Li, Tania

4) Li Tania 2000 “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42(1):149-179.
She wants to set an alternative approach on the understanding of indigenous identity articulation which does not collapse it in either a strategic esencialization and inventing a tradition in response to specific situations, or a type of false consciousness in which both indigenous identification and non identification represent a failure in recognizing a class condition. If indigeneity is nor an inevitable condition, not just an invention, but rather a positioning based on practices meanings and landscapes that arise as particular forms of struggle and engagement. “The conjunctures at which (some) people come to identify themselves as indigenous, realigning the ways they connect to the nation, the government, and their own, unique tribal place, are the contingent products of agency and the cultural and political work of articulation.”(4). She describes two cases in terms o “risks and opportunities each present, one in which people with worse economic conditions and less integrated to the nation so not weave any type of identity, while other group of peasant communities which are better off economically, with higher levels of education articulate an indigenous identity in particular in the context of fighting against the construction of a damn. While the “Lauje have not been provoked into articulating collective identities and associator defend their territory”, .
She takes Halls notion of double articulation o understand: how ideological elements come (or not come) together as a coherent unity in particular contexts, under certain conditions, to particular subjects. Articulation is never fixed and it permits to see both the internal processes of bringing together and the delimitation with other as arbitrary and contingent definition. How “ideology finds its subjects”, rather than how a subject thinks inevitably as a result of their class location or social position, and how this enables subjects to make sense of their historical experience and thus think ideology as empowerment. She takes Hall to address both the political and empirical dimensions of identity. The fixity of position is what makes meaning possible, at the same time they are limited to the socially available places of recognition socially provided. Identities are always about becoming, and not just invented, they are part of flows of meaning and power that transcends the temporary fixation, it transcends too the experience of individuals to focus constellations of shared or compatible interests, that mobilize collectives. The populations and landscapes are classified by the state (Indonesian) by simplifying and stereotyping frames, one of which she calls the “tribal slot” (taking Truillot’s savage slot), and are made available at a particular time-space not because of the qualities of a place-population, but following the negotiated regimes of representation. If the Indonesian state has no category to draw “ethnic” disctinctions, buts rather general “villagers” and “isolated people” which is the majority of rural landless population, the environmentalist NGO’s working in the forests, have instated in the category of indigenousness as a group with a particular and unique knowledge over the environment, and use the term masyarkat adat (isolated populations). In the history of Inedonesia it was the Dutch who played an important role in differentiating from loosely differentiated group.