Paper short abstract:

Indigenous peoples are framed as environmental stewards of global natural heritage in current neoliberal conjuncture of extractivism and multiculturalism. This presentation discusses the capacity of multimodal ethnographic engagements for creating 'spaces' of contestation in capitalist frontiers.

Paper long abstract:

The current globally circulating narratives and mediations of indigenous peoples as environmental stewards bring together two 'ideals' around which utopian (and dystopian) scenarios are organized in environmental governance (Igoe 2005). One provides a 'planetary vision' of 'Spaceship Earth' in long-durée, geological time, where the future of humanity as a global community depends on saving its terrestrial/ecological support system (Nugent 1994, Escobar 1996). The other one one projects a 'multicultural vision' of this Spaceship Earth, where Indigenous or tribal peoples with rights to culture - but not necessarily to territory or autonomy (Neizen 2003) are imagined as the stewards of nature 'rooted' in place and frozen in time, occupying the colonial and racial slot that needs to be protected against capitalism, development and the West (Li 2000). These visions of past, present and future of ecological and cultural survival 'contain' contradictory political enframings of differently situated actors and institutions, seeking to render 'nature' and 'indigeneity' visible in particular ways, in current conjuctural 'moment' (cf. Hall) of entanglement of nature and culture with capitalist commodity logics and extactivism. How can we 'contextualize' and 'capture' the multiplicity of 'frictions' (Tsing 2004) and imagine 'collaborative encounters' (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Gullamon 2019) without undermining local struggles and recreating colonial archives? This paper will focus on different web and video-based mediations of 'authentic', traditional' and 'indigenous' Bedik (menik-speaking) communities in South-Eastern Senegal, analyzing their finctionalized 'trutful' stories curated for international audiences, and strategies and forms of multimodal anthropology that can open spaces for creative invention.