NATION-STATES CONFRONT THE GLOBAL: Discourses of Indigenous Rights in Fiji and Tanzania

How do global issue constructions serve as resources for actors engaged in domestic political contention, and what does the appropriation of global ideas by domestic actors imply about the spread of global culture? To contribute to knowledge about conflict‐based diffusion of global ideas, we examine the histories of global constructions of indigenous rights and national debates about indigenous rights in Fiji and Tanzania. While global models of indigenous rights emphasize self‐determination for nondominant, culturally distinct groups at risk from the nation‐state, advocates for indigenization policies in Fiji and Tanzania have argued for state policies to entrench political and economic rights for majority or near‐majority groups that were well integrated into the nation‐state. Although transnationally connected indigenous rights organizations have a greater presence in Tanzania than in Fiji, actors in Fiji remain more engaged with changes in international indigenous rights discourse than their counterparts in Tanzania. This difference reflects variations in the leverage global culture offered in the two cases because of its externality to national political debates. In Fiji, actors appropriated global culture as a means to internationalize a domestic dispute, while in Tanzania the impetus for indigenization came from global economic pressures. Our findings imply that conflict‐based diffusion concentrates agency with respect to the use of global legal discourses in domestic actors rather than the globally connected actors and experts who carry global culture in consensus‐based diffusion.     

Public relations (PR) in nation-building: An exploration of the South African presidential discourse

This research explored public relations strategies employed in the presidential discourses for building relationships among South Africans in a democracy. This was done through analyzing political discourses of the three South African Presidents since 1994–2009 of Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma. A comparative discourse analysis was used to examine five important dimensions in political discourses concerning nation-building. Different themes were identified: relationship managing, democracy, national identity, and national development. Additionally, an exploratory discourse analysis was conducted to further investigate the characteristics of the presidential political discourses on nation-building. These analyses in the present research provide contributions to foster cooperation, developing a common national identity agenda and social cohesion using political campaign strategies, particularly for government, policymakers and public relations practitioners (PRP's), government communication practitioners, who strive to build a better relationship between government and the public.     

Bilingualism and bilingual education and their relationship to citizenship from a comparative German-Australian perspective

In this paper, the acceptance of bilingualism and the role of bilingual education are studied in Australia and Germany. The differences between these countries with respect to immigration and multiculturalism/multilingualism policies allows the study of the underlying reasons with regard to the handling of bilingualism. While in Germany a contrast between teaching of migrant and minority languages and foreign languages is obvious, the development of LOTE in Australia overcomes this distinction but not the reluctance towards bilingual education. It is then asked what is the meaning of bilingualism with regard to citizenship, which is based on the concept of the nation state in both countries, though in Australia at least concepts of a multicultural state are discussed. The connections of bilingualism/bilingual education and citizenship are also considered with regard to both countries within the context of political developments.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

Naming Regulations and Indigenous Rights in Argentina

In Argentina, parents must register their children at the Civil Registry to receive a national identification card, choosing their child's name from a list maintained by provincial Civil Registry offices. This process regulates all citizens, but it is particularly onerous for indigenous parents who wish to give their child an indigenous name. In tracing the letter and practice of the law and responses to the law, I argue that the regulation of names is a political process with racial and gender assumptions built into it. These assumptions translate into exclusionary implications for membership in national identity. For indigenous people in Argentina, this is particularly problematic, as they are already largely invisible to the national body. Although indigenous people are challenging aspects of the law they are not challenging the very premise of the law—that the state has the right to control their access to citizenship through a law regulating children's names. Finally, the successes of indigenous parents in using an indigenous name has the unintended consequence of turning indigenous names into cultural commodities, thus diminishing the validity of indigenous political critiques of the law.     

Shamans’ Pragmatic Gendered Negotiations with Mapuche Resistance Movements and Chilean Political Authorities

In this article, I look at the ways in which gendered national discourses and the discourses of Mapuche resistance movements coerce and construct shamans (machi) and the ways in which machi appropriate, transform, and contest these images. I explore the contradictions between machi’s hybrid practices and their traditional representations of self and why they choose to represent themselves as they do. My interest lies in the ways in which studying gendered representations by and about machi, especially machi’s nonideological political practices, can contribute to current discussions of power and resistance, agency and structure, and the practice of power itself. Recent anthropological work has focused on the particular historical, social, political, and economic contexts shaping how and why indigenous groups decide to protect and promote particular images of themselves. I focus not on the community politics in which machi are involved, but on machi’s public faces in relation to national political figures and Mapuche political leaders such as longko.     

