Notes on Indigeneity

1- Clifford, J. 2007 Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas,

Homelands, Sovereignties in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la
Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren
Foundation
. To understand the constantly changing configurations of indigeneity, there
is a need to unpack concepts of native and sovereign, in their implications of
a fixed attachment, and examine for example the superposition of multiple
sovereignties. If indigeneity and diaspora are analyzed as different
experiences, he proposes to explore the diasporic dimensions of indigenous
experience. One case could be the relation of urban indigenous people with
their homelands, and the cyclical returns. Most indigenous groups have been
involved in cosmopolitan encounters. The contradictory complexity with
respect to belonging both inside and outside national structures in
contemporary social worlds may be diasporas most productive theoretical
contribution (201). Diaspora may help describe situations of
connectedness-in-dispersion of social groups, which are many times
dismissed as acculturation and denied in land claims, but that in turn
conform greater scales of affiliation (as tribal). The term also points to the
sense of belonging outside the nation state where the group is situated. We
can recognize pragmatic sovereignties when the ties to place have not
been lost: from everyday contacts to seasonal or deferred returns.
Dispersion allows us to think on a different scale of identification. Patterns of
circulation associated with political forces reshape sociability in the locations
within the network. This opens up the possibility of other patterns of
modernity, which do not simply follow the traditional description of cultural
loss, rural poverty, etc. Different kinds of performance are required in
specific relational sites. Diaspora cannot explain the constraints that lead to
displacement or the restraints that people experience in diaspora. Finally,
diasporic sovereignty unfolds in multiple dimensions, from being a domestic
dependent nation to a nation state or an economic corporation (as casinos),
which are examples of claims for sovereignty without secession.
1- de la Cadena , Marisol y Starn, Orin (eds.) 2007 Indigenous Experience
Today, Oxford-New York: Berg Publishers
The authors set the discussion from some common grounds. Indigeneity
shows that the aspiration of the West to disseminate progress and civilize
the others worldwide has not unfolded as it was expected. Contrarily
indigenous populations (an estimate of 250 million worldwide) still exist and
constitute economic, cultural and social movements that do not just
constitute alternative, counter forces to modernity. Scholarly analysis seem
to be divided among those who celebrate the political mobilization that
indigeneity generates, and those who see it as problematic definition of
boundaries and a machinery of exclusion. A basic idea is then that
"indigenous people are highly heterogeneous" (2). Indigeneity is generated
in complex nets of self and alter definitions in complex and "changing
boundary politics and epistemologies of blood, culture, time and place" (3).
How then conceptualize indigeneity in the context of a neoliberal
multicultural politics that recognizes indigenous existence? "Indigeneity

emerges only within larger social fields of difference and sameness; it

acquires its "positive" meaning not from some essential properties of its own
but through its relation to what exceeds and lacks. (...) Indigenous cultural
practices, institutions and politics become such in articulation with what is
not considered indigenous within the particular social formation where they
exist" (5). In this way indigeneity is historically contingent and names a
relationship that implies a particular space- time (Pratt). The different shapes
this relationship has taken are not just a question of different ideologies, but
effected material relations and state policies that configure post colonial
formations, in which "colonizers" are not only from the West. The global
indigenous movement was both conformed in the articulation of diverse
indigenous activism and also in the travelling of the notion of indigeneity. It
keeps insisting the waves of destruction that colonialism and capitalism
generate(d), something that give a common ground to articulation with
subaltern groups, which brings into play a diverse range of indigenous
"positionings" enabled in contingent configurations that articulate "particular
patterns of engagement and struggle" (Li). Thus indigeneity is a field (not
just of political identities but) of governmentality, subjectivity and
knowledge, in which "becoming indigenous is always only a possibility
negotiated within political fields of culture and history" (13) on "national
formations of alterities" (Briones). Indigeneity encompasses questions of
territory and political sovereignty, while challenging the "ethnospacial fix"
(Moore) that veil displacement, expulsions and "indigenous diasporas"
(Clifford). In many cases there is a "perverse confluence of neoliberalism
and political mobilization that conform new gorvernmentalities
2- Tsing, Anna 2005 Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection,
Princeton University Press.
Tsing presents us a challenging picture: how to understand globalization
through the tradition of ethnographic work, which has traditionally been
local? And the answer is not by just connecting the global and the local as
oppositional forces, as the current tendency on anthropological research on
globalization tends to claim. The local is not just the site of the particular,
opposing a universal force of expanding capital, which abstracts resources,
social relations and culture under the homogenizing force. Capitalism and
the global are the particular, conjunctural articulations of different,
contradictory interest that meet: the Suharto family governing Indonesia and
Canadian and American capitals. The power of capital seems not to need any
type of articulation because it is presented as absolute and universal, thus to
propose to understand the articulation of capitalism is pointing to take a
new direction. Capitalist power is also conjunctural, it takes different forms in
different social formations, it creates differential effects. Capital does not just
flow, it needs grip and creates friction. Friction refers not only to the
oppositional forces of domination and contestation, but the condition (and
the limits) of possibility of production of power, it makes possible for capital
to expand. Meanwhile people do not just receive globalizing forces but also
shapes the conditions of their participation of forest exploitation. Yet her
focus is not only capital but also rather the environmental movement. She
explores the way environmentalist discourse, identity and practice is built as
a political force in Indonesia as one capable of overthrowing a government.

