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- Convenors:
-
Fina Carpena-Mendez
(Universitat Central de Catalunya - UManresa FUB)
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen (University of Helsinki)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B315
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel addresses ethnographic investigations of youth and indigeneity in their intersections with mobility and displacement, as well as their impacts on knowledge transmission and innovation, personhood and relatedness, and cultural and environmental sustainability.
Long Abstract:
Despite historical evidence of geographical mobility and cultural exchange at the root of Indigenous ways of seeing and being in the world, the colonial structures of domination that imposed immobility and racial boundaries shaped a long tradition of anthropological depictions of Indigenous peoples as rooted in place and caught up in cultural replication. Yet, the recent ethnographic record has indicated that children and youth are relevant social actors who negotiate their Indigeneity. While struggles to protect territories and attachment to local places remain key aspects of contemporary Indigenous politics and identities, the last historical round of colonial globalization through the spread of neoliberal capitalism has set the context for the translocal re-articulation of being and becoming Indigenous. Processes of transmigration, transculturation, and subaltern cosmopolitanism invite us to rethink indigeneity in the contemporary world. Novel processes of transnational migration of Indigenous communities in the last decades have become youth processes. Simultaneously, youth has emerged as a distinct social and political category in Indigenous communities. This has important consequences for the continuity of knowledge transmission and control of local natural resources. This panel addresses ethnographic investigations of youth and indigeneity in their intersections with mobility and displacement, as well as their impacts on knowledge transmission and innovation, personhood and relatedness, and cultural and environmental sustainability. In so doing, it seeks to explore the contributions of the ethnography of Indigenous youthhood to broader debates in the anthropology of global youth cultures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Indigenous youths in Indonesia build strategic alliances with artists and peace activists to fight capitalist intrusion. Involving local cultural identity markers and the global rhetoric of human rights and environmentalism, they negotiate their indigeneity through physical and ideational mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Capitalist intrusion into indigenous peoples' lands has had disastrous impacts on their livelihoods, settlement patterns and the environment. Indigenous people often do not have the means to resist or the older generation's worldview does not allow them to speak out. This contribution looks into how indigenous youths manage to translate between different worlds and fight for their rights. A huge plantation project threatens indigenous people in Maluku, Eastern Indonesia. Indigenous youths mobilised the older generation, joined hands with peace activists, artists and youths from the broader region and successfully ousted the investor.
Moluccan society had been torn apart by a so-called religious war for years and indigenous tradition was promoted as bridge builder. The peace process in Maluku and wider decentralization processes in Indonesia provided the setting for a thriving youth culture and arts scene that includes indigenous youth, draws on indigenous knowledge and enables mobilisation for resistance against government plans and outside forces as well as everyday peace. Both conflict and neoliberal capitalism have set the context for translocal re-articulations of indigenousness and triggered the translation between different knowledge regimes. I am interested in the strategic alliance of indigenous youths, artists and activists and how they involve, at the same time, the global rhetoric of human rights, environmentalism and indigeneity and local cultural identity markers. The paper analyses the merging of global protest aesthetics, negotiations of indigeneity and authenticity, and local cultural realities, and thus aims to show how indigenous youths negotiate their indigeneity through physical and ideational mobility.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines Nahua youth's aspirations, their ambivalent learning experiences of transnational migration, and the consequences of disrupting care practices deeply intertwined with understandings of the moral good and the inter-generational renewal of agro-ecological knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
Indigenous youth from farming communities in Mexico initiated processes of transnational migration when the neoliberal state made small scale agriculture infeasible at the end of the 1990s. Migration produced hope -something worth dying for- in the context of rapidly spreading imaginaries of the countryside as a symbolic field of death. This was the prelude to broader processes of juvenicide and dispossession promoted by the Mexican state. The transnational family literature has revealed the crucial role of extended kinship in providing care and well-being amid the temporal disruptions and displacements of global migration. It has emphasized how technologies of communication make it possible to maintain social cohesion and long-distance intimacy. Yet after two decades of transnationalization of indigenous communities, chronic illness, disability, and youth suicide, together with the central question of making a living, have become the main concerns of indigenous families. Based on multi-temporal fieldwork, this paper addresses how indigenous relatedness complicate our understanding of family transnationalism, and challenges assumptions about experiences of disembodied long-distance care. Neoliberal capitalism created the conditions for the trans-local re-articulation of being and becoming indigenous. It also disrupted care practices deeply intertwined with local understandings of the moral good and the inter-generational renewal of agro-ecological knowledge. In the context of return migration, ongoing economic crisis and political violence, this paper argues that shared quotidian efforts between elders and youth to renew biocultural heritage and to invest in indigenous quality of life, rich in social relations and care practices, are central to the production of hope.
Paper short abstract:
'Extraction Education' encapsulates the essence of mining funded schooling for indigenous children, which is gathering pace in mineral rich states in India, threatening cultural genocide. Such education is clearly aimed at undermining anti-mining movements.
Paper long abstract:
As many as 20 million tribal people have been displaced by industrial projects since India's Independence, that are based around the mining industry, including dams and factories. A few of the many movements against these have achieved prominence or been successful. Less focused on is the efforts of mining companies to gain legitimacy by funding tribal education. The largest manifestation of this tendency is the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) in Bhubaneswar, the world's largest boarding school, with over 25,000 tribal children, part-funded by the very mining companies that are seeking tribal lands. This phenomenon has been termed 'extraction education (by Judith Walker, on a situation in Canada). In many ways, large, mining-funded boarding schools reconfigure the 'industrial schools', and network of residential schools for indigenous children throughout North America and Australia, as well as the policy of assimilation they embodied.