The public life of white affects

The growing political power of racialized groups in white‐supremacist societies has unsettled the hegemonic position of whiteness. In the United States, this political shift has led to the linguistic repositioning of whiteness within public discourse as visible and vulnerable rather than unmarked and dominant; such repositioning operates as part of a larger strategy for maintaining white supremacy. Within white publics, which are simultaneously constituted through white public space, white public discourse, and white affects, those who are white‐identified linguistically engage in affective performances that reassert racial dominance by invoking claims of wounded whiteness. The article compares the affective strategies of white public discourse found, on the one hand, in ethnographic interviews with white youth in liberal educational spaces in California and, on the other hand, in the mediatized discourse of the US racist far right. The analysis identifies five affective discourse strategies deployed in the white public discourse of both groups: colormute racism; disavowals of racism; appropriations of diversity discourses; performances of white fragility; and claims of reverse racism. This shared set of discursive strategies is part of the larger convergence and mutual dependence of militant racism and mainstream racism in protecting all white people’s possessive investment in white supremacy.     

Making Space at the Nations' Table: Mapping the transformative geographies of the international indigenous peoples' movement

Social movement scholarship has focused increasingly upon the roles played by symbolic resources and movement discourses in the process of social transformation. Current socio-political approaches, often characterized by an excessive focus on movement structure to the exclusion of larger cultural considerations, still struggle to address adequately the process of transmutation from idea to form, from symbolic shift to material change. Through an examination of the international indigenous peoples' movement, this article illustrates the ways that space constitutes a mediating dimension of the transformative processes through which the symbolic potential of movement discourses may be manifested. The alternative spatialities and new geographies generated, deployed and legitimized by this movement have provided critical locations for indigenous peoples to enact the creative work of mobilization. It is argued that incorporating the work of critical geographers into existing sociological and political perspectives will contribute to the better apprehension of these transformative processes as well as those associated with the particularly spatialized phenomena related to globalization, development, nationalism and geopolitics.     

Legal indigeneity: knowledge,legal discourse and the construction of indigenous identity in Colombia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the creation of the indigenous legal subject in Colombia from the perspective of legal-knowledge regimens. It analyses the turn from medical psychiatric assessments to indigenous identity to anthropological discourses on cultural differences. This article describes the legal construction of the indigenous subject in two historical moments. On the one hand, in the context of formation of the nation-state in Colombia and, on the other hand, in the transition towards contemporary multicultural constitutionalism within which legal discourse creates taxonomies for the definition of identities and the recognition of special rights to people who claim to be indigenous.     

Fiji Indians and Political Discourse in Fiji: from the Pacific Romance to the Coups

Abstract Why did Fiji Indian political rhetoric shift, at Fiji's independence, from Gandhian political grievance to nation, development and harmony? The Indians were brought to Fiji as plantation labor in order to protect the indigenous Fijians from wage labor. A romantic vision of the indigenes guided colonial policy, and became law at Fiji's independence, in a constitution giving indigenous Fijians and their chiefs special privileges. Despite the appeasing rhetoric, an electoral defeat of the indigenous chiefs was followed by military coups, for protection of indigenes against Indians and consolidation of chiefly power. Fiji has proved difficult to ‘imagine’ as a nation.     

Demonizing the Sensible and the ‘Revolution of Our Generation’ in Rosia Montana

Abstract

‘Save Rosia Montana’ is an emblematic socio-ecological movement in post-communist Romania. It started in 2000 as a local reaction against what was projected to be the largest open-cast gold mine in Europe; it has gradually grown into a national movement with global networking. Activists have been consistently accused of acting under the impulse of an emotional luggage which could function as an impediment to understanding the ‘real’ issue, that of Romania's development. While the corporation claims to present the ‘real’ story articulated in the supposedly objective discourse of rational science, the choice to take a stance out of other beliefs has been demonized as emotional. This article will make a critical discourse analysis of corporate texts and Rosieni's testimonies to highlight what appears as ‘legitimate’ versus ‘illegitimate’ discourse, how some phrases are presented as self-evident rationales while others are dismissed as inappropriate or ‘emotional’. Rosieni have created visibilities for new things, objects, languages, and projections that have been downplayed by the post-communist political context. The conflict is not just over cognitive aspects or valuation languages but also over how one is allowed to feel, what one is allowed to enjoy (doing), how is one supposed to live (spend time), what Ranciere calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’.     

