Autonomy and Interdependence in Native Movements: Towards a Pragmatic Politics in the Ecuadorian Andes

Ecuador strikingly illustrates two contradictory forces of the global cultural economy: the pressures of market integration that erode economic independence and the pursuit of "autonomy" that has motivated native movements. Examining here how Quichua communities practice self-determination during enactments of popular justice and negotiations for urban market access, the article shows the political limitations and economic risks of autonomy defined in the context of bounded indigenous territories. It also argues against the practicality and even desirability of autonomy formulas that assume new, unified multicultural identities as a means of framing relations among autonomous peoples. Instead, the author contends that Quichua peoples have been working towards a "relational autonomy" linked to the geographic mobility of peasant careers. It manifests itself not through zonal separation and new pluricultural identities, but rather through strengthening and restricting relations with others. The autonomy that emerges, then, is situational, reflecting the responsiveness of indigenous organizers-rather than programmatic commitment to ideals, multicultural or otherwise.     

Planning Other Families: Negotiating Population and Identity Politics in the Peruvian Amazon

This article examines the ways in which globally driven population policies are experienced by rural, indigenous women in Amazonian communities on the periphery of formal, political power. As with other global development processes, population programs are actively resisted, accepted, and modified by the women who are their intended "targets." Through a nuanced exploration of the interface of indigenous identity with the discourse of empowerment and reproductive rights, this article traces the impact of internationally funded population and development programs on local identity politics in the Peruvian Amazon.     

Subject to a new law: historicizing rights and resistance in Maya anti-mining activism

ABSTRACT

Since 2004, the Marlin Mine, located in North-west Guatemala, has produced conflict between Goldcorp, the Guatemalan state and the primarily indigenous Mayan communities affected by the mine. This conflict has generated local anti-mining movements that organized community consultations which, grounded in indigenous rights law and Mayan decision-making practices, allow affected communities to decide whether or not to permit mining in the region. While communities resoundingly rejected open-pit mining, and while this decision received international support, the Marlin Mine continues operations. Drawing on field research and new developments in philosophies of rights, this paper makes two related arguments. First, Mayan anti-mining resistance must be situated within a broader colonial history defined by exploitation and primitive accumulation. Second, Mayan activism challenges current conceptions of the relationship between rights, cultural identity and political agency; most significantly, Mayans do not only claim rights on the basis of identity, they enact and politicize the form in which these rights potentially take place.     

Sovereignty and the other in Ecuadorian nationalist discourse

This article explores how exhortations for national unity are intrinsically linked to the symbolic displacement of a problematic other through an examination of elite Ecuadorian nationalist discourse and its construction of Indigenous activists as internal enemies. Specifically, this article looks at the role that the 2008 border row between Ecuador and Colombia played in publicly legitimating a concept of Ecuadorian citizenship rooted in racial homogeneity. Ecuador's northern border served as an ideal mechanism for performing the Ecuadorian state's authority to establish the internal borders that separated ‘citizens’ from ‘enemies’. These performances of state legitimacy highlighted Ecuador's victimisation by a more powerful neighbour/imperial proxy as a means for building regional empathy, while reinforcing the legitimacy of the Ecuadorian government to marginalise Indigenous social movements as a means to symbolically assert ‘national unity’.     

‘When you have no law you are nothing’: Cane toads,social consequences and management issues

In this article we demonstrate that Yanyuwa people have detailed biological knowledge of their northern Australian environment, which is culturally defined and embedded within their relationships to country, resources and each other. Through a case study of the impact of Bufo marinus (cane toads) on Yanyuwa culture and everyday life, we argue that Aboriginal management strategies and Aboriginal peoples’ intimate knowledge of species and environment need to be understood as both legitimate and fundamental when engaging in management initiatives in Australia. We demonstrate that for Yanyuwa people emotional engagement with their environment is underpinned by a morality of social and environmental relations and that ‘memory’ is pivotal to this engagement. We conclude by briefly delineating how the adoption of a ‘moral ecology’ perspective goes some way to addressing issues pertinent to discursive encounters at cultural management frontiers.     

