. We critique the liberal approaches to formalising title, where Indigenous struggles for their ways of life are funnelled into fighting for collective property. K E Y W O R D S agrarian change, Cambodia, collective land titling, deforestation, forest-based livelihoods, Indigenous, Paraguay
Straggles for indigenous self‐determination have become a major worldwide human rights movement. Throughout the Americas and in settler colonies such as Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, as well as across the Pacific and in Asia and Africa and the Caribbean, indigenous peoples reject their treatment as disadvantaged citizens of settler states and instead demand to be recognized as political communities with distinctive rights. The proliferation of indigenous mobilizations – irreducible to a single, unified movement – reflects a shifting terrain of straggle. New strategies, operating simultaneously on multiple scales, have been deployed to confront new and evolving threats to the individual and collective rights of indigenous peoples. Despite noteworthy gains, indigenous peoples, in many cases, still are losing control over lands, waters, and other resources, and access to sacred sites. Market‐driven global processes, underwritten by dominant settler colonies such as the United States, are deepening environmental deterioration and increasing poverty, limiting the hope of sustainable futures for indigenous and non‐indigenous people everywhere.
For the purposes of this entry, “Indigenous peoples” refers to those societies which exercised powers of self‐governance prior to colonization by and incorporation into the modern nation‐state and who continue to experience and resist this as unjust. Such peoples are, thus, distinct from ethnic or other minority groups in that the primary issue framing Indigenous–settler state relations is “not racist exclusion … but forced incorporation into the state.” The continued structure of imposed rule expresses itself as settler colonialism; distinguished from other forms of colonialism by the intended permanent settlement of foreign peoples and, thus, access to Indigenous land in perpetuity. Consequently, it has been argued, settler colonialism is “first and foremost a territorial project” where land (as opposed to natural or human resources) is the precondition.
Building upon ethnographic research conducted among participants in UK-based initiatives in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, the paper contributes to anthropological literature on the essentialising nature of state-sponsored constructions of minoritised groups. More specifically, I put forward two sets of arguments. Firstly, I suggest a concept of simultan-eity that challenges colonially inflected conceptualisations of the relationship between communities and their respective traditions. Activists of Jewish-Muslim inter-community work subvert dominant conceptualisations of intergroup commonalities and divergen-cies by developing a theorisation of Jewish-Muslim relations that acknowledges group similarities and differences as overlapping categories. Secondly, I contribute to John Jackson's (2005) theorisation of racial sincerity, a notion offering a conceptual challenge to the notion of authenticity. I argue that the complexity of my interlocutors' thematisa-tions of Jewish-Muslim relations underpinned by the diversity of the sources of knowledge that they rely on could be best understood as an example of this analytic. On a broader theoretical plane, the paper proposes a framework that underscores the agent-ive power of minority communities and pays close attention to the way they define their positionalities vis-à-vis the majorities and each other in ways that go beyond binaries-based theorisations.
In this essay I bring Gregory Bateson together with Deleuze and Guattari (primarily with the latter) to show their ecological compatibility, especially with Guattari’s ecosophy. I do this against the backdrop of the Anthropocene which presents us not only with a ‘climate’ of post-truth and political corruption, but also with the so-called climate crisis. In the context of these two broad examinations, I ask what can an artisan-artist-designer do given this problematic context? My reply is to call on ‘speculative design’ by an ‘avant-garde without authority’ to expose the symptoms of the Anthropocene era.
This article critiques current theories of the commons as having been produced and sustained by human-centered paradigms of intellectual reasoning. It develops a commons beyond the human in response, which offers another way to envisage the commons and its pledge to the construction of better, alternate futures. Rather than advance yet another definition of the commons, this article examines how its means of knowledge production might ensue differently by dislocating the concept from its existing points of epistemological orientation. At the heart of this inquiry lies an attempt to rethink the commons concept beyond its regulating logics of liberal humanism, a radical reconsideration of the kinds of politics it should and might still enable beyond the lure of progressive reason. Turning to a reading of Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book, the article argues that a commons beyond the human gathers in the text through the more-than-human existence engendered between a young Aboriginal girl, Oblivia, and a flock of black swans. The novel presents neither the disavowal of the inherited knowledges of the commons nor a concrete policy to herald its appearance in a conjectural future, but a critical expansion of its transitive acts of worlding. This is made feasible by its insistence on upholding an Indigenous Australian ontological reality as the structuring provision for its narratives—one that has long stressed its dissonance from dominant Western genres of thinking and being.