Far from constituting a unique articulate identification of political interest and

positioning, the environmental movement is made in the tension between a
specific local and a particular global, which works through the bringing
together diverse perspectives. Why is affect important? I think this is one of
the most interesting dimensions of the book. It helps to understand the
aesthetics making it possible for people to immerse in relations of
exploitation and violence. It is at the same time effected and a means of
creating power, it permits us to understand the acceptance of the creation of
the social space of the frontier. Affect is also the way environmentalism as a
discourse and practice finds its subjects. Tsing shows us that affect and
power are not abstract vectors of energy, but they (as physical forces do)
have to deal with the stickiness of the surface they encounter. This stickiness
creates a friction that can divert the directionality and even light a fire.
3- Li, Tania 2000 Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource
Politics and the Tribal Slot Comparative Studies in Society and History
42(1):149-179.
Li wants to approach indigenous identity articulation without collapsing it in
either a strategic essentialization and inventing a tradition, or a type of false
consciousness in which indigenous identification represent a failure in
recognizing a class condition. Indigeneity is not an inevitable condition, not
just an invention, but rather a positioning based on practices, meanings, and
landscapes that arise as particular forms of struggle and engagement. The
conjunctures at which (some) people come to identify themselves as
indigenous, realigning the ways they connect to the nation, and their own,
unique tribal place, are the contingent products of agency and the cultural
and political work of articulation(4). She describes two cases in terms of
limitations and possibilities one in which people with worse economic
conditions and less integrated to the nation so not weave any type of
identity, while other group of peasant communities which are better off
economically, with higher levels of education articulate an indigenous
identity in particular in the context of fighting against the construction of a
damn (5).Double articulation lets us understand how ideological elements
come together (or not) as a coherent unity in particular contexts, under
certain conditions, to particular subjects. Articulation is never fixed and it
permits us to see both the internal processes of bringing together and the
external delimitation of an other as arbitrary and contingent definition. She
considers how ideology finds its subjects within the available slots for
social recognition. Identities are always about becoming, and not only
invented; they are part of flows of meaning and power that transcend the
temporary fixation. It transcends too the experience of individuals to focus
constellations of shared or compatible interests, that mobilize collectives.
The tribal slot is significant in this particular context and made available in
regards to negotiated regimes of representation. The Indonesian state had
no category to draw ethnic distinctions, only general isolated populations
which is the majority of rural landless population. The environmentalist
NGOs working in the forests, have been responsible for installing the
category of indigenousness and have used the term isolated populations. In
the history of Indonesia it was the Dutch who played an important role in

differentiating tribal groups from loosely differentiated social formations.

The identity of the Lindu as indigenous people with valuable knowledge and
ancestral rights to their land was firmly established in the context of
opposition to the hydro plan and the threat of forced resettlement. There has
been much written about how subaltern struggles are distorted by
representations created and imposed by outsiders, which is an important
critique. However, it treats representation as a one-sided imposition. By
paying attention to the process of articulation it is possible to appreciate
opportunities as well as constraints. In their work on behalf of tribal and
indigenous people, NGOs have also articulated their own positions within
broader fields of power. As positions are recalibrated, no doubt the risks and
opportunities associated with the tribal slot will be reassessed by those it
potentially engages, also by those who seek to place the resource struggles
at the center of a broad social movement.
4- Hall, Stuart. 1996. "Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and
ethnicity." Journal of Communication Inquiry 10: 5-27.
Hall argues that Gramsci makes very important contributions to thinking the
field of the political as not just a superstructure of economical relations. Hall
thus recognizes economy as a horizon of possibilities (13) rather than a
field of determination. It is the domain of the state civil society, which is
central for understanding social reproduction. In this process hegemony is a
central process involving the cultural direction in all social fields. Hegemony
is the direction of the general interest of a social formation with those of a
dominant group, in a way in which the collective will but also the unspoken
are taken for granted. Hegemony defines what is worth fighting for and also
how that should be done. It is the play of hegemony what defines the
historical unfold of social relations (rather than any deterministic line towards
communism). For Hall there is not just a one way causality of change from
economy to the political and ideological, but rather multiple reciprocal
causalities [overdetermination]. Capitalism was not just developed equally,
racism played a central role in the establishment of inequalities. Racisms as
a practice and as a classificatory system have to be understood as the
particular historical process resulting from specific social configurations
[conjunctures]. The question is not then what is veiling a class-consciousness
but rather how politics are actually articulated in terms of class, race, and
ethnicity. It is the type of alliances rather than the position in the economic
structure that define the political field. Racial and ethnic alliances are as
significant as could be a class, however neither class nor race or ethnicity
are given categories that should be made conscious, rather they are
possibilities of creating collective movement. The state power is then
operating by the dual movements of coercion and consent, where the former
is mostly only operated in the times of crisis, the other is exercised more as a
positive type of power that shapes civil society. Coercion is thus reserved as
an armor to shield hegemony joining state and civil society. Racist
ideologies may be activated within institutional and civil societys hegemonic
struggles, it is not rare then to see that subordinated groups articulate in
terms of race after being subjected by racism. For some groups this could be
the meaningful articulation for ideological struggles. These struggles can

