Apart from Asia and Africa, Latin America is also an important geographical region with its own ethno-historical background where indigeneity has taken a very significant position in the political sphere. In Chapter 7, Olaf Kaltmeier argues that the Indian question lies at the heart of the political-cultural definition of the Americas, in the process of colonization. The identitarian concept of “Indian” is a colonial intervention and an exercise of epistemological power, subsuming different peoples and empires under a single signifier. Thereby, this classification has been used since colonial times to design ethnic policies of domination. Nevertheless, in order to frame their protests, subaltern actors have frequently made use of this concept, which finds its ultimate expression in the politicization of the indigenous question in the 1990s. Kaltmeier analyzes the different conjunctures of the political use of indigeneity in modern Latin America, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Relying on Latin American postcolonial and cultural studies, the chapter unravels the conjunctures of state-driven inter-American indigenismo, indianismo, and indigenous autonomy and pluri-nationality. Finally, Kaltmeier discusses whether the pluri-national redefinition of Andean societies marks a turning point towards the end of coloniality, or whether we face a new conjuncture of colonization based on the closure of the Indian mobilization cycle and the emergence of a regime of accumulation based on appropriation.
In Chapter 8, Gilberto Rescher shows that self-representation is also an important means of indigenous representation that can be considered an alternative approach to the politics of representation adopted by the unitary nation-state. Based on his empirical investigation into public discourses on indigenous people in Mexico, he shows that these frequently emphasize their supposed backwardness, and consequently conceptualize indigenous groups as marginalized and trapped in clientelist relations. However, indigenous villages are localities where local and translocal processes intersect, facilitating social, economic, and political transformations. In Mexico, Rescher argues, indigenous villages normally present themselves as indigenous communities, and these can be seen as an important basis of the political system, because they are conceived as a unit of potential political mobilization in favor of specific political actors. This allegiance was classically thought to be secured in the manner of a clientelist exchange of (state) resources for political loyalty. Though local political actors seldom employ the term indigenous, the communities’ representatives allude to relevant imaginaries and views, strategically employing suitable representations in political negotiations through a variety of means. The underlying relative unity of the communities is achieved by social cohesion based as much on several forms of pressure as on a belonging resulting from inter alia day-to-day interactions. The (often prejudiced) views of indigenous communities are embodied by their members and the affiliation is both internally and externally displayed. Indigeneity and representation as consolidated communities are important political resources, even though these groups, far from being homogeneous, are often affected by internal conflicts and power relations. Thus, the social positioning of these indigenous groups initially stays the same. Nevertheless, indigenous communities may use this (self-)representation to promote a transformation of (local) political relations. Party affine organizations that seek to transnationally re-establish networks of political co-optation are also frequently ethnically framed, employing discourses that emphasize a pretended shared ethnic identity. Thus, indigeneity can be both part of practices that enhance political transformations, and a discursive instrument to revive clientelist modes of political interaction.
Indigeneity and the State
Around the world, states always constitute a major stakeholder in the realm of indigeneity, either as promoters of indigenous people or as forces against them. In fact, people who claim (or are claimed) to be indigenous continuously negotiate their local identity with translocal politics, and their cultural identity with political entanglement. Recognition of indigeneity is therefore said to have challenged the idea of a unitary nation-state that upholds the notions of nation through the minority-exclusionary politics of majority inclusion, which excludes cultural “others” through the spheres of rights and entitlements (see Uddin 2014). Uday Chandra in Chapter 9 discusses the case of Maoists in Jharkhand, India, to illustrate relations between indigeneity and the state. He argues that the Communist Party of India (Maoist), in both its own words and those of its critics, is fighting a revolutionary guerrilla war to overthrow the bourgeois state in India. Yet everyday local realities in their tribal bases show Maoist cadres making claims on the state to raise minimum wages, implement new forest laws, and ensure the timely payment of rural employment guarantee funds. Since 2009, Maoist factions and splinter groups have also routinely campaigned for adivasi political parties, such as the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), and have even begun contesting state and panchayat elections in scheduled tribe constituencies. By participating in the electoral arena, are Maoist rebels abandoning their radical political project in favor of indigenous politics? Or does the agenda for radical social change spill over into “revisionist” avenues such as elections? To explain this apparently anomalous state of affairs, Chandra proposes the notion of “radical revisionism,” encompassing political practices that work within existing democratic structures but push them to the hilt and seek to transform them from below, in the hope of radical democratic futures. He draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in central and southern Jharkhand to shed light on the everyday tactics and maneuvers of adivasi youth, who, as radical revisionists in Khunti and West Singhbhum districts, abandon the party line and, paradoxically, accentuate the modern state-making process in the tribal margins of modern India. In particular, Chandra focuses on how new political subjectivities, as well as new notions of democratic citizenship, community, and leadership, emerge on the ground.
Within the framework of state–indigeneity relations, Wolfgang Gabbert discusses in Chapter 10 how, since the 1980s, constitutions in several Latin American countries have been reformed to acknowledge the multicultural and ethnically diverse character of the nations and to recognize existing indigenous legal and political practices. Thus, a first step in creating a more accessible and more adequate legal system has been taken. However, these legal reforms touch on a number of practical and theoretical issues related to such fundamentals of social anthropology as the reification of culture and tradition. Gabbert discusses four of these topics: the political fragmentation of the indigenous populations; their cultural heterogeneity; the relationship between law and social structure; and the incidence of power relations in customary law. He argues that much of the current debate on the recognition of so-called indigenous customary law applies to an earlier model of the nation-state, thereby running the risk of fostering new forms of cultural homogenization and sustaining