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Contribution short abstract:

This contribution looks at the importance of ethnographies’ focus on complex connections to help us to understand the contemporary power of illicit governance into which diverse lives are differentially incorporated.

Contribution long abstract:

From the UN recognition of the indigenous agroforestry chakras as “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems” to the Kawsak Sacha – “living forest” political proposal, indigenous Ecuadorians have put to work the academic and development distinctions between productive exploitation and reproductive sustainability. Yet the very opposition that makes these projects so important as critiques of extractive logics, also places them in analytically distinct spaces from contemporary problematics. The past decade’s ecological critique of the exploitation of natural resources, and often of indigenous territories, made such an opposition conceptually cogent and politically important. Today, however, when economic dispossession is significantly influenced by narco-economies, criminal governance and increasing violence, indigenous peoples, if mentioned, are portrayed only as victims. Yet the political clarity of indigenous difference in this case also obscures complex causalities. For example, how and when do non-state authorities over territories collide or collude, often without explicit discord or accord? How do new generations of indigenous youth incorporate the racialized punitive discourse widely circulated in mass media? If indigenous practices led us to more-than-human ethnographies that could be incorporated into political defense of indigenous lifeways and territories, we now need ethnographies that focus on complex connections between spaces, systems and apparently opposed spheres to help us to understand the shifting systems into which diverse lives are differentially incorporated. This paper examines such connections through a focus on the transformations of the chakra and of the Kawsak Sacha proposal in the context of the increasing power of illicit organizations in Ecuador.

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Contribution short abstract:

Decolonial approaches in Mexico have contrasting genealogies and conceptual toolkits. In my current project on decolonial political humour from an indigenous perspective, I have found challenges and advantages in communicating across such interpretations.

Contribution long abstract:

Discussions about decolonial scholarship have been gaining ground in Mexico for some years now. Among the indigenous intellectuals and Mexican scholars studying indigenous groups I have met in Mexico, I have found contrasting interpretations of decolonial thought. Some clearly draw strong analyses from Marxism, especially emphasizing a movement against neo-extractivism and land dispossession. Others focus more on epistemic frameworks, with efforts to counter supposedly rational approaches with a combination of feelings and action (senti-acción), a form of affective-political engagement seeking justice. My research project, in contrast, seeks to shed light on decolonial political humour from an indigenous perspective. In my view, much of the polarization that currently plagues Mexican politics is related to colonial categories – mainly related to classism and racism – with which social hierarchies are policed. While I have found that these and other different layers of decolonial thought are not contradictory, their key conceptual anchors sometimes make it hard for fruitful dialogues to follow. For the reflections, I draw from my recent participation (2023-2024) in a seminar on decolonial epistemologies at the University of Guadalajara, in Mexico, convened by an indigenous intellectual.

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Contribution short abstract:

I’ll discuss the tension between Western appropriation of Indigenous concepts and Indigenous position within a Western framework. I propose an ethnographic practice that is neither romanticizing nor a detached critique, proposing a third alternative.

Contribution long abstract:

As an anthropologist working in Hawai‘i with Indigenous microbiologists, my contribution to the roundtable proposes that of nuancing what ‘appropriation’ and ‘incorporation’ means. There is increasing evidence of the fact that Western scientific concepts and ideas partly derive from the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge, in addition to the appropriation of their lands, resources and labour. In Hawai’i, Indigenous microbiologists are trying to transform Western science from within: they incorporate knowledge, protocols and formats derived from Indigenous chants and other traditional written documents into Western standards of evaluation, conduct and dissemination of research and education. On one hand, these processes bring momentum and strength to anthropological and social sciences’s questioning of what science is and what it can be otherwise. On the other hand, certain aspects of Indigenous science seem unable to escape the neoliberal and colonial social structure which regulates and takes advantage of Indigenous scientists’s progressive aspirations. Between joining forces or taking a distant critical gaze, a third collaborative way is possible, that take stock of anthropology’s critique pursuing a shared political vision with indigenous communities.

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Contribution short abstract:

Tukanoans in Northwestern Amazonia have adopted the idea that they have a culture and that its loss has fatal existential implications. I explore how, through the notion of culture loss, Tukanoans have reinterpreted their contemporary forms of indigeneity as signs of their imminent disappearance.

