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.