Indigenous Experience Today

Marisol de la Cadena, Orin Starn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000190182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A century ago, the idea of indigenous people as an active force in the contemporary world was unthinkable. It was assumed that native societies everywhere would be swept away by the forward march of the West and its own peculiar brand of progress and civilization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indigenous social movements wield new power, and groups as diverse as Australian Aborigines, Ecuadorian Quichuas, and New Zealand Maoris, have found their own distinctive and assertive ways of living in the present world. Indigenous Experience Today draws together essays by prominent scholars in anthropology and other fields examining the varied face of indigenous politics in Bolivia, Botswana, Canada, Chile, China, Indonesia, and the United States, amongst others. The book challenges accepted notions of indigeneity as it examines the transnational dynamics of contemporary native culture and politics around the world.

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Indigenous Voice

Anna Tsing

The global indigenous movement is alive with promising contradictions. Inverting national development standards, it promises unity based on plurality: diversity without assimilation. It endorses authenticity and invention, subsistence and wealth, traditional knowledge and new technologies, territory and diaspora.¹ The excitement of indigenous rights claims draws from the creative possibilities of such juxtapositions.

Yet, given this heady brew, it is perhaps not surprising that scholars have had mixed reactions.² Some are excited by the struggle against discrimination, violence, and resource theft. Others are suspicious of the support of neoliberal reformers and the movement’s inattention to class. Some note continuities with colonial discourses of race and cultural essence. Others celebrate cultural revitalization. Meanwhile, both boosters and critics tend to base their evaluations on one of two research models: either case studies, with their plethora of distinguishing particulars, or generalizations about indigeneity at large. Collections continue to string together cases with the assumption of commonality; analysis searches for fundamental principles without attention to the histories that make such principles more or less relevant. Both models reduce indigeneity to a singular set of logics and dilemmas. Whether they base their commentary on single cases or on generalizations about all indigeneity, most scholarly reports have shown little curiosity about the diversity of indigenous problems, rhetorics, and causes. Those of us who enter the field to understand how the obscure ethnographic situation we know best fits into global mobilizations are offered few clues about divergent histories and conflicting claims. In response, this chapter begins the task of laying out a historically concrete history of divergent indigeneities.

My method abandons neither place-based particularity nor the links across places. Instead of imagining links only as a route to homogenization, however, I highlight the friction that creates both grip and gaps, both misunderstandings and common ground. In this spirit, I begin my story with the dynamics of indigeneity in one place, Indonesia, and use the questions raised from that situation to guide my wider inquiry.³

Indigeneity is not a self-evident category in Indonesia. Almost everyone is “indigenous” in the sense of deriving from original stocks; Indonesia is not a white settler state. Yet activists and community leaders fighting for the rights of marginal rural communities have increasingly used the rhetoric of indigeneity to draw attention to their causes. In both cities and villages this rhetoric engenders debate; it is difficult to consider “indigenous rights” without running into disagreements about terms. This situation stimulates me to begin with talk about indigeneity, rather than jumping immediately to indigenous experience. It also presses me to consider how the national political scene—with its cultural forms and its potential alliances—structures indigenous claims. As I turn from Indonesia to trace indigenous rhetorics more widely, I thus attend to how nations, and the dialogues between nations, shape indigenous voices. In these transnational dialogues, powerful traveling axes of indigenous concern are formed.

I begin, then, with Indonesia, before turning to my general thesis.

Translation Questions

In Indonesia, the phrase used as an equivalent for “indigenous peoples” is masyarakat adat. However, the effective translation of the transnational indigenous movement goes beyond the problem of words. Many Indonesians oppose activist attempts to single out certain rural communities as deserving of special rights. Nationalism in Indonesia runs strong, and the directive to blend cultural communities into a common nation—“from the many, one”⁴—is still among the more progressive programs of Indonesian nationalism. In contrast, the division of the nation into ethnic communities is seen as a heritage of colonial “divide and rule” policies.

It is hard to deny that the separation of cultural minorities and majorities throughout Asia and Africa was, and continues to be, a colonial habit. The use of Southeast Asian mountain people by U.S. imperial forces in Indochina serves as an important reminder of the colonial history of nurturing loyal tribes. International identification of “indigenous peoples” in Asia and Africa continues to follow colonial lines of separation, singling out minorities for international protection because they are willing to oppose Muslims, Chinese, and other imagined enemies of the West. In Indonesia, the phrase masyarakat adat, “traditional societies,” derives its punch from colonial precedent. Dutch scholars elevated adat, perhaps best translated as “custom,” to the status of customary law. The notion of adat as law allowed the colonial argument that Islam was a foreign religion that should not be allowed to define native life. At the same time, it also informed those Dutchmen who opposed colonial programs that threatened to plow over all native social forms. Dutch colonial authorities set up adat law courts in only a few places; in terms of power and policy, adat was effective mainly as an idea about native difference and, at least potentially, native rights. In the early independence period, nationalists developed contrasting attitudes toward the idea of adat: Some rejected it as archaic; others embraced it as the spirit of the nation. During the New Order regime (1969–98), adat was known through government programs to depoliticize rural citizens through token recognition of harmless cultural forms. When Indonesian environmental and human rights activists of the 1980s and 1990s decided to revive the concept of adat as a tool for the empowerment of rural communities, they had to carry—and transform—this complex and contradictory history.⁵