generate transformations in the terms of hegemony, and thus reshape ideas

about race and ethnicity.
5- Grossberg, Lawrence (1996a) 'Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All
There Is?', in Stuart Hall and du Gay, Paul (eds) Questions of Cultural
Identity. pp. 88-107. London: Sage.
There is a need to resituate identities in the broader power configurations, by
overcoming the idea of resistance. A reconsideration of identity would
demand that we rethink three logics: of difference, of individuality, and
temporality. But to do this we also need to critique the broader normative
systems of modernity. Thus, he reframes identity in regards to the logics of
otherness, productivity, and spatiality. Cultural studies distinguish two modes
of production of political identities as: 1) struggle for presenting positive
aspects of identities; 2) multiple, complex, and unstable; and 3) framed by a
group of concepts not a unique theory. The notion of difference implies a
dominant identity that is constituted in the negation of the subaltern (both
necessary and destabilizing). This other can be either a supplement, in which
the other is a total exteriority, an excess, or a negative other within the field
of subjectivity. The notion of fragmentation points to the multiple lines of
identification transversing any give subject position and the impossibility to
predict articulations, the subject as a dis-membered and re-membered
(Harraway). Hybridity, implying the simultaneous coexistence within two
conflicting identities, implies: 1) subalternity as a third space always inbetween identities; 2) as a permanent state of liminality; 3) border crossing,
in which identity is in the movement of transversing (Anzaldua). Diaspora is
linked to this but focuses on the particular diachronic experience of
transnational migration. The concepts above have been criticized for: a)
ignoring the diversity, fragmented forms in which power operate; b) ignoring
the positivity of the subaltern (he also produces culture); c) ignoring the
forms of power within the subaltern; d) assuming the subaltern as generator
of a particular subjectivity; and e) if subalternity is a model of domination,
this implies knowing subalternity is in advance. If these other identities are
confined to produce their identities by mirror image of what is modern, then
there is no escape to modernity. But modernity itself has been constituted in
base of difference: difference that is always different to itself in time and
space. Theories of difference are trapped in the discussion of negativity
(Derrida: a negative that threatens reason form within) and positivity
(Foucault, an autonomous other that affects reason). He proposes to think
through theories of otherness, in which the other does not need to be
defined in regards to essential or transcendent terms, but rather by the
contextual capacities of affecting and being affected. Otherness uses a
notion of difference as an effect of economies of power. The subject as the
capacity to experience the world and know it is universal, but as a capacity
subjectivity is unequally distributed, as some people have the possibility to
occupy different positions or to defend and authorize their existence
(stratifying machineries), operates producing a relation between content
bodies and expression subjectivity as value. Subjectivity is thus abstract.
Self, as an embodiment of this codification, only comes to be after the
process of inscription of difference (differentiating machines). The subject
can be considered as having a spatial existence defined in the vectors of
movement. Articulation could be better understood as the intersection of

different trajectories and the relations of habitation and empathy. The

subject thought as spatialized can be fixed to space, have many possibilities
of movement, be able to access or not particular places. Thus agency is the
result of the relation between subjects and places, places that result from
attempts to organize space. If subjectivity constitutes places as belonging,
agency organizes the spaces and action form which people make strategic
moves. Grossberg is interested in making these shifts towards a spatial
frame for subjectivity, not so much to rethink agency and change, but rather
to think of belonging based on singularity, what Agamben calls the coming
community. This implies also a form of producing knowledge about the
other without turning it into sameness or a radical other. Singularity as a
mode of existence that is neither universal, nor particular, is not based on a
concept nor on an individual, it is better an example that exists as within and
outside the case it is supposed to belong. This belonging is in itself a
production, an appropriation of the class. The example is defined in its
capacity to be substituted is always replaceable, as such is always
unrepresentable. The community is thus totally undetermined; it is defined
by belonging itself. A politics of singularity demands a definition of the places
people can get to or access to places.
6- Ramos, Alcida. 1998. Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press. (Selections)
Ramos proposes to follow indigenism in Brazil as the complex process and
ideas conveying the incorporation of indigenous people to the state and as
citizens but also to the domain constituted in the multiple popular and
dominant ways in which the indigenous are imagined as a mirror projection
of the normal non-indigenous population. If Indigenism has a commonality
with the term Orientalism as a site of construction of a national, civilized
western identity which only defines its others in negative terms in respect to
the ideal civilized nationhood, it differs in that indigenous people coexist
temporally and spatially within the nation state which defines them as an
inferior other. Indigenism is also framed in the concrete interethnic political
field: the conflicts with state administration, tensions between indigenous
and settlers, and indigenous activism in itself. Her starting point are the main
ways in which hegemonic notions have shaped the indigenous as different
and inferior, by defining natives as children, heathen, nomads, savage,
primitives which justified and legitimized state (and church) violent
interventions, exclusionary practices, and land expropriation, even under the
name of their own development. Her final chapter is of particular interest as
she presents the way not only the state but also indigenist NGOs have
shaped a domain of indigenous politics dominated by western bureaucratic
procedures which demand professionalization of activist groups and a
predominance of managerial employees. The bureaucratization of politics
has effected the constitution of an image of a hyperreal Indian, which
under the demands of effective management of projects, have replaced the
real people, which those NGOs represent. In this movement the complexities
and contradictions of dealing with real people are displaced in an increasing
separation of the field of indigenous politics form indigenous communities in
themselves. She points to the ways the Brazilian state has attempted to both
incorporate indigenous populations and lands in their sovereignty claims
(especially the advancement of economic exploitation of the Amazon). Her

