Who should be considered ‘Indigenous’? A survey of ethnic groups in northern Thailand

On 22 May 2014, the Thai military conducted a coup d’état and discarded the previous constitution. In April 2015, a new draft constitution was prepared. Although eventually rejected by the military, it represented an exciting moment for activists, as it recognized the existence of ‘indigenous peoples’ (referred to as chon pheun muang in the draft). This prompted us to conduct interviews in 2015–2016 with people belonging to four different ethnic groups and living mainly in Chiang Mai province, northern Thailand: the Lua, Khon Muang, Hmong, and Lisu, in order to determine their understandings of who should be considered ‘indigenous peoples’, and what rights should they have. The findings indicate that there is considerable variation amongst people regarding the meaning of the term ‘indigenous peoples’; who should be considered indigenous; and what rights those defined as being indigenous should be entitled to.     

Undercut

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider some representations of the figure of the indigene in contemporary Australia, and their implications for a range of issues and debates in cultural theory. In particular, I examine the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses that I term ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘hybridity’, or the discourses of happy hyphenation and happy hybridization, respectively. These discourses, I want to suggest, raise specific problems in an Australian historical context, where the effects of scientific racism are being confronted by indigenous peoples in relation to land rights claims and, more generally, the dominant culture's demands for an ‘authentic’, visible and unproblematic Aboriginality that can be both clearly marked and contained. The figure of Truganini has particular significance in these debates, precisely because her body has figured as the site of geneticist practices and discourses. Simultaneously I locate these representations in the context(s) of the monument year of 1993, contexts that encompass a mesh of interrelated cultural concerns sometimes simplified under the heading of ‘Australian national identity’.     

Grieving for mestizaje: alternative approaches to Maya identity in Yucatan,Mexico

This article takes as its point of departure the highly contested theoretical terrain of ‘Maya’ identity in Yucatan, Mexico. Set in the physical terrain of a state psychiatric hospital, this article uses a framework of identity culled from the narrative of a young woman, ‘Claudina’, committed to its wards, to argue that being ‘in-between’ categories of ethnic identity, an experience she characterises as a painful sense of ambiguous loss, can be fruitfully analysed using an analytical framework of ethnic identity introduced by Claudina herself. Specifically, I argue that categories of identity culled from Claudina's story – mestizaje and elegancia – represent a valuable opportunity to think about how power dynamics and relationships operate in situations of ambivalent identities and social suffering. To this end, I use Claudina's language as a point of departure for understanding the lived experience of everyday life in Yucatan today.     

The Andean Catch-22: ethnicity,class and resource governance in Bolivia and Ecuador

This study deals with the tensions and contradictions between resource governance, welfare policies, and the constitutionally recognized rights of nature and the indigenous peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador. We have identified a certain reductionism in current debates on these issues and propose a more systematic analytical focus on class and the class-ethnicity duality, as expressed in historical and contemporary indigenous struggles, and also confirmed via our ethnographic material. Drawing on the double bind as expressed in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 wherein the protagonists face situations in which they do not have any choice to achieve a net gain, this article centres on how national governments have to choose between the protections of rights – in this case ethnic and environmental rights – and welfare provision financed by extractive revenues. From the perspective of ecologically concerned indigenous actors, the Catch-22 is articulated in the choice or compromise between universal welfarism on the one hand, and ethno-environmental concerns on the other hand. The article draws primarily on ecosocialist arguments and on indigenous-culturalist perspectives on Good Life (Sumak Kawsay or Vivir Bien). A central finding is the existence of awareness among involved actors – oppositional movements and government authorities – that the Catch-22 quandary and joint class-ethnic concerns are unavoidable ingredients in their discourses, struggles, and understandings of Good Life.     