Looking Forward to the Past: National Identity and History in Malta

Critiques of the essentialising tendencies of nationalist discourse are well established in the social sciences—particularly in anthropology. This article builds on the calls for a more processual approach to national identity. It focuses not only on the problematic essentialism of discourses of national identity, but also on their inherent teleology. Social scientists have shared with nationalists a view of national identity as a problem that needs to be solved, and in doing so have adopted a teleological view that assumes that at some point in the future resolution is both possible and desirable. Picking up on recent theorisations of identity, the article argues that identity is inherently irresolvable, and for this reason we are better off investigating not the content of particular national identities, but the processes through which identities are debated—or indeed identity itself as a category is debated. The article concerns national identity in Malta, particularly the role of historians in articulating the identity debates. It links controversies within the historical community to the distinctive polarities of Maltese party politics, which developed in colonial Malta and continue into the post-colonial era. Although initially concerned with defining the content of national identity, political and historical debate shifted in the late twentieth century to focus on how it should be defined—and indeed whether identity was a useful category for describing Malta and its people. The article argues that this shift from content to process should be acknowledged by analysts of national identity, who should revise their analyses accordingly.     

People,land and the struggle for rangatiratanga/autonomy in New Zealand

This article interrogates indigeneity in the context of two New Zealand indigenous discourses, one of them land orientated and the other people orientated. It argues that the former has generally been emphasized over and above the latter, which it examines principally in terms of the struggle for the rangatiratanga (loosely translatable as autonomy) promised to Maori by the British Crown in the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840. People-based discourse is seen as key to the resilience of Maoridom and its powerful assertions of agency in recent decades. But to argue in this way is not to discount the land discourse, which in the holistic Maori worldview is conflated with the people discourse and rangatiratanga     

Between Pachakuti and Passive Revolution: The Search for Post-colonial Sovereignty in Bolivia

From the period 2000 to 2005, Bolivia experienced a profound political convulsion as social movements rose-up to contest the neoliberal model of development. This was most markedly inspired by contestation over the control of natural resources, namely water and gas. The period of mobilisation brought down two successive governments and propelled the MAS, led by Evo Morales, to power in 2006. This period also helped to revalorise indigenous culture and held out hope for a reimagining of power, politics and political economy. The transformation that would result from this uprising, effectively re-founded Bolivia as a “pluri-national state,” recognising 36 separate national groups with their own languages and cultures. This was, furthermore, a process based on the convergence of national-popular and indigenous struggles. However, following his disputed election for a fourth successive term in office, Evo Morales and other key leaders of the MAS have gone into exile, while right-wing, revanchist social forces are increasingly prominent. How do we begin to make sense of this turn of events, which include the swirling combinations of reactionary capitalist interests but also left-indigenous critiques of development from marginalised sectors? In this article, I argue that we need to situate Bolivia's indigenous social movements in the struggle between Pachakuti (an Andean term referring to the desire to turn the world upside down and forge a new time and space) and passive revolution (a state-led process of modernisation that seeks to expand capitalist social relations whilst incorporating limited demands from below, ultimately diffusing their radical potential).     

The Othering of Muslims: Discourses of Radicalization in the New York Times, 1969–2014

In this article, I engage with Edward Said's Orientalism and various perspectives within the othering paradigm to analyze the emergence and transformation of radicalization discourses in the news media. Employing discourse analysis of 607 New York Times articles from 1969 to 2014, this article demonstrates that radicalization discourses are not new but are the result of complex sociolinguistic and historical developments that cannot be reduced to dominant contemporary understandings of the concept or to singular events or crises. The news articles were then compared to 850 government documents, speeches, and other official communications. The analysis of the data indicates that media conceptualizations of radicalization, which once denoted political and economic differences, have now shifted to overwhelmingly focus on Islam. As such, radicalization discourse now evokes the construct radicalization as symbolic marker of conflict between the West and the East. I also advanced the established notion that the news media employ strategic discursive strategies that contribute to conceptual distinctions that are used to construct Muslims as an “alien other” to the West.     

