Indigeneity as an Academic Concept
Among activists, indigeneity is commonly defined by referring to collectives of people who believe that they share specific historical roots and experiences that are closely tied to certain territories, specific ethnic traits and linguistic autonomy, as well as specific customs, institutions, worldviews, and a characteristic way of life. Researchers seeking to document the project of indigenous identity politics have supported these activist claims with their academic analyses. With a tendency to embark on ethnographic naturalism, however, these perspectives have dismissed the essentialist connotations entailed in the notion of “indigenous peoples.” Adam Kuper’s much-cited article “The Return of the Native” (2003) strongly criticizes the entire idea of indigeneity as a postcolonial reproduction of what Andre Béteille calls “the re-emergence of primitivity” (see also Béteille 1998). These critical voices have reminded us that research on indigenous peoples entails several ethical and analytical dilemmas that need to be explicitly addressed. According to Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 1), “The word itself, ‘research,’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful.” However, ethnographers undertaking intensive research on indigenous peoples during the last couple of decades have been more sensitive to the colonial past in dealing with indigeneity and formerly colonized peoples, and also more politically conscious about the politics of representation (see Bal 2007; Hodgson 2011; Shah 2010).
A different path out of the impasse has been chosen by Kay Warren and Jean Jackson (2003). Based on their observation that, in order to represent indigeneity to make their claims, activists have adopted the notion of culture as a concept to depict commonality among particular groups and thus embarked on strategic essentialism, Warren and Jackson draw a sharp distinction between the culture concept applied by activists and the perspective of the researcher. Their task is not to reproduce the essentializing view of culture by isolating cultural practices that are used as markers of identity, but to examine “the ways essences are constructed in practice and disputed in political rhetoric” (ibid.: 9). Acknowledging that indigeneity has become a powerful tool in identity politics thus opens an analytical perspective academics have from the very beginning been trying to find a “middle point” between the perspectives of activists and an essentialist framework of categorical approaches in understanding the concept of indigeneity (see Barnard 2006; Merlan 2009).
One should, however, also be aware that for some decades now, “indigeneity” has been discussed in various academic disciplines, under varying perspectives, and sometimes detached from identity politics and the sociopolitical framework that has come to dominate the social scientific discussions of the concept in many research fields. In the field of psychology, for example, so-called “indigenous psychology” has taken the form of a sub-discipline with a growing number of representative and influential scholars worldwide. Although this academic movement’s beginnings and goals can quite easily be traced back to the beginnings of postcolonial studies, psychological research is less interested in the potential political nature of the sub-discipline’s origins; rather, its interest focuses on the question of whether there are psychological traits, pathologies, intervention strategies, therapies, and other psychologically relevant phenomena, including theories and methods, that—for good reasons—can be understood as indigenous features of very specific groups with very specific histories and their very own ways of experiencing, thinking, feeling, and behaving (Chakkarath 2012, 2013). Similar questions have been raised and investigated in other fields, such as the educational sciences (Snively and Corsiglia 2001; Verran 2001), sociology (Khoury and Khoury 2013; Morgan 1997), within the discourse on postcolonialism (Baber 2002), or archaeology (Bruchac, Hart, and Wobst 2010), to name just a few. One of the main queries that resonates from all of these concerns with the human psyche and so-called indigenous science approaches is the crucial academic question of whether our scientific theories can claim universal validity unless they have successfully met the challenges embedded in and conveyed by the concept of indigeneity.
Since questions like these are fundamental questions within the general philosophy of science, we should be cautious when merely treating these issues as simple offshoots of the postcolonial discourse, identity politics, and their sociohistorical background. This is another important reason why the contributions to this book attempt to understand indigeneity as an academic perspective beyond political and cultural binaries, while paying particular attention to the context that has been shaped in relation to manifold discourses and their various manifestations.
From Rights to Dignity
The last four decades of indigenous activism can be summarized as the era of movements, struggles for international recognition of identity, and campaigns for rights to lands, forest, natural resources, and habitats—on both local and global scales. Following the two International Decades of the World’s Indigenous People (1995–2004 and 2005–14), and the continuing annual International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (9 August), indigenous peoples have gained the support of the international community and human rights bodies, as well as national-level civil society organizations. In this process, the rights of indigenous peoples have been established by international legal protections; however, at the country level, many indigenous peoples are still waiting for official recognition. Currently, the futures of indigenous people lie with the state of dignity they look to gain at both local and global levels. In contrast to those who have made attempts to minimize the existing diversities of indigenous people, by formulating standard frames to ensure the rights and dignity of all indigenous people, Kuper (2003) concludes that there is no global solution for this diversity worldwide. One of the main focuses of this book is to present how indigenous peoples in various parts of the world are simultaneously involved with movements for indigenous peoples’ rights, as well as the struggle to improve their socioeconomic and political positioning in the national space, in order to gain dignity. Identity politics also feature in the indigenous movements in some nation-states, precisely because they are categorically excluded from the process of homogenous nation-building and the majoritarian policies of state formation. Therefore, indigenous peoples try to build relationships with the state that involve a dialectical engagement, in the tradition of Justin Kenrick and Jerome Lewis (2004), who present indigeneity as a sort of relationship—to culture, to land, and to ethnic historiography, or to put it another way, “indigeneity as a cultural concept.” Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka and Gérard Toffin (2011) have taken a similar view in favor of culturalist groups, explaining that indigeneity involves multiple attachments and senses of belonging, which constitute their social and cultural bases. However, many scholars, like Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002), argue that the idea of indigeneity is broadly a political concept, and has nothing to do with culture. Putting aside these debates over whether the idea of indigeneity is a political concept or a cultural one, it becomes important to determine the particular rights for indigenous peoples that ensure a certain level of dignity both as human beings and indigenous people on global and local scales.
Indigeneity, Land, and Resources
Struggles for land resources are one of the major challenges indigenous people face in all parts of the world. This has to do with the common view that land constitutes a core issue of indigeneity. In Chapter 1, Erik de Maaker explores the relationship between modes of land ownership, conceptualizations of land and nature, and notions of indigeneity. He states that the portrayal of upland communities of Northeast India as “indigenous” depends to a large extent on a presumably inextricable relationship between people and land (Karlsson 2011; Li 2010). Upland people are believed to “belong” to their land, and its forests, in the sense that it is considered sacred to them. One way in which this essential bond to the land is expressed is in joint land ownership. In the Garo Hills of Meghalaya, collective