work shows how these attempts constantly failed in recognizing indigenous

peoples capacities in shaping their incorporation in the state, the
complexities and contradictory positions of each group. However, this failure
was also in the possibility to erase their cultural systems. She concludes that
her interest in studying indigeneity is not just understanding the world of
the Indians, but rather differential power characteristic of interethnic
contact becomes more evident when seen through the manifestations of the
dominant society. Ultimately, she argues, it is as though the Indians
represented a part of the countrys unconscious intractable but necessary
to its constitution. To study Indigenism, then, is to disclose the nation rather
than the Indians themselves (25).
7- Briones, Claudia. 2007. Teoras performativas de la identidad y
performatividad de las teoras. Tabula Rasa, Revista de Humanidades,
Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, Colombia, 6: 55-83.
What are the effects of the naturalization in social sciences of the politics of
identity in the context of postmodern theory and neoliberal governmentality?
Following Brubaker and Cooper she proposes to think the effects of the
unproblematized definition of identities as constructed, contrastive,
situational, fragmented, fluid and negotiated. She takes as an axis of debate
the tension between structure and agency, postulating that subjects
constitute as such by articulating their personal and collective identities (for
themselves and others), but they do not do it at their wish, as the work of
articulation unfolds under circumstances they havent chosen (59). One of
the problems of notion of identity is that if we take as a constant the
contrastive nature, then identities are always contextual, and always result
from its interrelation. Deconstructive works have criticized this point by
problematizing the subject and the effects of reticular forms power. The
other of any identity becomes always excess that overflows any identity
and threatens it. Identity is phantasmagorical, always excluding a part of
what it is supposed to represent, and is constituted from difference (not
identification). These theories have not just developed within the academy
but have also accompanied and participated in the so-called new social
movements. All this happens in the context of a normative multiculturalism
that make cultural difference hyper-visible. It is not that identity is in trouble,
but rather it has always been a problem. The proliferation of analyses of
identities have generated some authors to propose to abandon the concept
altogether. Hall, proposes to redefine the category while keeping it while
Brubacker and Cooper propose the use of intermediate concepts (ie social
location). There are two fundamental movements to be made: 1)
disaggregate, and think whether we are talking about subject, people,
agents; 2) maintain the tensions that constitute the subject as subjection (as
effect) and subjectivity (as how people occupy those positions). It is in this
context of the discussion that Social Sciences incorporate the concept of
performance, as a focus on the practices of signification. Contrarily Butlers
subject and act are mutually and variably constituted each time. Her final
questions are what is the relation between subjectification and subjectivity,
and what mediates between subjectivation and identification. For this she
takes the notion of fold: the interiority is only the exterior folded towards an
inside that is only a second moment that creates an epistemological
dimension not an ontological genesis. There is no essential or pre-given

interiority. If this is combined with the notion of machineries what it is folded

is the experience available as a result of the operating machineries.
Subjectivity is thus the way these positions are inhabited and then made
visible as social identities. In this context performativity is the capacity of
people to stabilize or generate lines of flight from social identities as they
embody them. Agency is limited by structured mobilities that define
possibilities of movement, access and empowerment. She criticizes that
many studies are implacable evaluators of the limitations defined in regards
to desirable notions of subversion. Another problem is to read strategic
essentialisms, in what we could understand as essentialist installations, to
recognize a more dynamic political field rather than strategies that swallow
the subject. To study identities as an us/them division veils the possibilities of
understanding different levels and the perforations that are more a regularity
resulting from different articulations and the heterogeneity of any collective
containing multiple subject positions. Many analyses claim that indigenous
identity politics are dangerous as they close possible articulations with other
groups. She proposes an alternative question: what are the conditions and
contexts making identities to emerge in terms of indigeneity?
1- Briones, Claudia 2007 Experiences of Belonging and Mapuche Formations of
Self in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds.
New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation
Briones argues that identity and its politization is just a starting point on our
understanding of much complex processes of individualization and
communalization, one in which being Mapuche is differently understood and
felt and non the less a convergent force. She discusses how a process of
differentiation with the Mapuche movement triggers discussions and actions
that reshape the understanding of the political and the very nature of the
struggle in which Mapuches are involved. She uses the concept formations
of self as an alternative to the notions of individuation in terms of
subjectivity and identity. Formations of self emerge from regional geographies
of inclusion and exclusion that delineate a series of structured mobilities
that foster Mapuches or may eve preclude- the opportunity and desire to
come together despite differences (101). Political economy of the production
of difference help both to understand the challenges and reinscripton of
hegemonic construction of aboriginality in Mapuche self-perception and
performances that struggle for a better positioning in regional systems of
stratification. Emerging identities with the Mapuche movement are less a
result of globalizing identities than trajectories available to the Mapuches
today and since colonization. In analyzing shifting youth Mapuche identities
self-defined as mapunkies and mapurbes she follows Tsings notion of
friction that both question the spaces of identity and disestablish them while
provisionally occupying them. She considers diversity in Mapuche movement
more as a possibility for political articulation than a restraint, in this the
different categories of youth adscription from exclusively Mapuche to the
map-urbes. Subjectivity is an unequally distributed universal value (111)
and Experiences of the world are produced from particular positions, that
although temporary, determine access to knowledge and bring about
attachments to places that individuals call home and from which they
speak (111). Commonality is created in the sense of being involved in a

common lucha (struggle) against forms of exploitation, but it also comes

from the diverse experiences that are narrated and become manifestations of
a shared past. Both things transform common people into luchadores. Yet
a sense that the struggle has just begun also comes from the different
positions from which the struggle has been enunciated, so if previous
generations focused in land claims and legal recognitions, youth consider that
the struggle goes in other direction, such as including the experiences of
neighbourhood kids and making a Mapuche appropriation of the city.
2- Slavsky, Leonor. 1992 .Los indgenas y la sociedad nacional. Apuntes sobre
poltica indigenista en la Argentina La problemtica indgena. Estudios
antropolgicos sobre pueblos indgenas de la Argentina. Bs. As. CEAL.
The author traces the general lines in indigenists policies in what is now the
Argentinean territory. The Spanish colonization in what is now contemporary
Argentina was a process many centuries long. In the northeast there was a
rapid creolization of indigenous and Spanish, the north east region was
organized in connection to the silver production in the highland Peru. Both
regions were the first ones to receive the missioners presence, who adopted
the two general languages for their work: Quechua and Guarani, a step
towards the making of mestizo cultures. Towards the beginning of the 19 th
century there were two indigenous regions not yet subjected to the state: the
Chaco and Patagonia. Both regions had a war commercial relation with the
white society. Thus in the colonial time it was considered that indigenous
population had to maintain cultural integrity while subjected to the dominant
society. This was reflected in the legal system that considered indigenous
subordinated societies: and as such they were vasallos of the Spanish
crown, thus had to pay tribute and received the benefits of true civilization
and religion. Republican indigenism resulted form the transformation of the
national revolution, that considers indigenous as groups that have to
integrate the nation. In this period there was no longer a recognition of
indigenous specificity, and the national constitution is written in that spirit. In
Argentina, the negation of indigenous was absolute something that allowed
violent policies of extermination, while the immigrant policies attempted to
constitute the country as white. There was not a clear policy in Argentina of
what to do with the actually surviving indigenous, thus in Patagonia after
being evicted from their lands they were incorporated to the army, sent to
work in the sugar plantations, while women and children were distributed in
religious institutions. Meanwhile the Chaco was being invaded in 1912 the
president Roque Saenz Pea releases the order to occupy the region. The
invasion follows a similar strategy than in the south, only that in the Chaco
their is an interest not only in the land but also in preserving the indigenous
population as labour force. After this campaign the dominant discourse of
Argentina as a white country is consolidated. A discourse that legitimates the
poverty and marginalization of the indigenous as a result of their backwards
cultures rather than as military invasion. The indigenous issue is not assumed
by any given state agency, but shifts from the Ministry of war, to the M. of the
interior, the secretary of labour, the Migrations Division. During the 1980 the
first legal transformations. The meeting by the interamerican institute of
indigenous affairs, provoke the state to take some position over indigenous