Extractivismo unearthed: a genealogy of a radical discourse

This article provides a genealogy of extractivismo discourse. In South America, the critical discourse of extractivismo has shifted political horizons and fomented a protracted intraleft dispute. Decades of neoliberalism unified popular movements to resist austerity and recuperate national sovereignty, but the ascendency of leftist administrations across the continent fragmented the field of radical politics. Ecuador exemplifies this internecine conflict: environmental and indigenous activists and allied intellectuals crafted the discourse of extractivismo to resist President Rafael Correa’s ‘21st century socialism’. State actors assert that oil and mining revenues will trigger economic development. But anti-extractive activists contend that ‘the extractive model’ pollutes the environment, violates collective rights, reinforces dependency on foreign capital, and undermines democracy. Drawing on 14 months of archival and ethnographic research, I recover the source discourses of extractivismo and outline the conditions of their coalescence into a novel problematic. I trace extractivismo to the neoliberal period (1981–2006). In that period, I identify the co-existence of two distinct critiques of resource extraction, which I call resource radicalisms: resource nationalism and proto-anti-extractivism. But alongside it, in their struggle for territorial sovereignty and collective rights, Amazonian indigenous groups articulated the discursive elements that would later be unified by the term extractivismo. I argue that a particular conjuncture – the election of a leftist President, the rewriting of the Constitution, and the government’s avid promotion of extractive projects – enabled the crystallization of extractivismo discourse. Anti-extractive resistance in turn triggered a tectonic political realignment: activists that once fought for the nationalization of natural resources now oppose all resource extraction, a leftist President finds himself in conflict with the social movements who initially supported his election, and the left-in-power has become synonymous with the aggressive expansion of extraction. Finally, I consider the tension between extractivismo-as-critique and its capacity to generate collective action.     

Transnational Discursive Opportunities and Social Movement Risk Frames Opposing GMOs

Research on social movement frames has been cumulative. Recently, scholars started studying the structural incentives and constraints for claim-makers by relying on the concept of discursive opportunity structure (DOS) while bringing the public sphere and the media to the centre of analysis of political contention. This article draws on these literatures to investigate social movement campaigns against genetically modified (GM) crops and pesticides in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. First, it argues that there is a transnational DOS that provides structural incentives and constraints to frame risks in symbolic struggles to define GM crops. Next, based on a content analysis of national newspapers, it describes the use of risk frames in national public discourses. Finally, it addresses the question of how this transnationalized DOS is framed by the media by looking at the discursive opportunities for social movements as well as other collective actors in their framing disputes. The study provides evidence of a transnationalization of public debates and offers explanations for national variations by resorting to other components of the DOS such as national policy discourse, timing of political agendas, media structure and culture. It concludes by recognizing the need to consider the various dimensions of opportunity structures for movement action, i.e. political, discursive, and economic, and their relative degree of transnationalization or autonomy over global forces.     

De los Derechos Humanos: Reimagining Civics in Bilingual & Bicultural Settings

Dominant approaches to teaching social studies often marginalize bilingual and bicultural students. This is particularly troubling because the explicit goal of the social studies is to cultivate civic participation. Educational inequalities are thus tied to political inequalities. In light of this, this article shares a narrative case study of the author's own bilingual and bicultural approach to teaching middle school civics at a dual-language American school in Mexico. Through the illustration of a comparative civics curriculum that incorporates translanguaging practices, the author argues that embracing bilingualism and biculturalism in the social studies can lead to more expansive possibilities for justice-oriented civic education.     

生活世界：思想政治教育的新视角

在社会发生深刻变革的大环境下,传统的知识论和技术论的思想政治教育方式已日渐衰微,哲学中的“生活世界”话语也就渗入了思想政治教育领域,这就要求思想政治教育必须以新的方式来思考和关注学生的生活和教育问题。教育离不开入的生活世界,只有关注学生的生活世界,思想政治教育才能实现它的价值。     

Muslim Women,Moral Visions: Globalization and Gender Controversies in Indonesia

Since 1998, Indonesia’s democratization has produced contentious public debates, many of which revolve around issues of gender and sexual morality. Yet such controversies not only often focus on women, but also involve women as participants. This article examines how Muslim women activists in two organizations adapt global discourses to participate in important public sphere debates about pornography and polygamy. Indonesia’s moral debates demonstrate an important way in which global discourses are negotiated in national settings. In the debates, some pious women use discourses of feminism and liberal Islam to argue for women’s equality, while others use Islam to call for greater moral regulation of society. My research demonstrates that global discourses of feminism and Islamic revivalism are mediated through national organizations which shape women’s political activism and channel it in different directions. Women’s political subjectivities are thus shaped through their involvement in national organizations that structure the ways they engage with global discourses. The Indonesian case shows not only that the national should not be conflated with the local, but also demonstrates the significance of national contexts and histories for understanding global processes.