Ramos

This is a good book which reflects a very close relation with the indigienist movement in Brasil in which the author does not loose her critical position. She is not hesitant to show multiple contradictions in the 20 years of indigenous politics, even though the case she is analysing makes it difficult to not consider the expansion of capitalists corporations as uncontrollable forces depredating resources and populations. If we contrast her work with Tsing we can criticize her homogenization of power which appears as a totally exterior, absolute and negative force. Her notion of the real and the imaginary or ideological (even though she does not use this concept) echoes a perspective which has been fairly criticized, as long as it sustains a notion of the reality and truth as an absolute domain separated and untouched by the "representations" of it. Among others constructivism has showed how much al versions of reality are socially constituted and are part of the real as are the "material" practices. Anyhow the last readings I done and commented are of course complicating this even further.

Ramos proposes to follow indigenism in Brasil as the complex process and ideas conveying the incorporation of indigenous people to the state and as citizens but also to the domain constituted in the multiple popular and dominant ways in which indigenous are imagined as a mirror projection of the “normal” non indigenous population. If indigenism has a commonality with the term “Orientalism” as a site of construction of a national, civilized western identity which only defines its others in negative terms in respect to the ideal civilized nationhood, it differs in that indigenous people coexist temporally and spatially within the nation state which defines them as an inferior other. Indigenism is also framed in the concrete interethnic political field: the conflicts with state administration, tensions between indigenous and settlers, and indigenous activism in itself. Her starting point are the main ways in which hegemonic notions have shaped the indigenous as different and inferior, by defining natives as children, heathen, nomads, savage, primitives which justified and legitimised state (and church) violent interventions, exclusionary practices, and land expropriation, even under the name of their own development. Her final chapter is of particular interest as she presents the way not only the state but also indigenist NGO’s have shaped a domain of indigenous politics dominated by western bureaucratic procedures which demand professionalization of activist groups and a predominance of managerial employees. The bureaucratization of politics has effected the constitution of an image of an “hyperreal” Indian, which under the demands of effective management of projects, have replaced the real people which these NGO’s represent. In this movement the complexities and contradictions of dealing with real people are displaced in a increasing separation of the field of indigenous politics form indigenous communities in themselves. If in the course of her work she points to the ways brasialian state has attempted to both incorporate indigenous population and lands to their sovereignty (especially the advancement of economic exploitation of the Amazon) her works show how this attempts constantly failed in recognizing indigenous people capacities in shaping their incorporation to the state, the complexities and contradictory positions of each group. However this failure was also in the possibility to erase their cultural systems