De la Cadena y Starn Indigenous Experience Today

Mas vale que deje de leer y escriba algo. Acá empiezo las fichas. Pero antes una nota sobre lo extraño de leer el artículo de Claudia -Briones- en la compilación que estoy por fichar, en inglés y en este contexto globalizador de la discusión de indigeneidad, pero hablando de la posición de Lorena , Oskar y Fakundo como jovenes mapurbes, y mapunkies, autónomos e independientes en contraposición a los jóvenes del cai herederos de la "conciencia" de sus padres-militantes. Esta lectura me recordó lo mucho que noches de charlas interminables, las múltiples presentaciones, las discusiones sobre la ciudad y las esquinas, las noches de recitales y gira, los encuentros y bailes en circulo, en mi ciclo de movilidad durante cuatro años provocaron muchas de las cosas que estoy pensando. Otra cosa que sigue haciendo ridículo definir al "campo". Bueno inglés y libros.

de la Cadena, Marisol and Starn, Orin 2007 "Introduction" in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation

The authors set the discussion form some common grounds. Indigeneity show that the aspiration of the West to disseminate progress and civilize the others worldwide has not unfolded as it was expected. Contrarily indigenous populations (an -unstable-estimate of 250 million worldwide) still exist and constitute economic, cultural and social movement that do not just constitute alternative, counter force to modernity. Even though indigeneity is a lot of times intertwined with process of economic and social marginalization this is not a generalization we can make. Scholarly analysis seem to be dived among those who celebrate the political mobilization that indigeneity generates, and those who see it as problematic definition of boundaries and a machinery of exclusion.

A basic idea is then that "indigenous people are highly heterogeneous in their views and agendas" (2) Indigeneity is generated in complex nets of self and alter definitions in complex and "changing boundary politics and epistemologies of blood, culture, time and place" (3). Even present views on indigeneity tend to conform a coherent and enclosed definition of a "leftists environmentalist indigenous", this conform a "reverse Orientalism" (according to Ramachandra Guha). One configured in a history of Western epistemologies, policies and the indigenous interpellations and resistances that continued reconstructing difference, form savagery to one in need to be assimilated through development to current multiculturalism.

How then conceptualize indigeneity in the context a neoliberal multicultural politics that recognizes indigenous existence? "Indigeneity emerges only within larger social fields of difference and sameness; it acquires its "positive" meaning not form a some essential properties of its own but through its relation to what exceeds and lacks. (...) indigenous cultural practices, institutions and politics become such in articulation with what is not considered indigenous within the particular social formation where they exist. " In this indigeneity is historically contingent and names a relationship that implies a particular space- time (according Mary Louise Pratt).

The different forms this relationship took is not just a question of different ideologies, but effected material relations and state policies that configure post colonial formations, in which "colonizers" are not only form the West. The global indigenous movement was both conformed in the articulation of diverse indigenous activism and also in the travelling of the notion of indigeneity. It keeps insisting the waves of destruction that colonialism and capitalism generate (d), something that give a common ground to articulation with subaltern groups, which brings into play a diverse range of indigenous "positionings" enabled in contingent configurations that articulate "particular patterns of engagement and struggle" (according to Li).

Thus indigeneity is a field (not just of political identities but) of governmentality, subjectivity and knowledge, in which "becoming indigenous is always only a possibility negotiated within political fields of culture and history" (13) on "national formations of alterities" (Briones). Indigeneity encompasses questions of territory and political sovereignty, while challenging the "ethnospacial fix" of (Moore) that veil displacement, expulsions and "indigenous diasporas" (Clifford).

In many cases there is a "perverse confluence” of neoliberalism and political mobilization that conform new gorvernmentalities. Finally if indigenous self representation and collaborative work is currently an opening which opens a series of new possibilities, it also has to be acknowledge that asymmetric relations are not just erased in the act of collaborating, rather academic and non academic, north south, "local" and "universal" among other lines tend to complex entanglements of power, form which the formation of hybrid genres is only one of the possibilities.

Well Marie Louise Pratt takes lots of this ideas into a very very lucid after word.

Contents:

"Introduction," Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn

Part 1: Indigenous Identities, Old and New
“Indigenous Voice,” Anna Tsing
“Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake,” Emily T. Yeh
“‘Our Struggle Has Just Begun': Experiences of Belonging and Mapuche Formations of Self,” Claudia Briones

Part 2: Territory and Questions of Sovereignty
“Indigeneity as Relational Identity: The Construction of Australian Land Rights,” Francesca Merlan
“Choctaw Tribal Sovereignty at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Valerie Lambert
“Sovereignty's Betrayals,” Michael F. Brown

Part 3: Indigeneity Beyond Borders
“Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties,” James Clifford
“Diasporic Media and Hmong/Miao Formulations of Nativeness and Displacement,” Louisa Schein
“Bolivian Indigeneity in Japan: Folklorized Music Performance,” Michelle Bigenho

Part 4: The Boundary Politics of Indigeneity
“Indian Indigeneities: Adivasi Engagements with Hindu Nationalism in India,” Amita Baviskar
“‘Ever-Diminishing Circles': The Paradoxes of Belonging in Botswana,” Francis B. Nyamnjoh
“The Native and the Neoliberal Down Under: Neoliberalism and ‘Endangered Authenticities',” Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Part 5: Indigenous Self-Representation, Non-Indigenous Collaborators and the Politics of Knowledge
“Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories in the Saint Elias Mountains,” Julie Cruikshank
“The Terrible Nearness of Distant Places: Making History at the National Museum of the American Indian,” Paul Chaat Smith

“Afterword:Indigeneity Today,” Mary Louise Pratt