This paper will map the terrain of various forms of investment and collaboration between mining companies, state and non-governmental organisations for tribal education. In some cases, money is channeled through mining company foundations for 'social programmes' , with education foremost on the list. In other cases, the government runs skill development programmes in partnership with the industry, with the objective of imparting 'useful skills' to the 'reserve army of labour'. Skills here become divorced from knowledge. This paper attempts to deconstruct this nexus and lay out the ramifications it has on indigenous economies, knowledge systems, social structure and the movements resisting takeover of lands and lives.
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the creative experiences of Sateré-Mawé women in Manaus (Brazil) and the relationships they established between the city and the Andirá-Marau indigenous land through a network of seeds, which are collected, exchanged and used in the making of bracelets and necklaces.
Paper long abstract:
The presence of the Sateré-Mawé people in Manaus (Brazil) is made particularly evident by the "urban villages" and associations that emerged in the city during the 1990s, through political movements mainly led by young women who came from the Andirá-Marau indigenous land.
Gradually, handicrafts made with seeds became one of the main life strategies of the Sateré-Mawé women in the urban area, as opposed to the housework in so-called "family homes". In the processes of making seed artefacts, the city itself becomes not only a place of multiple encounters and experiences but also an area of collection of certain seeds, which are combined with those brought from the indigenous land in the production of necklaces and bracelets.
To follow the paths of the seeds reveals a wide circuit and a particular way of experiencing the city, which also mobilizes multilocal relations in different municipalities and countries. The practice of craftwork, and all that it implies — from the collection, exchange and purchase of seeds to the making and selling of the artefacts— triggers a broad circulation that is intrinsically linked to the agency of women and the spaces established by them in the city, where the practice of craftwork emerges in a context of transformation of gender roles, ways of doing and frontiers between city and indigenous land.
Paper short abstract:
Who are the young indigenous participants within the United Nations System? Through a decolonial approach, but not only, this paper addresses the complexity of the young indigenous participants' ways of being within the UN.
Paper long abstract:
Indigenous Peoples have acquired an important presence in the international community, especially within the United Nations. They are authors and actors of UN documents, declarations. They participate in meetings, conferences, workshops in Geneva, New York and elsewhere. Every year, more than once, in some UN settings, Indigenous Peoples from around the world get together to discuss topics that are important to them and to the world. Food sovereignty, conflicts over resources, climate change, discrimination, political participation, indigenous youth, new technologies and free, prior and informed consent are some of the key topics of the international Indigenous Peoples' agenda. This paper will address the current participation of young indigenous participants within the UN System. Who are they? Why is it important to be in the UN? What is to be a 'young indigenous' for the UN? Through a decolonial approach, but not only, this paper focuses on the complexity of the young indigenous participants' ways of being within the UN. Furthermore, this paper will reflect on the young indigenous participants own and acquired knowledges to belong/relate to the UN system. Keywords: Indigenous peoples, Young Indigenous, Decolonial approach, United Nations System.
Paper short abstract:
As digital media are rapidly expanding as methods of transmitting oral history among the young members of Mexican Wixárika community, will video files replace other art forms such as songs and woven patterns in the transmission of oral knowledge from the elders to the young people?
Paper long abstract:
In the videos filmed by the young Wixaritari at the Tatuutsi Maxakwaxi secondary school, they show themselves walking by the river, shooting arrows, weaving, and taking ritual sculptures to sacred places together with their family members. They sing Mexican pop songs in Spanish and comment them in Wixárika language. Very few of them have ever physically traveled beyond their neighbouring community, but they have visited foreign countries and learned songs in Internet.
In our paper we discuss the contradictions, tensions and mutual agreements in our joint video planning and filming for the collection of the Tsikwaita community museum. How to negociate between the teenagers, their teachers, and the elders of the community? All agree that video is necessary for documenting, archiving and preserving Wixárika traditions, but the crucial question is how to do it properly. Wixárika young people combine visual styles of global youth cultures with the Wixárika language and oral history. The school teachers give very detailed advice about filming. The community elders are preoccupied with obeying the ritual obligations for the deified ancestors.
As digital media are rapidly expanding as methods of transmitting oral history among the young members of Wixárika community, these technologies will influence Wixárika understanding of their cultural heritage and the relationships between generations. Will video files replace other art forms such as songs and woven patterns in the transmission of oral knowledge from the elders to the young people?
Paper short abstract:
In a network of intercultural Wixárika schools, youth are given tools to develop their language, their traditional skills, and knowledge. This paper addresses a community museum project, linked to the school, where Wixárika youth can apply their mobile imaginations.
Paper long abstract:
In 'Uweni muyewe, a rural Wixárika community, children are introduced to non-human entities through the cultivation of maize as they learn the basic their culture. Compulsory state schooling and curriculum weaken their traditional knowledge. According to a student, "After finishing school, I hardly spoke my language at all. When I entered college, they told us about Wixárika culture, and they were things unknown to us. Then the teachers told we would build a museum, and we said we would participate, too. Since then I've considered it important that the culture doesn't disappear."
In 2016-2017 I did participatory research in the 'Uweni muyewe college, teaching English, museology, and filming. Life in an intercultural community college was rewarding: courses in Wixárika language and culture, indigenous rights and community development helped the students to maintain their indigenous identity. Also, through other subjects they could prepare themselves for higher education, which would mean moving to cities. Today, the Wixárika school network aims to preserve material and immaterial culture in museums. The idea of community museum is to benefit the community in conservation and documentation, including those in search of jobs outside the communities. Both teachers and students participated in the projects' video workshops. Whereas some teachers expressed doubts, that without the closeness of maize fields Wixárika culture cannot continue, the young people were happy to apply their knowledge in mobile technologies. Parochial and mobile imaginings appeared as a generational difference.