In Memoriam

This article discusses the origin of social work education in Africa as an export of colonial powers. Social work or social work education has not been the product of a progressive social metamorphosis but rather that of foreign methodologies imposed on African societies. Consequently, the essence of social work education lacks relevance in terms of its philosophical, value and ideological base. Thus students who graduate from such a system of education tend to remain, to some extent, unfamiliar with indigenous knowledge systems and lack adequate knowledge in working with the people. The paper further argues that, while the origin of social work education is well known, its future direction, development and focus on the continent remain unknown, at worst haphazard, ad hoc and undirected with serious implications for the mission and vision of the profession. Social work in Africa has been without a platform to foster discourse on its nature, character and direction. Transformation of social work education from being Euro-centric to being Afro-centric has to be spearheaded by an organization that can provide a forum for dialogue, leadership and a contextual framework. The article therefore examines the need for such a forum and briefly discusses past efforts in this direction in an attempt to provide a direction for transformation.     

Testing citizen identities: Australian migrants and the Australian values debate

In this paper I explore how recent public debates about Australian values impact on the everyday lives of migrants preparing to become naturalised Australian citizens. Framed through the perspective of governmentality, I combine textual analyses of government documents relating to the Australian citizenship test with ethnographies of recently-arrived migrants in order to demonstrate how political practices related to the conferral of Australian citizenship link and interconnect with the production of migrant subjectivities. In this way, I explore what aspiring citizens think about Australian values and how they contest, accept and negotiate these demands on them to adopt the Australian way of life. The analysis suggests that migrants in this study presented multiple and complex ways of being model Australian citizens. They drew on popular national myths about Australianness promoted in citizenship test resources but they also produced alternative subjectivities that promoted identification with everyday multiculturalism as central to living a happy and prosperous life in Australia.     

‘You Are Germany’– ‘I Am Australian’: The construction of national unity through diversity in select examples from Australia and Germany

This article explores the construction of national unity through diversity by analysing two case studies from Germany and Australia: the television campaign ‘You Are Germany’ and the song ‘I Am Australian’. It places both examples in a broader context of forging national unity through diversity and argues that diversity has occasionally been hijacked as a nationalist argument to advance national identity and unity. This study explores the different aspects of diversity appearing in both cases under study, identifies those parts of diversity being excluded and asks how national unity is being forged through recourse to diversity.     

“A Cruel Medium for a Woman”

The developing Melbourne television service featured a number of female personalities who successfully transcended the circumscribed boundaries of their on-camera roles to become household names. Personalities like Corinne Kerby, Panda Lisner, and Toni Lamond were pivotal to the affective connection that many viewers forged with live, locally produced shows. Yet, these women have all but disappeared from the official histories of Australian television, as well as from the shared recollections of the past that form the “public archive” of Australian television. This article not only seeks to recuperate these early performances, but to examine the public discourses that circulated around these personalities, their TV personas, and their private lives.     

The forecast accuracy of Australian Bureau of Statistics national population projections

This paper examines the forecast accuracy of Australian Bureau of Statistics national population projections produced from the 1960s to the early 2000s. As well as total populations, the accuracy of the following is assessed: age-sex-specific populations, the Total Fertility Rate, life expectancy at birth and net international migration. It is shown that forecasts of the 1960s and 70s were the most inaccurate; forecasts of the 1980s and later proved to be much more reliable. The paper goes on to take an alternative perspective on population forecast error through the use of an adapted percentage error measure which accounts for offsetting errors in births, deaths, net migration and the jump-off population. This measure also permits an assessment of the relative contributions of the components of demographic change to overall inaccuracy. It is shown that errors in forecasting net international migration have generally contributed most to inaccuracy followed by births and then deaths and jump-off error. ABS projections of total population are also compared to those produced using a simple naïve model. The paper concludes by arguing that the new error measure could prove valuable in other studies of population forecast accuracy.