Environmental NGOs,dispossession, and the state: The ideology and praxis of African nature and development

Zimbabwe provides a significant context to examine the interplay of the new development rhetoric, the actions of powerful conservation organizations, donor policies, a relatively strong and stable government, and the empowerment of local communities. This interplay exists in diverse rural areas where the Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) is in various stages of experimentation and implementation. CAMPFIRE has been described as a philosophy of sustainable rural development that enables rural communities to manage, and benefit directly form indigenous wildlife. It is the best known of African efforts to permit African communities to re- assert their management of selected natural resources. The program has the official support of the Zimbabwean government. Nonetheless, there are many potential areas of serious conflict. Three case studies are utilized to explore how the challenges of repossession of critical environmental resources by marginalized communities in the changing context of state and NGO relationships where international tourism is a revenue generator for both the private sector and government.     

Assessing the Potential of Indigenous-Run Demographic/Health Surveys: the 2005 Shuar Survey,Ecuador

Despite improved national censuses and “micro-demographic” studies, demographic processes and health conditions among indigenous populations in Amazonia and elsewhere in lowland Latin America are not well understood. A new source of demographic and health data has emerged in the past decade, namely meso-scale surveys initiated and administered by indigenous organizations. These surveys offer the potential for filling information gaps, shedding light on culturally specific factors that shape demographic processes and health, and empowering indigenous organizations with data that could inform health initiatives. This article assesses the indigenous-run survey “2005 Health Analysis of the Shuar and Achuar Nations” of eastern Ecuador in which the authors were involved, which reached 1,943 households in 257 communities in Morona-Santiago Province. We present findings on fertility, migration, sanitation, and health, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the survey. We argue that despite flaws in the survey design and implementation, this survey revealed important linkages among fertility, migration, and health. Such surveys have the potential to provide much needed detail, representativeness, and cultural specificity that macro and micro data sources cannot provide. We conclude with recommendations to improve surveys of this type.     

Precarious Alliances: The Cultural Politics and Structural Predicaments of the Indigenous Rights Movement in Tanzania

Since 1990, over one hundred indigenous nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have emerged in predominantly Maasai areas in Tanzania, attempting to organize people around diverse claims of a common "indigenous" identity based on ethnicity, mode of production, and a long history of political and economic disenfranchisement. Despite attempts to foster unity and promote common political agendas, the indigenous rights movement has been fractured by sometimes quite hostile disagreements over priorities, competition over resources, and tensions over membership and representation. This article explores the complicated causes and consequences of these tensions by focusing on the discussions, disagreements, and silences that occurred during a recent attempt to reconcile indigenous groups in Tanzania. The workshop offers a unique window on the cultural, political, and historical dynamics of the indigenous rights movement in northern Tanzania, the principles and practices of inclusion and exclusion that have defined and shaped the movement, and the internal and external stresses that have made alliances within and among the INGOs, donors, and the government precarious, at best. [Keywords: indigenous peoples, social movements, cultural politics, Maasai, Tanzania]     

International NGOs and Land Use Change in a Southern Highland Region of Ecuador

Nongovernmental organizations are increasingly influencing resource management and land use in areas of small farm agriculture in Latin America. A field study of NGOs working in upper Canar, a region in the southern highlands of Ecuador, documents the changing human environment relations in an indigenous area and the influence of NGOs in the change process. Case studies of PLAN International and CARE indicate that the NGOs are helping marginalized producers shift land use away from traditional grains and tubers toward dairying and vegetables. Given current needs and resource constraints, the new land uses represent effective adaptive strategies. However, the NGO work is having notable consequences for land use intensity and labor utilization patterns.     

Bridging the gap: transnational and ethnic organizations in the political incorporation of immigrants in the United States

This study was prompted by concerns about the ways in which immigrant organizations, especially those of a transnational character, may retard or prevent political integration among recent migrants to the United States. For this purpose, we constructed an inventory of all organizations created by Colombian, Dominican and Mexican immigrants in the United States, interviewed leaders of the twenty largest organizations from each group in person, and conducted a survey of 178 additional organizations by telephone or Internet. Results reveal a near-absence of perceived conflict between transnational activism and political incorporation. Almost without exception, leaders asserted that there was no contradiction between home-country loyalties and activities and US citizenship and voting. These results appear to reflect genuine conviction, rather than any social desirability syndrome. Objective indicators show that most organizations maintain close ties with US political authorities at various levels and engage in a number of US-focused civic and political activities. Determinants of such engagement are examined. Implications of the results for theory and public policy are discussed.     

