Indigenous Peoples and Globalization

Resistance and Revitalization

Thomas D. Hall, James V. Fenelon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317257608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

The issues native peoples face intensify with globalization. Through case studies from around the world, Hall and Fenelon demonstrate how indigenous peoples? movements can only be understood by linking highly localized processes with larger global and historical forces. The authors show that indigenous peoples have been resisting and adapting to encounters with states for millennia. Unlike other antiglobalization activists, indigenous peoples primarily seek autonomy and the right to determine their own processes of adaptation and change, especially in relationship to their origin lands and community. The authors link their analyses to current understandings of the evolution of globalization.

CHAPTER 1

Globalization and Indigenous survival

Plate 1.1. Indigenous mask in Mexico City museum. (Photo courtesy of James V. Fenelon)

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES NUMBER OVER 350 MILLION around the globe, and possibly many more, depending on how one defines indigenous. This number is comprised of more individuals than the entire population of the United States, or about the equivalent of the European Union. It includes on the order of 5,000 different cultures. Thus, indigenous peoples constitute about 4 percent of the world’s population—but more significantly, they account for as much as 95 percent of the world’s cultural diversity.¹ Still, many writers have predicted the demise of indigenous peoples, especially for native nations in North America. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson Morgan, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, claimed, “The great body of Indians will become merged in the indistinguishable mass of our population” (quoted in Iverson 1999, 16–17; see also Cadwalader and Deloria 1984 on envisioned disappearance). However, Native Americans are not only “still here” but also one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population (Snipp 1986, 1989, 1992; Nagel 1996). This is also true for indigenous peoples in much of the rest of the world.

Confrontations and conflicts between states and indigenous peoples are as old as states themselves (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). Clearly, states have been unilaterally successful in displacing, absorbing, incorporating, assimilating, or destroying indigenous peoples over the past 5,000 years. Yet, despite myriad dire predictions—and, more importantly, repeated military and social actions directed against them by states—many indigenous peoples have resisted steadfastly and survived attempts at total annihilation.² Certainly, one might respond, “Not yet, but soon!” But “soon” is now many centuries old. Thus, the question remains as to how or why indigenous peoples have survived the onslaughts against them. In particular, how have they survived into the early twenty-first century when there are no more regions outside the reach of global capitalism, and no regions that are not claimed by one or more states?

We begin by sketching a few of the ways indigenous peoples have survived. The examples will illustrate, among many other things, the need to increase the precision of concepts we use to discuss indigenous survival. This, in turn, requires reexamination of theoretical issues including not only indigenous peoples but also questions about the origin and processes of globalization (Berger and Huntington 2002; Chase-Dunn 1999, 2006; Chase-Dunn et al. 2000; Featherstone 1990; Featherstone et al. 1995; Gills 2000; Holton 2005; King 1997; Manning 1999; Podobnik 2005; Robertson 1992; Robinson 2004; Sklair 2002, 2006; Smith and Johnston 2002). Our exploration of the puzzle of how people without massive resources, numbers, or weapons can resist the transformative and often destructive effects of globalization will shed some light on the general processes of globalization and resistance to it.

The subject of indigenous peoples in a global context is a very large and very complex topic. Actually it is a set of discussions fraught with controversies and contentions, including over the basic concepts and terminologies used. Many scholars use a common gloss for indigenous peoples: American Indians or peoples like them. There are myriad problems in this limited gloss that arose from some of the social sciences themselves. Yet this gloss, however problematic, does permit the beginnings of a conversation. We will refine this description as we proceed in this chapter, to be more comprehensive of the international and global nature of indigenous peoples, as based on the examples we examine in this book.

Defining globalization is arguably as complex. Again, many scholars use a common gloss: the intense speeding up of communication, travel, commerce, and interconnections across the planet Earth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, primarily built on capitalist systems in rich countries that exploit market structures. Given this reference to the capitalist mode of production, it may be more instructive to think of globalization as divided into three general categories of economic, political, and cultural patterns that are involved in a close and complex process of interaction. The same could be said for any period of modern capitalism; however, the differences lie in the distinction between a world economy and a global economy: whereas the former economic pattern occurred on an international scale where production, exchange, and consumption took place between states, in the latter economic pattern production, exchange, and consumption take place on a transnational scale.

In this economic pattern of globalization there is a fundamental notion of expansion, but it is not the type of expansion that occurred during the rise of the international economy. Robinson (2004) describes this expansion as twofold: the first is “extensive enlargement,” where the “commodification of social relations” reached locations that were once beyond the structure of “commodity production”; the second is “intensive enlargement,” where this commodification of social relations is becoming increasingly privatized (pp. 6–7). As global capitalism has reached into all regions of the world, “extensive enlargement” has grown less apparent. According to Robinson, late-twentieth-century capitalism’s expansion is intensive, with a “deepening rather than the enlarging of the system’s domain invading and commodifying all those public and private spheres that previously remained outside its reach” (2004, 7).