Background: Research in outdoor adventure education (OAE) and related fields has argued that OAE programming can problematically reproduce dominant ways of being around patriarchy and whiteness. In particular, scholars have forwarded specific critiques of sense of place (SOP) in OAE or related fields. Purpose: This article investigated and critiqued SOP as a fundamental curricular concept and offered an anticolonial analytical tool for educators. The article posited that SOP is a key site of intervention for OAE educators and programs with anticolonial goals because of the historical, sociocultural, and economic foundations of SOP in OAE. Methodology/Approach: This study employed an anticolonial and antiracial capitalist theoretical framework and qualitative methods including thematic study of select literature on environmental conservation and colonialism, analysis of fundamentals of anticolonial pedagogical frameworks, and interview findings from mentor-partners in OAE and related fields. Findings/Conclusions: This study developed an anticolonial analytical tool to understand and interpret SOP in OAE through an anticolonial lens. Implications: The purpose of this tool is to assist practitioners and educators in the analysis of their own SOP pedagogy and practices and to encourage the development of SOP curricula toward anticolonial aims.
This microhistory of a shoreline place in Thailand details the socio-natural process by which a piece of coastal land came to be recognised as private property by the state. It demonstrates that intimate and long-term attention to specificities of how property comes into being has more explanatory power than synoptic theorisations of accumulation and dispossession. Using ethnography, archives and affective co-narration, this paper probes the shifting ground of water and land to show how the fluidity of water plays a key role in the politics and legal procedures of enclosure, and how fluctuating boundaries become an ambiguous arena for property claims contestations amid entanglements of slippery legal semantics. It argues that the expanded notion of agency in the Anthropocene presents new challenges for thinking about property relations, and that thinking from a shoreline place of shifting water-land boundaries engenders novel questions to do with fluid dispossessions at a time of rising oceans.
This article investigates processes of criminalisation and mechanisms of repression and control of oppositional political activism of Israel’s citizens, both Palestinians and Jews, given the state’s particular political formation as a ‘liberal settler state’ (Robinson, 2013). In order to do so, the article traces the ‘threshold of threat’ that leads to criminalisation and repression in Israel. I argue that the process of criminalisation and repression is tied with the construction of the concept of ‘threat’ and is always bound with race-making. Further, the article treats criminalisation as a multilayered process involving both state and non-state actors, and a range of informal and formal strategies. I further argue that the operational logic of the settler state dictates the strategies used to tolerate, contain, limit or crush dissent altogether. Since the Israeli state strives to maintain privileges to its Jewish citizenry, we can trace more reliance on ‘informal’ strategies of criminalisation towards its Jewish citizens, led by civil society organisations and actors, while the ‘formal’ strategies, led by the state, are preserved almost exclusively for dealing with Palestinian political activism. Finally, I argue that unravelling processes of criminalisation and oppression, triggered by the crossing of the threshold of threat, exposes state vulnerabilities and fragility. By tracing the shifting thresholds of threat we gain a window into the precarity of such a system of power and how it can be challenged and transformed. We can also learn what opportunities for resistance exist and what ‘openings’ must be seized.
In this article I consider religion in international political scholarship and suggest a study of its epistemological politics and conceptual history. I argue that scholarship which strives to ‘engage’ or ‘recognize’ religion in global politics remain ignorant of the costs involved. Building on this argument, I ask if the troubles with recognizing religion reflect more basic qualities of recognition scholarship. Following the work by Jacques Rancière, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Jens Bartelson I argue that recognition has two faces and that along with its frequently acknowledged empowering aspect, it also comes with costs. In order to assess the costs of recognition I propose a study of its conditions of possibility, that is, a study of the ways in which the subjects of recognition become recognizable as such. In the final section of the paper, I apply this to the example of religion in global politics and the formation of the Muslim subject in the lead-up to the partition of British India and the founding of Pakistan.
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