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]     

Shamans versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest

This article explores how the recent rise of shamans as political representatives in Brazil addresses tensions and contradictions associated with the internationalization of indigenous rights movements. Identity politics and transnational organizational alliances concerning issues of environmentalism and human rights have greatly expanded the political leverage and influence of indigenous activism. However, some transnational environmentalist discourses collide with Brazilian discourses of national sovereignty, and the 1990s witnessed a nationalist backlash against Indians, whom politicians, military leaders, and media commentators have frequently portrayed as pawns of foreign imperialists. Opponents of indigenous rights also seized on apparent contradictions between rhetoric and action to discredit indigenous claims to environmental resources. The analysis examines how the shift to redefine knowledge as the core of indigenous identity circumvents some of these liabilities by shifting the basis for indigenous rights claims from environmental practices to environmental knowledge. As shamans mobilize and speak out against the threat of biopiracy, they blunt the nationalist backlash, repositioning indigenous peoples as defenders of the national patrimony and solid citizens of the Brazilian nationstate. [Keywords: Brazil, indigenous peoples, identity politics, shamans, biopiracy]     

Anthropology and the Politics of Indigeneity

This article is essentially a critical reflection on the transnational concept of Indigeneity, drawing from my long-standing involvement as a scholar-activist with indigenous peoples in Malaysia. With its multiple interpretations, configurations, and local inflections, the concept of Indigeneity has attracted much debate and contestation. It has become a significant political strategy in the counter-hegemonic indigenous social movements against exploitative, oppressive and repressive regimes throughout the world. In some contexts, Indigeneity is complicated by its conflation with racialised identities. While there is an implicit understanding that Indigeneity and marginality are closely linked, this is not always the case for certain claimants of indigenous status. In this article, I address these issues in the context of Malaysia and India, focusing on some of the conundrums and contradictions associated with the transnational concept of Indigeneity. I also reflect on some of my experiences with indigenous peoples in Hawaii and Australia and at international conferences. The article concludes with the viewpoint that anthropology requires continued engagement in a politics of critical solidarity with indigenous peoples, one that focuses on enablement rather than endless deconstruction.     

"Land, Water, and Truth": San Identity and Global Indigenism

San peoples of southern Africa followed two very different trajectories through the 20th century. For some groups, colonial rule and apartheid meant segregation on geographically remote homelands (or in game parks); for the majority of San, however, they meant incorporation as a landless underclass of farm laborers, domestic servants, and squatters. This bifurcated history now presents obstacles to the recognition of a nascent pan–San identity as the contemporary San join other indigenous peoples in struggles over land rights, control over natural resources, and political voice in national and international arenas. This article discusses some of the ways in which international models of indigenism have colluded with essentialist conceptions of culture and ethnicity to (1) prevent the recognition of the San peoples' cultural identity, as it is shaped by their various historical experiences and socioeconomic conditions, and (2) distort the understanding of San claims for land and natural resources by transforming San struggles for social and economic justice into demands for "cultural preservation." [Keywords: indigenous peoples, San, southern Africa, social movements, cultural politics]     

Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood

This article reviews the development of the laws and treaties regulating the use of child soldiers and the political, social, and cultural context in which these developments are grounded. Humanitarian and human rights groups have undertaken a major initiative to end the use of young combatants. These efforts are part of a larger children's human rights project designed to create a universal definition of "childhood." Casting the proposed ban on child soldiers in the language of human rights deflects attention from the enormity of the social and cultural changes involved in the proposed transnational restructuring of age categories. Treaty-making efforts reflect an emerging "politics of age" that shapes the concept of "childhood" in international law, and in which different international, regional, and local actors make use of age categories to advance particular political and ideological positions.     

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.     

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.     

The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics

Over the past decade in Brazil, the convergence between international environmentalism and indigenous cultural survival concerns led to an unprecedented internationalization of local A native struggles. The Indian-environmentalist alliance has benefited both parties, but recent events suggest that it may be unstable and may pose political risks for native people. The limitations of transnational symbolic politics as a vehicle for indigenous activism reflect tensions and contradictions in outsiders' symbolic constructions of Indian identity.     

The politics of race and sport: Resistance and domination in the 1968 African American Olympic protest movement

Using the case of the African American Olympic protest movement that grew out of the crisis of the civil rights struggle in the late 1960s, this article is an attempt to argue that work involving identity, culture and popular culture is crucial to the study of race and ethnicity in the contemporary world. A reconstruction of this movement demonstrates, first of all, how a cultural arena like sport can make it possible for otherwise powerless racial and ethnic minorities to draw attention to their cause. Of course, as with most insurgent movements, such initiatives ultimately (and often very quickly) come up against structural impediments that work to reject or absorb their challenge and reinforce the hegemony of the established regime. But the precise nature of the structural constraints operating in this particular case provides profound insight into the construction of social order in liberal democratic settings and the threat posed by cultural politics to this order. More specifically, I argue that athletic protest was overwhelmingly condemned and rejected because it threatened to rupture the homologies between sport culture and liberal democratic ideology that otherwise legitimated a fundamentally individualist, assimilationist vision of racial justice and civil rights in the United States. In more general theoretical terms, then, culturally‐oriented movements expose the ways in which domination itself is deeply structured in and through culture. The article concludes by suggesting that this, especially in an age when capital and power have discovered techniques to insulate themselves against traditional, materialist forms of resistance, is why cultural forums and identity politics have become primary sites of the struggle for hegemony.     

