From the November 2004 Anthropology News

Michelle Bigenho and Daniel Goldstein, Contributing Editors

As 2004 draws to a close, we feature a column that considers the decade of indigenous people.
Who Is Indigenous?

By: Andrew Canessa (U Essex)

The year 2004 has marked the end of the UN Decade for Indigenous People. There can be no doubt that over this period the language of indigeneity has leaped to center-stage. The popular overthrow of Bolivia’s president in October 2003, which has been described widely as “an indigenous revolt” (despite being far more complex than the phrase would imply), is one recent example. Indi-geneity is, moreover, not only a public issue in settler states such as Australia or the Americas; groups such as the Dalits in India and San in South Africa have found it politically useful to organize around an indigenous identity. Those who are “indigenous” today may have been marginalized previously under terms of class, caste, means of subsistence or geographical distance from metropolitan centers. The increasing profile of indigeneity is a product of people organizing around an indigenous identity for greater political effect, as well as international agencies identifying and addressing indigenous peoples and issues; the two processes are, of course, mutually reinforcing.

Agencies such as the UN and the International Labour Organization (ILO) as well as multilateral aid organizations such as the World Bank have affected the ways that people articulate their political aspirations. The ILO’s declaration on indigenous rights (ILO 169) has been instrumental in allowing marginalized peoples to pressure national governments to recognize and address their concerns, often with some success. Within development aid initiatives, the World Bank focuses on indigenous people because in many countries these are the poorest and most marginalized populations; these initiatives have an impact on national governments’ recognition of indigenous peoples as the former seek to attract money for “ethno-development.”

Indigeneity is definitely “in,” but who is indigenous? This is not only an issue in places such as Africa and Asia, where indigenous people may sometimes have a shorter historical presence in a given territory than their neighbors, but also in the Americas where indigeneity is seemingly less ambiguous. In the US the federal government recognizes and regulates indigenous identity through what is essentially a “blood quantum” criterion; Latin American governments make no such formal definition and may not even ask a question on ethnicity in their national censuses. The agencies mentioned above (and they are followed by many others) have broad definitions of indigeneity but all conclude that, ultimately, indigenous people are those who define themselves as indigenous people.

This raises a number of questions that are of more than passing academic interest. The colonial and postcolonial history of Latin America has witnessed many indigenous people joining the ranks of mixed or mestizo society as a consequence of migration and upward social mobility. Could this process be reversed as being indigenous becomes a positive status that may be economically advantageous?

It is worth remembering that indigeneity is a Western concept. My own research among Aymara-speaking highland peasants who follow a “traditional” lifestyle shows that people who might be unambiguously “indigenous” from an outside perspective may eschew any identification with indigeneity or even an Aymara ethnicity. This is not to say that they do not systematically distinguish themselves from dominant social groups: they do, but these differences are not easily mapped onto categories of indigeneity or even ethnicity.

At the end of the UN Decade for Indigenous People, indigeneity has manifestly become a major political discourse in many countries and indeed internationally. The next decade will surely see indigeneity contested, challenged and perhaps contained—a set of processes in which anthropologists will doubtless be involved.

Please send comments and items of interest to Michelle Bigenho at mbigenho@hampshire.edu or Daniel Goldstein at dgoldstein@holycross.edu.