issues. The main points are: recognition, participating and

ethnodevelopment (the upcoming indigenous intellectuals and
professionals claim that indigenous development should be in their hand).
The main focus become the land claims understood as the active dimension
of the indigenous reparation.

3- Tamagno, Liliana. 2001 Nam Qom Hueta' a Los tobas en la casa del hombre
blanco. Ediciones Al Margen. La Plata.
Tamagno analyzes the recreation of Toba identity in the city of La Plata, through
recreating cultural practices. She questions how is identity maintained in spite of
assimilationist, proletarization processes. Identity is redefined by recreating
territoriality as a discontinuous urban and rural extension. This experience of
migration is thus reconstructed through a series of significant points during
migration, as are the intermediate points in between places of origin and the
final destination in the city. In spite of the spatial discontinuity among these
places there is a symbolic unity, recreated by history and by the trips to the rural
areas. There is a strong emphasis among the Tobas to get a place in the city
where "they could live all together". The toba presence in the city starts in the
1960s. In spite the first settlements were connected with other settlements in
cities and with the rural communities, the question whether the people were
aboriginal outside the Chaco is a paradox to recognition. Should government
apply indigenist policy with them? The Chaco appears as a unifying and
reference point in the historical narratives about migration and coming to the
city. If initially the group was located in Quilmes, then a part of it moves to La
Plata. Others come form Ciudadela Norte, they move form Ciudadela and
Quilmes to either La Plata or Derqui, however some families remain in those
locations. In La Plata they get land and the possibility of building houses, a work
that started in 1992, through the governmental plan. The particularity is that the
indigenous specificity is not recognized, they are given the houses as urban
poor, the lands remain fiscal. The group is not included as legitimate demanders
of historic reparation measures as they are not settling in their traditional lands.
However, in 1999 the city mayor recognizes its presence as a community
represented by the Toba Association. The association, even with no legal
recognition, was created in 1991 and was a unifying entity negotiating with the
government. Community is not only a level of political organization but also a life
style manifested in the spatial organization of the houses and the use of
common areas (where all children play together and all adults watch them over).
The church, La Iglesia Unida, is also a significant institution bringing people
together, organizing communal activities and keeping links with the Chaco.
Kinship is significant; it connects people in the city as well as maintains ties with
the rural communities that they visit with frequency. She observes that women
travel the most many times the purpose of the trip is to take care of an ill
relative (197). The places they are most in contact with are Quitilipi, Pampa, and
Bo. Toba Resistencia. The women political participation in the neighborhood is
secondary and regarded as "help" to the men. She concludes that there is not a
single identity being produced in the city but a complex subject position in
relation to ethnicity, class, and religion. Thus the city is a locus with which the
tobas relate but not a space with a rigid socializing structure that is imposed

over them. Her work is intended to be a contribution of the condition of internal

migrants who have gone to the city and forced to keep indigenous adscription
aside.

8- Grant, Bruce 1995. In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of

Perestroikas. Princeton University Press.
The author presents the effects of the Soviet State attempts of incorporation
and cultural transformation of the Nivkhi people of Sakhalin island, an out of
the way (my introduction of Tsings concept) location in Siberia. He focuses
on the multiple waves of colonization, and the effects of the soviet collapse.
Grant points to the contradictions of the different policies over the small
people (a category referring to small demographic number, pointing them
as internal others and somehow taking the place of western notions of
indigeneity), always considered in need of development. The policies come
one after the other regardless of the tensions between them, creating time
frames and defining a difference between a traditional past, and a modern
present, a present that fades again with the soviet collapse. From the
creation of towns, going through World War II, the relocations and
abandonment of towns generated with the post-war crisis, to the perestroika
and the final collapse, all these periods were marked by different ways of
external attempts to incorporate and transform the Nivikhi people. One of
the initial salient contradictions between Nivkhi and state was that of
whether to celebrate their difference attributing to them a romantic primitive
communism and preserve this difference, or to motorize a homogeneous
pan-Soviet identity. Discourses of progress prevailed (as the continuous
action of education of local intellectuals show) generating a strong pressure
for incorporating to the socialist state through assimilating to hegemonic
meanings of Siberian peoples. A point of interest is that education policies
during the soviet rule included the formation of indigenous Siberians
intellectuals in Leningrad, something that was considered as a valuable
possibility by the communities that were willing to confront the efforts to
send a few students per year to the city (88). The maintenance of links and
strong positive memories about the city after the return to the communities
was not just a personal experience but part of the collective representations
about the city. These trips thus contributed to shape other type of relation
between these marginal spaces and one centre, by opening participation in
the cultural capital of the city. The author shows the contradiction between
Nivhki marginality within the soviet state recreated through different forms
of exclusion, and the nostalgic memory of the soviet times after the collapse.
This contradiction can be probably understood in the contrast of the
economic benefits and the imagined political participation in a strong state
and the unfilled spaces left after its decline. This work shows an interesting
contrast of the relation between indigenous and state, that in its
contradictions present an entity against which Nivkhi can define themselves
as group
LA