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.     

From Moral Protest to Religious Politics: Ethical Demands and Beur Political Action in France

This paper traces the responses of Muslim youths ('Beurs') to their marginalisation in France. The Beur movement acquired national significance via the politicisation of moral protest in the early 1980s. In spite of early successes, the movement stumbled when the 'politics of austerity' adopted by the French state amplified a social crisis for which migrants became the scapegoats. The Beur movement, like other youth movements of the period, expressed a search for solidarity and a stress on ethical demands. Beurs' disenchantment when their civic elan ran out in the face of everyday difficulties led some to transfer their search for solidarity to the terrain of Islam. Islam, the paper argues, often appears to provide answers to the particular complex of politico-ethical demands for social justice and dignity that the Beur movement expressed. However, the Islamist re-conversion of some Beur militants is to be read as the result of a particular conjunction of multiple power relations which would integrate economic, social, cultural and gender dimensions. It is not necessarily indicative of a failure of the politics of moral protest to promote progressive transformational politics.     

Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle

How do transnational ideas such as human rights approaches to violence against women become meaningful in local social settings? How do they move across the gap between a cosmopolitan awareness of human rights and local sociocultural understandings of gender and family? Intermediaries such as community leaders, nongovernmental organization participants, and social movement activists play a critical role in translating ideas from the global arena down and from local arenas up. These are people who understand both the worlds of transnational human rights and local cultural practices and who can look both ways. They are powerful in that they serve as knowledge brokers between culturally distinct social worlds, but they are also vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by states and communities. In this article, I theorize the process of translation and argue that anthropological analysis of translators helps to explain how human rights ideas and interventions circulate around the world and transform social life.     

Memory Pieces and Footprints: Multivocality and the Meanings of Ancient Times and Ancestral Places among the Zuni and Hopi

The notion of the "contested past" has grown to be an important topic in anthropological research in recent decades, linking such themes as nationalism, identity, museology, tourism, and war. In North America, these discussions have largely centered on archaeology's shifting relationship with native peoples. As scholars give new attention to how research methodologies and representation of cultural histories affect indigenous peoples, it is critical to understand the unique ways in which Native Americans view their past. Contemporary Zuni and Hopi interpretations of ancestral landscapes in the San Pedro Valley of Arizona are used to explore how indigenous worldviews imbue ancient places with deep cultural and individual meanings. This research, based on a three-year collaborative ethnohistory project, argues for resolution to the "contested past" by incorporating a perspective of multivocality, which will enable the creation of alternative histories that do not eschew scientific principles while respecting native values of history.     

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.     

Perverse Frictions: Pride,Dignity, and the Budapest LGBT March

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) marches are critical and contentious events throughout post-socialist Europe: key sites of emerging sexual politics, shifting tensions between national and transnational meanings, and competing visions of citizenship. Since 1997 a ‘Pride March’, in 2008 Budapest's LGBT march was renamed the ‘Dignity March’. Taking this change as its focus, this paper explores debates within and outside Hungary's LGBT community about the meanings of ‘Pride’, ‘Dignity’, and sexuality. I argue these debates reveal competing efforts to negotiate the perilous boundaries between national and transnational discourses of identity, politics, and belonging. Situating them within Hungary's shifting political context, including recent violent attacks on the March, I suggest the move from the politics of Pride to the politics of Dignity has failed to escape the frictions of intersecting global and local discourses, instead invoking new cultural–political tensions, exclusionary boundaries, and dilemmas of identity, belonging, and politics for Hungarian LGBT people and activism.     

Suffering, justice, and the politics of becoming

To suffer is to undergo, to bear, to endure. Suffering exists on the underside of agency; it is as important to ethics as agency. The experience of suffering is never entirely captured by the ethical, political, medical and spiritual categories in which it is represented. Perhaps an engagement with suffering can open up hidden connections between these domains. After examining John Caputo and Friedrich Nietzsche comparatively on the relation between suffering and ethics, this essay explores the relation of the politics of becoming to suffering. The politics of becoming is a paradoxical process by which a new cultural identity is drawn into being and yet is irreducible to the energies and motives that spurred its initiators to action. To exemplify and think the politics of becoming is to call into question the sufficiency of existing paradigms of morality. A critical examination of the Rawlsian model of justice brings out, for example, the insufficiency of justice to the politics of becoming. It suggests the need, first, to pursue an ethics of engagement between several parties drawing upon a variety of sources of ethical inspiration and, second, to cultivate ldcritical responsiveness to new social movements that struggle to place new identities onto the cultural register. If the latter movements sometimes modify general understandings of suffering, identity, justice and medical practice they also indicate the role cultural thinkers can play in re-examining periodically established codes of interaction between these domains.A paper presented, with commentaries, as the 1995 Roger Allan Moore Lecture at Harvard Medical School, Center for the Study of Culture and Medicine, May 11, 1995.     