Contribution long abstract:

Tukanoan groups living on the Papurí River, located in Northwestern Amazonia, hold fast to the idea that they are disappearing. Only a couple decades ago, however, they considered themselves and were regarded by their neighbors as the most powerful of all the peoples of the broader Vaupés region. Far from usual factors, such as settler colonialism, epidemics, ecological damage, or evangelization, a rather unexpected process accounts for this sudden change: the rise of multiculturalism in Latin America.

This paper traces how the conceptual and moral apparatus of multiculturalism triggered radical changes in the Papurí at an existential level. I will show that with the ascent of affirmative cultural policies in Colombia came the descent of an entire life project, what locals call “civilization.” In a few decades, over a century of welcomed missionary and developmentalist intervention was brought to a halt, projects were abandoned and left to ruin, and Tukanoans encouraged to “go back to their traditions.” Overnight, moreover, these peoples witnessed the resignification of their lifestyle from “civilized” to “acculturated” and of their transformations from “progress” to “loss.”

By analyzing the journeys and uptake of these notions, it is possible to understand why several indigenous groups in the Papurí have developed extinction theories and have come to perceive themselves as being on the verge of their existence. Following categories like “culture loss” and “endangerment” offers troubling views on how multiculturalism’s hegemonic discourse on indigeneity has created the conditions for entire indigenous groups to live in fear of disappearing.

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Contribution short abstract:

Using a comparative perspective between the Amazon and Guinea, this paper explores indigenous politicization in the environmental crisis, analyzing how indigenous communities mobilize discourses to advance political and identity-based claims, as well as the resulting impact on power relations.

Contribution long abstract:

Over the past decades, the global environmental crisis has triggered a paradigm shift towards an ecological framework, reshaping international power dynamics and hierarchies around new concepts of nature, ecology, biodiversity, health, environment, and sustainability. In response, indigenous communities strategically mobilized and revitalized anthropological categories, including ontologies, shamanism, animism, cosmologies, and non-humans, forming a political discourse of opposition and resistance. This mobilization aligned indigenous claims with Western environmentalist policies and interests, granting them increased legitimacy on the international stage but also giving rise to neo-colonialist or green colonialist practices, such as the expulsion of indigenous communities from their territories or the prohibition of their traditional practices (hunting, slash-and-burn agriculture, logging) in the name of environmental protection.

Despite the growing political representation of indigenous communities in global environmental forums, a notable majority of representatives hail from the Amazonian and American regions, with African populations notably underrepresented. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study conducted in Guinea (West Africa), this paper explores the intersection of environmental crises, indigenous mobilization and politicization, and their impact on power dynamics. Employing a comparative perspective between indigenous communities in the Amazon and Guinea, the study investigates the various discourses employed by these communities to advance political and identity-based claims and analyzes the resulting impact on power relations. This exploration raises crucial questions about neo-colonialist practices within the environmentalist paradigm and underscores how this politicization tends to homogenize and essentialize indigenous communities and their practices, thereby rendering invisible power dynamics both between and within these communities.

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Contribution short abstract:

Responses to the category of indigeneity in Nepal include critical para-anthropological writings on their own culture by indigenous authors in hegemonic and subaltern idioms. These instance genealogies of intellectualism meriting scrutiny as they intersect with non-indigenous anthropology.

Contribution long abstract:

The rapid proliferation of concepts for indigeneity in Nepal at the turn of the last century coincided with the re-emergence of democracy, with programs of liberalisation, and consequently with a multiplication of counter-publics. Many researchers have recognised the conceptual force of indigeneity as deployed by ethnic activists for making political claims to rights and recognition. Yet, despite the numerous languages between which these concepts travel, and the different discursive modes by which they are deployed, there remains a tendency to dismiss the social scientific lexicon of indigenous intellectuals as a scholarly conceptual vocabulary "gone native" following growth in Nepal's international relations. By examining self-published writings on culture in one indigenous language (Nepal Bhasa, language of the Newar community), at the advent of Nepalese democracy (1951), its revival (1990), and through the ongoing post-constitution phase (2015-), another genealogy for indigenous para-anthropological writing will be proposed. This takes into consideration sequential developments in Newar indigenous intellectualism – as much where it builds upon previous norms of knowledge and authority as where it departs from them. The aim is to move beyond the overtly political instrumentalization of indigeneity; and instead, to consider attempts by indigenous authors to write culture, religion, civilisation, and heritage in their own terms, where language, concepts, and ways of knowing are constantly revised. Lastly, it will be asked how the non-indigenous anthropologist should approach the study of these texts, ethically and methodologically, thus revealing crucial differences between disciplinary projects, and clarifying the proper aims of a non-confessional anthropology.