Should ethnic Lao people be considered indigenous to Cambodia? Ethnicity,classification and the politics of indigeneity

The ethnic Lao are not well-known in Cambodia, despite constituting a substantial but unrecorded population there. Even though the Lao have lived in Cambodia for many generations, they were excluded from being considered ‘indigenous peoples’ when the category was legally introduced to Cambodia through the 2001 land law. Instead, they are not classified as ‘ethnic Lao’, except for the very few who were actually born in Laos. Here, I consider how the politics of identity in Cambodia has separated some highland ethnic minorities from the Lao. Many ethnic Lao in Cambodia quietly disagree with not being classified as indigenous. This contestation represents a similar dynamic to the differences of opinion between the Asian Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) and the peasant organization, La Via Campesina, regarding advocating for indigenous and peasant rights, respectively. My objective is to demonstrate that the politics of indigenous categorization in Cambodia is complicated and fraught.     

The Collective Self and the Ethnopolitical Movement: "rhizomes" and "taproots" in the Amazon

The present situation in the Amazon is frequently characterized by political tensions between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. As a consequence, indigenous peoples are organizing in order to defend themselves and their land against the encroachment of representatives from the national society. To the Matsigenka, who live in the monta a of southeastern Peru, this process is relatively recent, and so is the conceptualization of ensuing conflicts in ethnic terms. Although ethnic criteria for constructing social identity is still largely alien to most Matsigenka, it has, to the indigenous organizations, come to serve as the model for defining political issues mainly because it is imposed by the dominant national society, which defines the rules. At the same time, categories of beings that are defined in notions of the cosmogony remain a significant factor in the Matsigenka conceptualization of the social world. The employment of two parallel models for constructing identity, which are occasionally conflicting, produces both conceptual confusion and organizational problems for the Matsigenka ethno-political movement.     

Fabric that weaves stories: Pua kumbu and contemporary Iban identity construction in Sarawak,Malaysia

This article examines the process of identity construction among the Iban indigenous people of Sarawak in Malaysia through pua kumbu – their sacred and ritual cloth. Although the Ibans are popularly known for their headhunting practices and longhouse dwellings, these cultural practices are in major decline and therefore pua kumbu is brought to the forefront as a significant means of identity construction. By illustrating the meanings, narratives, and ceremonies associated with pua kumbu, this article demonstrates that pua kumbu is not just a piece of sacred or ritual cloth; rather, it has significant meanings in the everyday life of the Ibans. It connects the Ibans with distinctly eternal meanings of their life and cosmology, past histories, and their connections to the physical environment. It thus helps the process of maintaining a boundary and identity construction of the Ibans by distinguishing between ‘us and them’ – the Ibans and others.     

Stakeholder identities in Britain's neoliberal ethical community: Polish narratives of earned citizenship in the context of the UK's EU referendum

This article examines the narrative strategies through which Polish migrants in the UK challenge the formal rights of political membership and attempt to redefine the boundaries of ‘citizenship’ along notions of deservedness. The analysed qualitative data originate from an online survey conducted in the months before the 2016 EU referendum, and the narratives emerge from the open‐text answers to two survey questions concerning attitudes towards the referendum and the exclusion of resident EU nationals from the electoral process. The analysis identifies and describes three narrative strategies in reaction to the public discourses surrounding the EU referendum – namely discursive complicity, intergroup hostility and defensive assertiveness – which attempt to redefine the conditions of membership in Britain's ‘ethical community’ in respect to welfare practices. Examining these processes simultaneously ‘from below’ and ‘from outside’ the national political community, the paper argues, can reveal more of the transformation taking place in conceptions of citizenship at the sociological level, and the article aims to identify the contours of a ‘neoliberal communitarian citizenship’ as internalized by mobile EU citizens.     

Some reflections on contemporary writing in the indigenous languages of America

Abstract

This article surveys recent literatures in the indigenous languages of Latin America. The past decade has witnessed a continent-wide rise in indigenous-language publications – a rise calling for a reevaluation of the critical state of indigenous rights and language policies that was expressed in the context of protests around the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus' 'discovery' of the Americas. The new wave of indigenous literatures has arisen in the wake of dramatic acts of violence, such as military repression and neoliberal economic restructuring. However, the large-scale displacement of indigenous peoples that has resulted from these processes has also provoked a desire among indigenous writers to utilize print media in order to preserve knowledge and communal memory. Drawing on specific examples from contemporary indigenous poetry of Peru and Mexico, the article argues that indigenous literature challenges conceptions of indigenous expressive culture as inherently oral, traditional, rural, and communitarian.     