Reproductive Politics,Biopolitics and Auto-immunity: From Foucault to Esposito

The contingent cultural, epistemological and ontological status of biology is highlighted by changes in attitudes towards reproductive politics in the history of feminist movements. Consider, for example, the American, British, and numerous European instances of feminist sympathy for eugenics at the turn of the century. This amounted to a specific formation of the role, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century feminisms, of concepts of biological risk and defence, which were transformed into the justificatory language of rights claims. In this context, one can ask how reproductive politics are to be fitted into the paradoxical relationship between biopolitics and thanatopolitics discussed by Michel Foucault and more recently by Roberto Esposito. In this context, “reproductive life,” can be thought of arising at the intersection of thanapolitics and biopolitics as these relate to women’s bodies. Revisiting Foucault and Esposito in the light of reproductive politics also allows a reconsideration of the paradoxical feminist aims involved in defending individual rights by reference to overall biopolitical interest and futurity.     

Kinematics and dynamics of the temporomandibular joint and of the movements of the mandible

In order to analyze the complicated movements of the mandible as the open-closing movement and the protrusio are, it is useful to evaluate the basic kinematic principles and reduce them to simple technical constructions. Both the open-closing movement and the protrusio could be reduced to 4-bar links, which were used to simulate the movements with help of a computer. Besides, the polodes and the curves of points in the muscular attachments could be constructed. The 2 entirely different 4-bar links have 3 things in common: The resting system - cranium, the moving system - mandibula, and 1 of the 2 arms connecting these 2 systems - the ligamentum laterale. As this ligament is taut during movements it can be considered a "guiding ligament" representing 1 of the 3 determining components of the mandibular movements. The other of the 2 arms has no anatomical equivalent; this arm, however, is "replaced" by the 2 other determining components of the mandibular movements: the joint and the muscles. The curves, which the Caput mandibulae describes, are practically identical for the open-closing movement and the protrusio despite of the different 4-bar links and these curves exactly correspond to the Discus articularis, taut by the upper part of the M. pterygoideus lateralis. The muscles do not only just move the mandibula, but they are also the component, which can choose between the different mandibular movements. By means of the curves, which points in the muscular attachments describe, the function of the masticatory muscles could be analyzed exactly.     

The Structure of Skilled Forelimb Reaching in the Rat: A Movement Rating Scale

Skilled reaching for food is an evolutionary ancient act and is displayed by many animal species, including those in the sister clades of rodents and primates. The video describes a test situation that allows filming of repeated acts of reaching for food by the rat that has been mildly food deprived. A rat is trained to reach through a slot in a holding box for food pellet that it grasps and then places in its mouth for eating. Reaching is accomplished in the main by proximally driven movements of the limb but distal limb movements are used for pronating the paw, grasping the food, and releasing the food into the mouth. Each reach is divided into at least 10 movements of the forelimb and the reaching act is facilitated by postural adjustments. Each of the movements is described and examples of the movements are given from a number of viewing perspectives. By rating each movement element on a 3-point scale, the reach can be quantified. A number of studies have demonstrated that the movement elements are altered by motor system damage, including damage to the motor cortex, basal ganglia, brainstem, and spinal cord. The movements are also altered in neurological conditions that can be modeled in the rat, including Parkinson''s disease and Huntington''s disease. Thus, the rating scale is useful for quantifying motor impairments and the effectiveness of neural restoration and rehabilitation. Because the reaching act for the rat is very similar to that displayed by humans and nonhuman primates, the scale can be used for comparative purposes. from a number of viewing perspectives. By rating each movement element on a 3-point scale, the reach can be quantified. A number of studies have demonstrated that the movement elements are altered by motor system damage, including damage to the motor cortex, basal ganglia, brainstem, and spinal cord. The movements are also altered in neurological conditions that can be modeled in the rat, including Parkinson''s disease and Huntington''s disease. Thus, the rating scale is useful for quantifying motor impairments and the effectiveness of neural restoration and rehabilitation.Experiments on animals were performed in accordance with the guidelines and regulations set forth by the University of Lethbridge Animal Care Committee in accordance with the regulations of the Canadian Council on Animal Care.Download video file.^{(127M, mp4)}     

Packaging Indigenous Media: An Interview with Ivan Sanjinés and Jesús Tapia

An interview with two key figures in the indigenous video movement in Bolivia conducted at the Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival in New Mexico. In the interview, Ivan Sanjinés and Jesús Tapia describe the development of indigenous video centers and organizations in Bolivia, their work with video makers across Latin American, their goals during their 2002 U.S. video tour, their reactions to their audience's questions, and notions of authorship and collaboration as a process that extends from communities in which videos are made to hemispheric networks of media makers. I introduce the interview by situating indigenous video in Bolivia within the wider and significant historical shift toward indigenous politics in Bolivia in the 1980s and 1990s and draw from the interview new meanings for the term indigenous media that involve the ways video makers assemble and package a multiplex of technologies, resources, social organizations, cultural principles and imagery into a representational form that extends beyond the completed videotape.