In 1999, the first archipelago-wide assembly of masyarakat adat was held in Jakarta. The alliance formed from this meeting, Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN), endorses regional campaigns and works to see Indonesia included in international indigenous organizing. Yet the emergence of AMAN has sharpened Indonesian debates about whether indigenous organizing is a good idea.⁶ Most government officials argue that the international indigenous movement is irrelevant because there are no “indigenous peoples” in Indonesia. They find common cause with urban professionals who worry about dividing the nation and imagine modernization as the key force for nation-building. Some, including mainstream conservationists, describe adat as “invented tradition” without stability or legitimacy. Many foreign scholars and international donor agencies oppose the idea of working for communal rights, which they see as dangerously exclusive. Supporters of liberal individualism join them, as do those concerned with ethnic violence. In recent years, Indonesia has been torn by ethnic and religious conflicts, many sponsored surreptitiously by the army. In Kalimantan, for example, “indigenous” Dayaks clashed with migrant Madurese in 1997, 2000, and 2001. It was hard to deny that the mobilization of Dayak identity had been supported by internationally connected NGOs. Few blamed international indigenous politics directly for the violence, but new questions have been raised. For example, there is cause to worry about the role of transnational Christian charities in promoting violence together with indigenous rights. Wherever Christians support minority cultures, missionization and human rights become hopelessly intertwined; anti-Muslim violence is an expectable outcome. Religious rage need not be confused with revolutionary armed struggle. But it is worth noting that where Indonesian communities have turned to revolutionary tactics, they have questioned or refused the indigenous slot. In Aceh and West Papua, activists want independence not dependent sovereignty; they find better routes to make their claims than indigenous politics.⁷

All of this points to the impossibility of an Indonesian indigenous politics that can promote social justice, and, yet, those who jump to this conclusion omit the major reason for Indonesian indigenous organizing. Those communities that have placed their hopes in the international indigenous label do so because their land and resources are threatened by corporate and state expansion. Indeed, the destruction of the countryside, with its once vast rainforests, bountiful fishing waters, and richly endowed legacies of culture and community, is the major problem confronting Indonesia today. The policies of the New Order regime, which opened the countryside as a “free” space of exploitation, allowed complementary orders of illegal and legal resource theft to pile atop each other. In Kalimantan, the destructive force of illegal and legal logging and mining tears the countryside apart; few bureaucrats or community leaders can think of much to do except clamor for a share of the spoils. The claim that rural communities might have rights based in their traditional cultures is one of the few interruptions of a deadly business as usual. Even if this claim is ultimately unsuccessful in remaking national and international policy, it is worth our attention.

Affiliation with international indigenous politics for this claim follows from a layered history. Colonial administration divided the archipelago into “inner” and “outer” zones with densely populated Java at the center of concerns about the governance of native people. The “outer” islands of Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Eastern Indonesia were interesting to colonial authorities mainly for entrepreneurial development; the native people were relevant only as exotica. Colonially subjugated Java became the center of the nationalist struggle, and the story of alliance between Javanese peasants and nationalist elites made the nation seem possible. In the early years of independence, non-Javanese elites became increasingly important to nation-building, and a few outer island groups gained prominence. Most rural communities in the outer islands, however, were nationally invisible. Only during the New Order regime were the outer islands targeted—in policies of increasingly massive resource exploitation. The policy of ignoring non-Javanese rural communities facilitated such resource theft. But this meant that rural protest from the outer islands found no channels in national politics. Only the formation of a social justice–oriented environmental movement in the late 1970s and 1980s brought outer-island rural complaints to national attention.

During much of the New Order regime, social protest was censored, and the environmental movement was one of the few sites for public discussion of justice. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the national environmental movement carried the weight of many progressive hopes. For the movement to endorse the rights of non-Javanese rural communities was an extraordinary political innovation; it brought people who had been historically excluded into the national political process for the first time. Ironically, after the much-anticipated fall of the New Order regime in 1998, the national environmental movement lost visibility, and international conservationists, with their law-and-order nature protection, gained prominence. In this context international affiliations have seemed more crucial than ever to Indonesian activists. To say that masyarakat adat are “indigenous peoples” launches hopes that international legitimacy will give some force to their complaints about land and resource theft. One influential Jakarta activist explained to me that her definition of masyarakat adat, the indigenous peoples of Indonesia, was rural communities fighting resource corporations.

Both the force and the idiosyncracy of this definition raises questions about the transnational field in which “indigenous peoples” has emerged. Can Indonesian activists effectively ally with transnational indigenous peoples? After all, some indigenous peoples—such as those caught up in the U.S. Alaska Native Claims Act—are resource corporations. Others, such as those who control Greenland Home Rule, mimic nation-states in their resource management plans. With what strength—and what hesitations—is global indigeneity linked to social justice environmentalism?

Finding myself in the midst of debates about Indonesian indigenous politics, I have turned to comparative readings in indigeneity to find more about the field. Yet comparative exercises are dangerous; they tempt us to assume an imperial perspective: the view from global management. I have presented this long prologue to suggest another reason for global mapping: to consider how a given set of emergent tactics might thrive or fail in transnational encounters. If we are involved in the politics of particular places, we need some sense of how the plans we advocate articulate with others.

Global indigenous politics is exciting and challenging because of its diversity. Its strength is its refusal of pregiven political categories—and its refusal to back down to demands for strict definitions. Almost every international project has adhered to the idea that indigenous peoples will not be predefined. As a Cree spokesperson for the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs put it, “To assume a right to define indigenous peoples is to further deny our right of self-determination” (Thornberry 2002: 60). Most conventionally, international indigenous spokespeople point to the necessity for self-identification. But self-identifi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Participants at the Wenner-Gren Foundation International Symposium "Indigenous Experience Today"
• Introduction
• 1 Indigenous Voice
• Part 1: Indigenous Identities, Old and New
• Part 2: Territory and Questions of Sovereignty
• Part 3: Indigeneity Beyond Borders
• Part 4: The Boundary Politics of Indigeneity
• Part 5: Indigenous Self-Representation, Non-Indigenous Collaborators and the Politics of Knowledge
• Afterword: Indigeneity Today
• Index