Kay Warren
The authors consider the problems of studying indigenous movements in
Latin America as a tension between academic work, advocacy and
positioning in the politics of representation. They point to the parallel
emergence of indigenous activism and the need to turn from class base
analysis to identity politics, which recognize ethnicity as a particular
dimension. This perspective has articulated with discourses emphasising
positive and common aspects of an indigenous condition, these forms of
essentialism that anthropologists have contributed to shaping have been
articulated in struggles with the nation-state. However, essentialism is also a
limiting force when imposed as a norm that erases heterogeneities. They
claim that there is no sense to making a value over these constructions but
rather to understand their complexities and take into account the particular
historical contexts and the contingencies in which identities are constituted.
If the importance of the roles of the states in the processes of this
conformation is something general across different Latin American countries,
the form of this interaction is never homogeneous. The role of international
agencies and economy has to be considered as shaping the differential
outcomes, as these agencies have their particular agendas and approaches
to the topic, for instance by considering ethnicity as a problem and a right of
the individual. Neoliberal policies of reducing state intervention in some
cases perversely coincide with indigenous claims, however it does also be a
force that further marginalizes and limits the groups possibilities of
autonomy [multiculturalism is not discussed very much here]. Thus the
processes of identification can be better understood in its conjuncture, as
movements combining achievements of self-determination and of state
subordination.
4- Nelson, Diane 1999. A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial
Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press.
To analyze the body politic in contemporary Guatemala, Nelson uses the
image of an injured body with a finger deepening the wound. Her analysis
advances from the body politic to the politics of individual bodies which has
as effects the production of subjects with differential class, gender, race and
ethnic positions. The body politics of Guatemala has no unified subject as its
effect but rather fragmented ones. Fluidarity is the conjunctural alliance of
social groups, in simultaneous dimensions. Identity is always incomplete,
never fixed, vulnerable, partial and porous. Fluid connections link social
identities and even escape orthopedic actions. Orthopedic is power directed
to the bodies acting over them and their connection in order to produce a
particular body politic. Orthopedic force recreates the state as an object
detached from the social relations that produce it while veiling this production
(state fetishism). The state is ruined, corrupted and yet still an arena of
struggle, an idea condensed in the image of the piata: if you hit the
government you may get some sweets. State fetishism is simultaneously
challenged in the total recognition of its corruption. Bodies that splatter,
describes the contradictory racialized categories organizing Guatemalan
society. The indigenous claims are feared as a finger in a profound nonhealing wound. She examines how the indigenous are rejected not so much

by whites but by ladinos who recognize their embodied connection to them.

Indigeneity is then defined in relation to tradition and the understanding of
biological relation (i.e. the son of an indigenous woman and a white man is
regarded as indigenous). In this sense two contradictory logics coexist: one
that considers a racial unity in ladinoness that has homogenized the
population, another that considers the implications of mestizage as the
conjunction of differential races where indigenous claims insist on the fact
that there are differential races. Ladinos, even disregarding racism, fear a
race war resulting form the unavoidable emergence of indigeneity. The
indigenous as a race is categorized in the process of incorporation where the
indigenous are simultaneously an other but also the core of the national
identity as a representation of a glorious past appropriated by the society as
a whole. While indigenous are recognized as the condition of possibility of a
ladino Guatemalan identity, their contemporary claims are understood as a
fragmentation of the Guatemalan body. If any body politic can be fixed, the
injuries that represent the indigenous identity can be repaired by the control
over bodies. Society can then be remade not by a homogenizing effect but by
the creation of controlled threads linking the fragments. Nelson leads us to a
body politic having the shape of a Frankenstein creation. A society of control
where heterogeneity is feared yet accepted if it has been corrected and put
into place. However, this body politic is inevitably fluid and thus cannot be
totally normalized and immobilized. Thus the splattering of Frankenstein is
always a possibility.
5- De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000 Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and
Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marisol De La Cadena makes a historical analysis of the discourses on
indigeneity in Cuzco during most of the 20 th century. The categorization that
define what is indigenous, what is partly indigenous and what is not, are blurry
and have changed many times. The changes are explained in relation the
production of power in Cuzco, but also in its relation with the country, and with
the capital city of Lima. The category indigenous mestizos, which combines the
production of a racial ideology along with the relevance of cultural markers of
ethnicity, demonstrates that race culture and ethnicity were mutually
constituted. Even when the discourses on racial determination have been
strongly denied, culturalist perspectives reproduced images of ethnic
primordiality, what she calls a culturalist definition of race. She analyzes the
genealogy of silent forms of racism (p 40) in the dominant discourses. She first
presents the elaborations made by the 1920s elite indigenistas, who developed a
reification of the indigenous as a glorious past and the present indigenous as
degenerated representatives. The indigenous were valued as long as they kept a
cultural habit considered appropriate. Liberal indigenists encouraged the
incorporation of the indigenous to the national project by promoting their
progress. The indigenous in this period are assigned a subaltern place, regarded
as peasants. The neoindianistas welcomed cholos, and the sexual openness that
permitted mestizage, as a path to improvement of the race. In the 1960s leftist
movement overtook an important critique of racial categories while promoting
class struggle. In the 1980s the discourse on class was left behind, being the
arena dominated by academic and political discussions. De La Cadena points out
the importance of places shaping subjectivities, as indigenous migrants to the

city are automatically considered indigenous mestizos. In this way each category
has a spatial correlation. Indigenous location is the rural highlands and
indigenous mestizos acquire this category by education and life in the city,
whereas mestizos constitute the general urban population having lost its ties
with indigenous cultural markers. Whites are city dwellers, particularly (but not
only) from the coast, and members of elites with high levels of education. In this
regard the processes of migration have been variably understood as
degeneration first, and as progress and integration latter. Indigenistas generated
a moral economy, in which to be a proper human was called decencia. The
decent indigenous were those who kept their culture alive and controlled their
sexuality; but also: educated white men, who could have indigenous lovers
without affecting their reputation, and white women who controlled their
sexuality. In contestation to this morality, cholos of the urban market develop a
new category: respeto. With it they defended economical independence, access
to education, and defied disciplining actions. Respeto challenges the negative
stigmas directed towards mestizas, however, it reproduces the hegemonic terms
that classify people according to economic position and formal education. It
reproduces marginality by recombining gender, sex, ethnicity, race and
geographical position in different terms.