One example of this “intensive enlargement” is the privatization of education.³ Based upon neoliberal ideologies, multilateral agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank often impose structural adjustment programs that compromise the autonomy of local communities. Operating on guidelines of “conditionality,” these structural adjustment programs can mean direct cutbacks to education (Holton 2005). As an already deficient, deteriorating, and neglected institution in much of the developing world, education cannot withstand such privatization, especially at the expense of indigenous traditions of instruction that have already been marginalized within a larger modern context.⁴

One example that is particularly significant to our discussion of indigeneity, resistance, and revitalization in an era of globalization is the 2003 case of the natural gas exploitation in Bolivia.⁵ Civil society unraveled when the neoliberal administration of former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada proposed the building of a gas pipeline to transport Bolivian natural gas through Chile and on to Mexico and the United States. In this instance indigenous Aymara communities joined forces with miners, teachers, students, and peasants in a show of an “unlikely alliance” to resist the effects of global capitalism in the form of natural resource exploitations, dependence on Chilean access to shipping ports, and U.S. influence over the region (Postero 2005, 74–76). Encompassing one of the largest indigenous populations on earth, Bolivia is a prime example of how native peoples can resist unjust invasions of global capitalism.

Within recent political patterns of globalization, no single event has done more to alter world sentiment and recognition toward the broader sense of indigenous peoples than the election of Evo Morales in 2005. As the first indigenous president of Bolivia to assume office, Morales’s victory exemplifies the changing sociopolitical scenes in countries where indigenous movements have effectively taken hold. It not only demonstrates the global importance of these successes but also adds to a pattern of resistance in opposition to global neoliberal hegemony. Moreover, the acceptance of indigenous politics into a broader movement of resistance to global capitalism is demonstrated by the establishment of close ties with other Latin American leaders.

Cultural patterns of globalization are perhaps the most subjective of the three categories. In a telling description about cultural globalization, Leonor Amarante (1986) captured a scenario indicative of this subjectivity when she reported on the use of video production among the Kayapo Indians of Brazil. By using video-technology in an attempt to document and preserve this culture, a Kayapo leader remarked, “Given that the white man has little interest in us, we have to act on our own” (Amarante 1986, 6). A paradox arises here: on the one hand, the influences of modern technology can be seen as altering traditional customs of cultural preservation; and, on the other, there appears to be at least some notion of agency provided by the availability of this mediating product. Nonetheless, in order to be true to the phenomenon at hand, the interaction of culture on a global level is occurring and must be interpreted as such.

Peter Berger (1997) outlined what he described as “four distinct processes of cultural globalization,” including the “Davos” culture, which illustrates behavior attuned to global business and entrepreneurship; the “Faculty Club International” culture, which describes the expansion of Western knowledge; the “McWorld” culture, which encompasses a westernization of popular culture; and the culture of “Evangelical Protestantism,” embodied in an explosion of religious proselytizing (pp. 23–29).⁶ In addition to these processes, Berger also makes reference to the following four potential adaptations that occur when indigenous cultures⁷ are faced with these encroaching globalizations: (1) the replacement of local culture, (2) coexistence between global and local cultures, (3) synthesis of global and local cultures, and (4) rejection of global culture by local cultures (Hsiao 2002, 50) or indigenous nations.

Evidence of these and of even more adaptations within the global cultural communities of indigenous peoples is quite prevalent. Since the end of the fifteenth century there has been no shortage of instances where forces motivated by capitalist accumulation through exploitation have replaced or tried to eliminate local cultures in the Americas.⁸ Likewise, the concerted effort to coexist can be seen in the late-twentieth-century attempt to create a democratic plural state in Ecuador (Selverston 1998). The adaptation of synthesis also can be found in the agro-industrial production and marketing of ancient Andean foods (Healy 2004)—especially in contrast to trends in the proliferation of fast foods influenced by the rigid rationalization from the West. And finally, the adaptation of rejecting various cultural patterns of globalization is demonstrated by the Kalimantan Dayaks of Indonesia and their struggle to protect their forests from investors who attempt to profit from the demand for natural resources within the global economy (Fried 2003). It is this adaptation of rejection and the subsequent cases of resistance on the part of indigenous peoples around the world that contribute to the focus of this book.

Globalization as we discuss it accompanies the expansion of the modern world-system and therefore the spread and diffusion of capitalism around the globe. Andre Gunder Frank (1978, 1992), Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 2004), and others have identified much of this as emerging at the same time and in tandem with colonialism, and they have further identified much of what others have called underdevelopment as a purposeful way of constructing and controlling world markets. Frank (1966) uses the term “the development of under-development,” whereas others (e.g., Wallerstein 2004) call this “neo-imperialism by core states.”

This understanding is essential to analyzing indigenous peoples for two reasons. First, the American Indian nations and other indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere—especially in North America—are subsumed in this process of “development” in terms of conquest, coercive assimilation, and nation-building. Second, those who survive these processes are further oppressed and marginalized through forms of internal colonialism. These populations are relatively small in core states such as the United States and Canada, and relatively large but diffuse in Latin American states, where they also are typically less “developed.” Recent conflicts in Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and especially Bolivia underscore these relationships of indigenous peoples, resistance, and the larger globalization processes.

Perhaps the most compelling observation is that even in core states with capitalism, social movements by indigenous peoples, such as the American Indian Movement and many sovereignty mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Figures and Tables
• Chapter 1 Globalization and Indigenous Survival
• Chapter 2 Indigenous Global Struggles: Models of Revitalization and Resistance
• Chapter 3 Māori in New Zealand (Aotearoa) and Adevasi in South Asia (India)
• Chapter 4 Indigenous Mexico: Globalization and Resistance
• Chapter 5 American Indian Survival and Revitalization: Native Nations in the United States
• Chapter 6 Indigenous Peoples: Global Perspectives and Movements
• Chapter 7 Conclusions: Indigenous Peoples, Globalization, and Future Prospects
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index
• About the Authors