Indigenous Worlds: Challenges of Emergence, Recognition, and Change

Over the last forty years, a global discourse of indigeneity and indigenous peoples has emerged, originating and diffusing in the 1980s and onwards from particular nation-states. This internationalist concept of indigeneity had been centered in the United Nations, and enshrined in documents of other multilateral organisations (the World Bank, International Labor Organisation). Peoples now often regarded as `indigenous’ have long existed – but this category is relatively recent, as are many developments associated with it. Like other such global discourses (e.g. `nationalism’), how indigeneity is understood varies across particular contexts. Its global dissemination makes such variability inevitable, and the question of how it intersects with particular socio-economic-political conjunctures, essential. Generally speaking, indigenous-settler dynamics (such as are found in Australia, North America, New Zealand, and parts of Latin America) have been, in some respects, most receptive of the collective, internationally-authored, `indigenous’ socio-political identity. For example, Australia as a state accepts the notion that it is home to `indigenous’ people. The recent concept of indigeneity has been seen as more ambiguous, unsettling, or downright threatening, hence less acceptable, in many Asian, East and South Asian, as well as African countries. This course will examine the intersections of international concept and national circumstances, both conceptually and by case studies. This course will look at questions of the emergence of an internationalist global category from two principal directions underpinned by readings from anthropological theorists on: the reification of cultural constructs, capitalist constructions of meaning, and the exercise of powers of recognition and legitimation, the changing role of nation-states globally (Bourdieu, Foucault, Wolf); and more political-economically situated ideas concerning the current global conjuncture, how and why this particular kind of internationalist category has emerged and its intersection with what Kalb (2009) calls `“critical junctions” that link global process via particular national arenas and local histories, often hidden, to emergent and situated events and narratives...’ Students will work through a number of case studies of indigenous peoples and settings; and discuss what has happened in various cases, the extent to which the category `indigenous’ has been mobilized concerning and by particular groups, and consider what the future of this category of `indigeneity’ may be.