Ethnic and immigrant politics vs. mainstream politics: the role of ethnic organizations in shaping the political participation of immigrant-origin individuals in Europe

Previous scholarship has reported contradictory results regarding the impact of involvement by immigrant-origin individuals (IOIs) in ethnic organizations on political participation. In this article, we assess the effect of involvement in different types of organizations (ethnic, pan-immigrant and native) on participation in various types of political activities. We use cross-national micro-data from a population survey undertaken in 2004–2008 to IOIs in nine European cities. Our findings indicate that ethnic organizations perform an integrative function for IOIs in the political sphere, but they mainly affect participation linked to immigration-related issues concerning specific ethnic groups and IOIs. Moreover, most effects of involvement in ethnic organizations on the different types of political participation examined are similar in closed and in open political opportunity structures (POS). We only find evidence that involvement in ethnic organizations depresses conventional political action in open POS settings while it increases political action in closed POS settings.     

Muslim community organizations – sites of active citizenship or self-segregation?

Ethno-religious community organizations in Western countries have often been described as being disconnected from mainstream society, and Muslim community groups have been a special focus of such critique. This article offers a counter-narrative to these widespread allegations. It draws on a synthesis of emerging research on the citizenship-enhancing effects of mosque involvement and on an explorative study involving thirty in-depth interviews with civically active Muslims in Australia and Germany. The article examines the potential of Muslim community organizations to mobilize their member into performing their citizenship through civic and political participation. It offers empirical evidence that many Muslim community organizations, rather than promoting social segregation, act as accessible entry point for Muslims’ civic participation, facilitate cross-community engagement and provide gateways to political involvement. These civic potentials of Muslim community organization have remained underestimated in the public and political discourse on cohesive societies and healthy democracies.     

Old Jokes and New Multiculturalisms: Continuity and Change in Vernacular Discourse on the Yucatec Maya Language

ABSTRACT  Much recent literature on indigenous identity politics in Latin America has emphasized the emergence of new discourses on ethnic citizenship. However, the ways in which state-sponsored efforts to validate and revitalize the Yucatec Maya language become relevant to rural Yucatecans reflect far more continuity with older local narratives about the relationship between language use and modernity. Situating contemporary engagements with multicultural language policies within a broader history of locally meaningful language practices complicates the general model of indigenous language communities that has informed many recent studies of Latin American identity politics and reframes scholarly debates that have emphasized contrasts between emergent forms of essentialism or purism and more-traditional means of identity formation. This, in turn, suggests new routes through which multicultural and multilingual policies can be conceptualized for heterogeneous communities of indigenous language speakers.     