Locating Security in the Womb

The discourse surrounding US family planning policies has evolved into a highly moralistic one that mirrors US domestic debates surrounding abortion rights. However, the original intent of ‘population control’ was to protect US access to raw resources and maintain US global supremacy. US family policies did not first identify woman as the object to be controlled, but policies have changed such that women's bodies have become a symbolic representation of – and site of resistance to – the power relationships between the US and developing states. The change in the rhetoric – from population control to family planning, women's empowerment, environmental sustainability and human rights – does not mean the ‘rules’ enforced by the hegemon have changed so much as it indicates a process of identity formation occurring through the implementation of these rules.     

Sharing and exchanging: understanding common grounds in northeast India

ABSTRACT

Northeast India, a ‘zipper region’ that gives impetus to Southeast Asian and Himalasian studies, is marked by complexities and ambiguities. The paper examines the multiple identity construction in contemporary Assam, the central state of this region and seeks to recover the other experiences that make ethnic life-world possible while challenging the ethnocentric discourses—in academia, politics, public and social movements. Acknowledging the presence of common or possibly universal processes behind the production of such discourses, it aims to interrogate the factors that cut across socio-cultural, political-economical or ecological dimensions. It further examines the multiple discourses and narratives that makes that social possible in the region. In doing so, it locates the strategic positioning of such discourses and how they deal with Indian nation-state and beyond. This paper in essence is interested in the question of possibility of various discourses—as a question of post-history.     

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.     

Narratives of ‘mixed race’ youth in South Korea: racial order and in-betweenness

South Korea has long been regarded as a country with a single ethnicity. Honhyeol, which literally means ‘mixed blood’ in Korean, exemplifies this orientation. In recent years, the number of ‘mixed race’ children in the country has been on the rise due to the increase in international marriages, particularly between Korean men and foreign women. Drawing on the personal narratives of 56 youths (aged between 9 and 17) obtained from three essay contests, this article examines how, why, and in which contexts the racial hierarchies of ‘mixed race’ children in Korea are constructed. Narratives of ‘mixed race’ children and their peers show that a ‘hierarchical racial order’ – characterized by a color-coding system that simultaneously operates along the lines of national origin – is channeled into ‘mixed race’ people’s everyday lives, thus shaping their identity constructions.     

The “New Mestiza,” the Old Mestizos: Contrasting Discourses on Mestizaje*

This article analyzes varying, inconsistent, representations of “mestizaje” (generally construed as racial or cultural mixing in the Americas) deriving from different historical settings and ideological frameworks. It particularly focuses on what I here term “old mestizaje,” summarized in the writings of Latin American intellectuals of the first quarter of the twentieth century, such as Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (The Cosmic Race); and “new mestizaje,” articulated in the works of such contemporary thinkers as Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The NewMestiza). The center piece of the article is the contradictions and fractures between old and new discourses in terms of their underlying views of race, identity, and “destiny.” It examines the links of old mestizaje with essentialist, Social Darwinist, concepts, and the foundations of new mestizaje on a critical cultural studies paradigm. I propose that various aspects of old mestizaje infused hegemonic racial ideologies throughout Latin America and engendered a form of “color blindness” that obscured pervasive racial inequalities in the region.     

Ethnic identities and national identities: Some examples from Malaysia

Using examples from Malaysia, this paper emphasizes the importance of relating ethnicity to the power of the state and political processes involving different ethnic groups. Ethnic group formation involves processes that make people identify as an imagined community in a nation‐state. Indeed, the processes that create ethnic and national identities are part and parcel of the same historical processes. It is also necessary to relate national identity to ethnicity, as national identity is imagined differently by different ethnic groups in a nation‐state. The paper describes Malay and Chinese ethnicity as well as the complex ethnic identification and ethnogenesis of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak.     