6- Albo, Xavier 2006. El Alto Vorgine de Una Ciudad. Journal of Latin American
Anthropology Nov, 11 ( 2): 329350.
Albo explores the sense in which Bolivia indigenousness is re-emerging in
the site of the Alto, the satellite city to La Paz and the fastest growing city in
the southern Americas. He considers this city simultaneously as a hinge, inbetween the rural Aymara world and the urban European oriented La Paz. The
Alto is not a different place from La Paz, as both together form a unity in
which La Paz has central infrastructure in El Alto, it needs its population, that
is a constantly present-silent other. El Alto cannot be considered as separated
from the rural communities as the majority of inhabitants are rural
immigrants Aymara that at different stages have migrated because of the
crisis in the rural areas. But also they have been attracted by a better life in
the city. In this, Albo points that there are multiple families doing a dual use
of space having homes both in the communities and the city or living in one
and going back to the other for festivals, meetings, family reasons. The Alto
is also a voragine (vortex): it is a space in the limit of two worlds that distrust
the other and in such field a creative force take place. It is a place that
reinstalls the indigenous presence in Bolivian nationhood. The "new" Aymaras
from the Alto are presenting new forms than before, many young people were
mostly born in the city, do not speak the language and yet they are proud of
and self identify as Aymaras. He does see this youth, who were very actively
engaged in the revolt of 2003 and 2005 as part of a new political force of the
city, as a type of coming of age of a city. The other forces Albo analyzes are
the Juntas Vecinales, that keep some continuity with forms of organization in
the rural areas even while reproducing some patron-client relations with the
state in some instances. Finally, the political organization refers to the
general response of the totality of El Alto population and their demands to
the representatives to take a position and mobilize during the conflict. It is
the maturity of a consciousness based on the colonial experience, a cultural

tradition, and an awareness of the use of natural resources what he sees as a

trigger of El Alto organization and full mobilization during these conflicts. This
creative force is what ended in the election of Evo Morales and is now
conducting Bolivia.

7- Sundberg, J., 2004. Identities-in-the-Making: Conservation, Gender, and

Race in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala. Gender, Place and Culture
11(1): 44-66.
Guatemala. Gender, Place and Culture 11(1): 44-66.Sundberg analyzes how
indigenous women, ngo and researchers identities are made in the process of
knowledge production and not before the action starts action and discourse is
thus taken as productive of this identities and the relations. Gender is thus
reproduced in the repetition of performance, in which gender is not produced I
isolation but in its interconnection with race, ethnicity in contradictory
configurations. By analyzing two meetings of a group of women starting a
project of collecting medicinal plants, she sees how initially there is a
reproduction of gendered hierarchies within, as it is a masculine figure who has a
leading positing as a consultant of the women. In a second meeting she brings to
analysis there is a stronger demarcation as the identities defined I this
performance are that of masculine, NGO consultants, ladino, women, ignorant,
indigenous. In this second meeting the ngo positions as having a knowledge that
the women lack. The discourse of lack intersects the systems that define racially
distinct whites from indigenous, and the modern form the traditional. In the
interactions she is observing all the participants are performing identities and
interpelating the others, as the ladinos perfom modernity, the women ask for
help in order to establish alliances and start their business. She examines how
her research and her position as researcher have influenced in this process, in
which the women went for relying on male councelling to relying on her (the
researcher) to finally relying more on internal problem solving mechanism. In
one of her returns the association had split between one of the founding figures
and the man in the community and directing a conservation project that had
initially helped them to conform. She interprets this as a division caused by
gendered tension in which this man wanted to keep control over the association.
The association changes in itself the balance of womens housework and there is
a demand for labor reorganization.

8- Svampa, M. 2003. Entre la ruta y el barrio. La experiencia de las

organizaciones piqueteras, Buenos Aires:. Biblos.
In the context of Latin American survival networks being more effective
than state mechanisms of integration to deal with poverty piquetero
movement (movement of unemployed) is a singularity. Argentina shifted form
beginning of the 20th century as a "waged" society to the disarticulation of
unions, organization of popular sector, the increase of individual informal
economic activities, desincorporation of youth form labor market, a change in
the role of women in popular groups. She sees the origin of the piquetero
movement, an heterogeneous "movement of movements", in two sites:
places where state employment was the structure of social life that had a
sudden collapse, the territorial movements on suburbs holding a pauperized