Anthropology and the politics of facts,knowledge, and history

Conclusions In this paper I have tried to discuss several levels of the politics of facts, knowledge and history in relation to contemporary anthropology. Taking off on the current school of anthropology known as interpretive anthropology or anthropology as text, I have suggested that issues involving the representation and documentation of knowledge and history are not primarily found in the process of writing an ethnographic text, but in the arenas of power relations which fall outside of ethnographic production. The power dynamics of unequal language as described by Asad operate in the political, economic, cultural and social lives of real individuals who carried on a historical existence before the entrance of the anthropologist and who continue to struggle, day to day, to survive and retain a sense of autonomous identity after the anthropologist leaves.Here the politics of facts, knowledge, and history have been explored in relation to my own fieldwork in the Zapotec community of Teotitlan del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. My discussion focused on the power relations of history and language reflected in the community archives, the ways in which different sectors of the community use history to defend their own agendas and differential access to power in a gendered and economically stratified community, and the ways in which collaborative projects can highlight different bases of linguistic and historical authority within a community.Unlike many indigenous peasant communities in Mexico, Teotitlan is not in the throes of an economic or political crisis. In fact, it probably has one of the highest standards of living of all the indigenous communities in Oaxaca. The community's protection of its many histories has been used, particularly by the merchant sector, as a way of asserting a claim to Zapotec weavings. The cultural claim to the textiles has been used to facilitate the community's insertion into the international capitalist economy. A claim to Zapotec ethnicity has been critical to the community's autonomy struggle as it has worked to gain independence from the Mexican state, first through circumventing documentation of production, and later, by avoiding deep involvement in craft development programs, which put the state in the role of middleman.Other indigenous communities and populations in Mexico and throughout Latin America face a much more severe crisis of autonomy, usually linked first to physical survival, and secondly, to maintaining control over natural resources. In the state of Oaxaca, significant numbers of the human rights violations which have occurred in the 1970s and 1980s involved indigenous peoples who were murdered, beaten, jailed or harassed for ethnically based political activities. Particularly outstanding were abuses leveled against the Trique living in and around San Juan Copala who have engaged in confrontations involving 13,705 hectares of disputed woodlands and communal land.For indigenous communities waging battles for self-determination and autonomy, the representation of history and facts are linked to political struggles to improve material conditions and gain greater control over their place in the larger political-economy. At the level of struggle at which the Trique are engaged in the crisis over authority and representation is played out in armed incursions by troops, police and gunmen, assassinations of Triqui leaders, torture, and rape. In the community of Teotitlan, it is played out more subtly in negotiations with American importers and within the community over prices and who controls the production and distribution of Zapotec weavings. In both instances the politics of facts, knowledge, and history reappear in the colonial encounter people live on a day to day basis and which anthropologists focused on in the 1970s. While the enterprise of ethnography winds itself through changing epistemologies in the pages of journals and at conferences, the lives of indigenous peasants continue in a struggle of empowerment against a history of marginalization.Lynn Stephen is Professor of Anthropology, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.     

How Do Real Indians Fish? Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta

ABSTRACT   There has been a growing interest in anthropology regarding how certain political conditions set the stage for "articulations" between indigenous movements and environmental actors and discourses. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how these same conditions can suppress demands for indigenous rights. In this article, I argue that the pairing of neoliberalism and multiculturalism in contemporary Mexico has created political fields in which ethnic difference has been foregrounded as a way of denying certain rights to marginalized groups. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern Mexico, I analyze how the arguments of a group of Cucapá for fishing rights in the Colorado Delta have been constrained within these political circumstances. I argue that cultural difference has been leveraged by the Mexican federal government and local NGOs to prevent the redistribution of environmental resources among vulnerable groups such as the Cucapá.     

Indigenous in the city: the politics of urban Mapuche identity in Chile

In this article, I analyse how urban Mapuche indigenous organizations in Chile conduct politics, both externally in relation to the state and internally in relation to other Mapuches. I suggest that the state creates the context for their politics through enacting centuries of policies that put Mapuche identity ‘under siege’. My analysis shows that urban Mapuche organizations respond to this context in three central ways. Some organizations refuse the moniker ‘urban’ and are temporarily urban. Others embrace their urbanity and are adamantly urban. Still others try to overcome the rural-urban divide to become reconciled urban. Each of these strategies deploys ideas of authenticity in different ways, opening possibilities for different kinds of political alliances. My research argues that when the stakes are high for claiming a racial or ethnic identity, choosing which aspects of identity on which to base political demands has profound political consequences.     

The Politics of Reintegrating Australian Aboriginal and American Indian Indigenous Knowledge into Resource Management: The Dynamics of Resource Appropriation and Cultural Revival

As the United States and Australia struggle with contemporary crises over competing uses of rapidly depleting natural resources, there are striking parallels between American Indian and Australian Aboriginal communities demanding a place at the management table and offering culturally based understandings of and solutions for the ecosystems at risk. These efforts to integrate indigenous knowledge into mainstream natural resource management are part of larger legal and political debates over land tenure, the locus of control, indigenous self-governance, and holistic ecosystems management.     