The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights: frame contestation and the exploitation of disability

Nonhuman Animal rights activists are sometimes dismissed as ‘crazy’ or irrational by countermovements seeking to protect status quo social structures. Social movements themselves often utilize disability narratives in their claims-making as well. In this article, we argue that Nonhuman Animal exploitation and Nonhuman Animal rights activism are sometimes medicalized in frame disputes. The contestation over mental ability ultimately exploits humans with disabilities. The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights activism diminishes activists’ social justice claims, but the movement’s medicalization of Nonhuman Animal use unfairly otherizes its target population and treats disability identity as a pejorative. Utilizing a content analysis of major newspapers and anti-speciesist activist blogs published between 2009 and 2013, it is argued that disability has been incorporated into the tactical repertoires of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement and countermovements, becoming a site of frame contestation. The findings could have implications for a number of other social movements that also negatively utilize disability narratives.     

Watching The Daily Show in Kenya

Global distribution of a popular American television programme – Jon Stewart's Daily Show – offers a rare opportunity to examine transnational contingencies of meaning in political satire. Drawing on focus group discussions in Kenya, this analysis shows how some East Africans appropriated and reinterpreted – indeed unexpectedly subverted – The Daily Show's political content, deriving from it insights that Stewart himself might have found surprising. Kenyan viewers perceived in The Daily Show gaps between the rhetoric and reality of empire and pointed to limitations of Stewart's dissident satire as they rejected its depictions of non-wealthy nations and marginalized peoples. They reconfigured Daily Show episodes as commentaries on global power relations; reflected critically on Kenyan politics, media and their own political subjectivities; and revised their own earlier assumptions about the gap between Africa and supposedly ‘mature’ democracies such as the United States. Thus, American political satire such as The Daily Show can activate in foreign audiences new perceptions of differences between the ‘West’ and the rest and new forms of political imagination.     

Holy Rus: (Re)construction of Russia’s Civilizational Identity

ABSTRACT

Originally connected with the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome and the universal Christian idea of an Empire of Faith, Holy Rus (literally ‘Holy Russia’) has developed today into a transcendental concept of a unifying national force and inter-confessional dialogue based on common moral and spiritual values. The discourse of Russia’s civilizational identity has emerged with new vigor against a background of national and social disintegration. The idea promoted by the state and the Russian Orthodox Church is that Orthodoxy as a quintessence of fundamental moral values is destined to unite the peoples separated by state borders under the auspices of Holy Rus. The core of the civilizational perception is constituted by the supranational nature of Russkiy Mir (literally ‘Russian World’) based on the idea of sobornost. The research is based on the analysis of speeches delivered by President Putin and Patriarch Cyril dedicated to identity issues. The author argues that this official rhetoric is aimed at redefining the place of the Russian Orthodox Church vis-à-vis both Western modernity and domestic secularism within the context of its recovery as an institution after decades of oppression.     

Displacement,integration and identity in the postcolonial world

Defining the relationship between displaced populations and the nation state is a fraught historical process. The Partition of India in 1947 provides a compelling example, yet markedly little attention has been paid to the refugee communities produced. Using the case of the displaced ‘Urdu-speaking minority’ in Bangladesh, this article considers what contemporary discourses of identity and integration reveal about the nature and boundaries of the nation state. It reveals that the language of ‘integration’ is embedded in colonial narratives of ‘population’ versus ‘people-nation’ which structure exclusion not only through language and ethnicity, but poverty and social space. It also shows how colonial and postcolonial registers transect and overlap as colonial constructions of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ fold into religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’. The voices of minorities navigating claims to belonging through these discourses shed light on a ‘nation-in-formation’: the shifting landscape of national belonging and the complicated accommodations required.