working class that had a longer experience of exclusion and had a continuous
neighbourhood organization. The first to block the roads as a protest
mechanism are the formerly employed by the state, but the territorial
movements immediately recognize this as part of a common struggle. Basing
her analysis in the heterogeneity of the piquetero movement and on these
two converging lines she sees that there were particular claims made to the
state generating a new form of political actions (from the workers strikes to
the street and road blocking). The people who organized this initial picket to
the national roads "had no other resource to gain visibility other than their
own bodies exposed in the roads" (28). This reconfigures the articulations
between unions, the left, unemployed, and popular sectors. The movement
creates a collective dignity in being unemployed, something that initially was
reserved as a privite stigma. If initially the state was still being recognized as
a legitimate interlocutor, latter some of the sections of the movement have
strong claims for autonomy (Solano). The youth has no connection to the
world of unions, no expectation to access to labor and thus will integrate the
"forces of security", confronting with the police during repression and
demonstrating that the thing to offer in struggle is physical confrontation.
This constitutes a new form of connection of politics and violence in an
association of protest and police struggling to control the street. The
territorial movements then made a shift form the basic demands of state
services, land and housing towards including the unemployed as a
problematic and adopting this new form of protest, and a link to the
piqueteros of the provinces. The neignbourhoos the movement constitutes as
a parallel structure to the Peronist patron-client relations and the Peronist
networks (cfr. Auyero). Even though the interconnection of Peronist and
piquetero movements is inevitable, there is also a turning point in the
monopoly of Peronist organization in the popular neighborhood. If the
surviving groups have been the ones that were able to accept the sate aid
and build from them spaces of relative autonomy through the administration
of social programs, the responsibility of negotiating with the different levels
of state administration also contributed to defer the initial demands in order
to attend some immediate urgencies.
9- Auyero, Javier 2001. - Poor Peoples Politics. Peronist Networks and the
Legacy of Evita. Duke University Press. Auyero offers an alternative analysis
to political clientelism that regards it as of political and ideological
submission, as a rational exchange of goods for votes or as a political
strategy for dividing the field of the popular. He examines the problem
solving networks between problem holders and solvers (brokers) as a means
of creation of an alternative for the subsistence in the socially slums of
Greater Buenos Aires in the 1990s. In a context of structural division of the
labor market and of both economic neoliberalism and state abandonment,
the peronist networks offer the only alternative for accessing necessary
services and goods. Problem solving networks recreate the bases of political
party organization. Brokerage is not something fixed but a pattern of
coherent articulate conduct that occupies the available social spaces and
reenacts the past and therefore it reinscribes it. He also offers a reading on
the gendered dimension on politics in which the constitution of a feminine

field is not only an opening of a sphere for womens participation, but rather
contributes to reinforce forms of subordination. If the shantytown was first a
location of peronist policies and upward mobility, the1990s were the
moments in which the neighborhood stopped being a place of upward and
transformed into a permanent place of survival for the socially and
economically excluded. In this context, an everyday type of internal
violence emerged as a result of the recourse to criminality and drugtraffiquing, and of development of forms of stigma against the immigrants
within the neighborhood, what is linked with a strong and violent presence of
police in the everyday life (73-77). To understand the way networks function
he unpacks the practices of political brokers and in particular the women that
function as the coordinators of state social programs made effective through
the party structure. He claims that is not enough to understand the structural
position of brokers but also the specific performance they unfold. The brokers
function as gatekeepers to the benefit of programs and of general help, but
they present as disinterest coordinators totally committed to social solidarity.
These brokers are mostly women. Auyero claims that they create relations
with their followers by presenting themselves as incarnations of Evita, by
performing her image as the mother of the poor. Thus they work
disinterestly as maternal caregivers for their unprotected children
something assumed as a natural feminine condition, and that operates in a
realm different from politics. Men brokers and political leaders present
themselves as mobile by which they creates a territoriality of it dominium. By
moving, they get in touch with the people by physically getting to them,
transversing the neighborhood, entering the intricate shantytown pathways.
In regards to this collapse of politics and kinship the actualization, the
constant recreation of the practice and image of Evita as mother, is done
through incessant brokers performativity. In it they produce their circle of
followers as a family. Women brokers have to work within this parameter:
women comply what men decide. According to Auyero these women perform
Evita not only out of affinity and admiration for Eva, but also because, as Eva
Pern herself found out there are few good roles for women in the public
arena. (145). By constituting social work as a duty they occupy a space of
relative autonomy opened to them. Through this embodied aesthetic,
discursive practice women enter the field of politics but they also construct it.
10- Guano, Emanuela 2004. "The Denial of Citizenship: 'Barbaric' Buenos Aires
and the Middle-Class Imaginary", City and Society,.16(1): 69-97.
Emanulea Guano in her ethnography of the porteo middle class points to the
production of meaning around the legitimate terms of being porteo in the
face of the economic and political transformations effected by the 1990s
neoliberal policies. The transformation of the economy that resulted in the
increasing unemployment and the impoverishment of the middle classes had
as effects the increased perception of fear, loss and intruition among this
sector. Fear of loosing their property and social capital, of being a white
europeanized middle class, loss of the property but also of a city expected to
be modern and European like. This generated a need of redifining and
reinforcing separation from the "intruders", the urban poor whose population
raised steadily. This need of differentiation was not made just on the basis of
class, but there was a growing claim that the poor invading the city as
immigrants of neighbouring countries and also racialized as non white. Even

though the long tradition of the Peronism of reclaiming the site of the "dark"
"poor" shanty town dwellers as an important part of "the people", and the
centre of a national identity, the middle class representations seem to be
more linked with the discourses and desire of modernization, of becoming
"real first world". Guano associates this with neoliberalism and calls it "to see
modernity from the looking glass", while embracing the project to be in
modernity becomes more and more distant. Thus the middle class along with
some of the dominant discourse of the government and the press, construct a
sense of disappearing middle class, along with an invasion of immigrants. It is
for her a reactualization of the civilization/barbarism discourse. In which the
middle class recognizes as the inheritors of a European city only to see its
cluster of slumnines in the cirujas [indigent], the squatter and the insecurity.
In these contexts only the granting of security, more than only possession
can guarantee the remaining in the middle class, thus the proliferation of
location of exclusion, or the self enclosing of the public space in the mall, and
the formation of gated communities. It is in the desparete definition of the
other that middle class attempts to avoid the fact that is very close or with no
clear distinction than this other.