Landscape Ideologies,Indigenous Governance,and Land Use Change in the Ecuadorian Amazon, 1960–1992

In recent years, states have ceded governance over large territories to indigenous organizations. This article examines the history of an early case of territorial governance (dating from the 1970s) to probe the social, political, and environmental processes that occur when an indigenous social movement becomes a governing body. It argues that indigenous organizations can quickly learn to “see like states” (Scott 1998) without adopting the particular visions promoted by the state that facilitated their new role. In the case explored here, indigenous leaders created landscape improvement schemes that went beyond those promoted by the state and others in terms of changing the legibility of land use and tenure categories. Furthermore, their schemes had significant impacts on forest cover as evidenced by remotely sensed images. These processes challenge theories that position the state as the primary arbitrator of human-environmental relations as well as theories that dichotomize between states and indigenous organizations.     

Genetic Diversity in the Lesser Antilles and Its Implications for the Settlement of the Caribbean Basin

Historical discourses about the Caribbean often chronicle West African and European influence to the general neglect of indigenous people’s contributions to the contemporary region. Consequently, demographic histories of Caribbean people prior to and after European contact are not well understood. Although archeological evidence suggests that the Lesser Antilles were populated in a series of northward and eastern migratory waves, many questions remain regarding the relationship of the Caribbean migrants to other indigenous people of South and Central America and changes to the demography of indigenous communities post-European contact. To explore these issues, we analyzed mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome diversity in 12 unrelated individuals from the First Peoples Community in Arima, Trinidad, and 43 unrelated Garifuna individuals residing in St. Vincent. In this community-sanctioned research, we detected maternal indigenous ancestry in 42% of the participants, with the remainder having haplotypes indicative of African and South Asian maternal ancestry. Analysis of Y-chromosome variation revealed paternal indigenous American ancestry indicated by the presence of haplogroup Q-M3 in 28% of the male participants from both communities, with the remainder possessing either African or European haplogroups. This finding is the first report of indigenous American paternal ancestry among indigenous populations in this region of the Caribbean. Overall, this study illustrates the role of the region’s first peoples in shaping the genetic diversity seen in contemporary Caribbean populations.     

Impact of the Nile perch on the fisheries of Lakes Victoria and Kyoga

The combined effects of lack of effective management, over-exploitation with destructive fishing gear and interspecific competition, particularly among tilapiines have had profound effects on the fish stocks of lakes Victoria and Kyoga. It has been proposed that these have been more important in the decline of the indigenous fisheries than predation or competition from Nile perch.     

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross‐cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and ‘translated’ into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of ‘translation’ raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation‐state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.     

Transnational cyberpublics: new political spaces for labour migrants in Asia

This article offers a cultural interpretation of transnational solidarities that Asian political activists are generating through electronic telecommunications networks. Its focus is on the experiences of the Migrant Forum in Asia [MFA], a network of non-government organizations that question issues of human rights, citizenship and working conditions of labour migrants in the Asian region. MFA's networking activities are being transformed as email enables daily conversations across multiple national borders, and new 'imagined' communities of political action have emerged. English has been chosen as the language of solidarity, and photographs have become important in communicating activities and ideas. These media are innovative modes of transnational communication and shape political spaces that exist in symbiotic relation to the 'real'. Attention to these practices, spaces and the symbolic meanings activists attach to these communities helps to illuminate a cultural politics of transnational activism in this region.     

Professional Hubris and its Consequences: Why Organizations of Health‐Care Professions Should Not Adopt Ethically Controversial Positions

In this article, I argue that professional healthcare organizations such as the AMA and ANA ought not to take controversial stances on professional ethics. I address the best putative arguments in favor of taking such stances, and argue that none are convincing. I then argue that the sort of stance‐taking at issue has pernicious consequences: it stands to curb critical thought in social, political, and legal debates, increase moral distress among clinicians, and alienate clinicians from their professional societies. Thus, because there are no good arguments in favor of stance‐taking and at least some risks in doing so, professional organizations should refrain from adopting the sort of ethically controversial positions at issue.     

Revisiting the Freedom of Fishing and Legal Obligations on States Not Party to Regional Fisheries Management Organizations

For decades, states have cooperated through regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) on the conservation and management of living marine resources on the high seas. Nonmembers, or third states not bound by their decisions, have been an Achilles’ heel. In this article, the legal status of RFMO nonmembers and the freedom of fishing are examined. It is concluded that RFMO nonmembers have concrete obligations with respect to established fisheries subject to RFMO regulation.