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| From the October 2003
Anthropology News
Speaking Truth to Power Beth A Conklin Engaged anthropology is about speaking truth to power. Vargas-Cetina’s commentary in the May AN outlines the complexities of locating truth and untangling cross-cutting commitments in the power-laden contexts of indigenous advocacy. The terrain is slippery, full of points where the priorities of academics and activists diverge. As she observes, these are often posed as “either/or” questions. But there are places where anthropological principles and theoretical insights coincide with the needs of indigenous advocacy. We can start to sort out these sticky issues by locating points where professional ethics and political effectiveness converge. Credibility When opponents of indigenous rights misrepresent people we work with, or misuse our writings to justify policies harmful to them, we have the responsibility to denounce this forcefully and publicly. This point has been made repeatedly over the years by ABA, the Brazilian Anthropological Association, and by a host of commentators on the Darkness in El Dorado controversies. But what should we do when misrepresentations are used to promote indigenous interests? Vargas-Cetina describes strategic “politics of misrepresentation” that capitalize on sympathetic stereotypes of native people as innocent, virtuous, vulnerable, and victimized, living in harmony with the earth and others. This neo-“noble savage” imagery has great popular appeal and considerable political utility. In South America, many NGOs have used it to attract media attention and generate international pressure to win a number of concrete gains and victories for native causes. Do we have the same obligation to speak out against positive stereotypes that oversimplify the diversity and complexity of native communities’ lives and concerns? Power is a relevant variable here. The tone of voice in which we speak should calibrate to the degree of harm at stake. In the hands of politicians, journalists, and policymakers, the power of the state transforms biased representations of indigenous cultures into weapons requiring forceful public denunciation. In the hands of pro-indigenous activists, strategic misrepresentations seldom carry such negative power; they are tools, not weapons. Uncomfortable as it may feel to see native communities portrayed as paragons of harmony and ecological sensitivity when local realities are otherwise, I think most anthropologists would agree this is an arena where we can choose our battles. If using our work to empower marginalized people is a goal of engaged anthropology, does this mean we should tailor our research agendas and writings to produce the images that certain activists or advocacy groups want? Again, ethics and efficacy converge: it’s wrong, and in the long run, it doesn’t work. Distorted claims inevitably backfire when the gap between rhetoric and reality is revealed. This has happened time and again in Brazil and elsewhere, where hostile journalists and politicians delight in exposés of Indian chiefs who talk the talk of eco-sensitivity but enrich themselves selling off timber and mineral resources. Idealized (mis)representations are shaky ground on which to stake indigenous rights claims. Rather than distort our research to support political agendas, a stronger contribution is to help indigenous politics escape the “noble savage slot” trap. If we really believe our constructivist insights that strategic presentations of self-identity are not just hypocrisy; that performance does not equal fraud; that learning to communicate in the language of foreign discourses (ecology, human rights) is smart and necessary, not “inauthentic,” then we need to find clearer ways to communicate this to the public. This is what indigenous activists themselves are working on. At least in South America, few if any native leaders wallow in exoticism and primitive nobility. Instead, they are trying, in a myriad of ways, to expand outsiders’ notions of who native people are and what they want and need. By demonstrating sophisticated abilities to communicate through the languages of citizenship, ecology and human rights; by putting video, email and Internet technologies to new uses; by calling attention to native people in cities, shantytowns, and other “invisible” sites; and by articulating innovative critiques of political economy and “non-indigenous” issues such as NAFTA and global warming, activists are staking claims to new kinds of indigenous global citizenship. Efforts to expand understandings of “indigenousness” recall how, in the 1980s-90s, Western environmentalism was challenged, revised, and expanded to shift from “conservation” focused on preserving flora and fauna to “sustainable development” recognizing local peoples’ rights to use environmental resources. That change came about partly because researchers produced data demonstrating the flaws in orthodox conservation and development models and the sustainability of native resource management practices. Together with advocacy groups, they managed to communicate new scientific understandings in terms policymakers and the public grasped. Something similar needs to happen with popular understandings of “indigenousness.” Support Indigenous Auto-Critique Isn’t it a contradiction to promote both cultural relativism and cultural critique (one of the either-or dilemmas Vargas-Cetina poses)? In Public Anthropology’s roundtable discussions on the Darkness in El Dorado controversies, Bruce Albert, who works with the Yanomami, offered a useful framework: indigenous people who are defended in terms of universal human rights should be encouraged to acknowledge such principles within their own society. Yanomami, he says, are beginning to discuss the treatment of women and children. Socially engaged anthropologists, Albert argues, can and should promote cultural relativism and affirm principles of universal human rights. Culture and Identity Beth Conklin has worked with native people in the Brazilian Amazon since 1985. Her most recent article on indigenous rights politics appeared in American Anthropologist 24(4), December 2002.
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