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| From the November 2003
Anthropology News
Who are “We” and is that Dangerous for “Them”? On Representations of Indigenousness
Les Field Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, in her May AN article on “Representations of Indigenousness,” simultaneously expresses support for indigenous peoples’ struggles, as well as succinctly critiques several facets of increasingly hegemonic representations of indigenous identity. Anthropologists, Vargas-Cetina suggests, should seriously consider not being complicit with these representations, and not only because scholarly research tends to undermine the claims such representations make. In her words, these claims misrepresent the complexity of indigenous peoples’ current social problems and needs. On the other hand, delegitimating these claims, she admits, threatens indigenous peoples’ movements because the public at large tends to only understand indigenous identities within the scope of these misrepresentations. Moreover, indigenous activists themselves make use of these misrepresentations in order to pursue political goals. Under such complex circumstances, Vargas-Cetina asks whether anthropologists should help indigenous activists, and how “we” anthropologists can support indigenous rights. Should or can we take sides in cases where indigenous peoples are opposed to one another, or, even more commonly, violence and abuse are occurring within indigenous communities? Uncomplicated Dualism Elsewhere, I have explored how different sorts of non-indigenous scholars and indigenous intellectuals in Native North America have at times allied over, and at other points struggled against one another with respect to the academic and strategic uses of both essentialism and constructionism. At this point in time, I believe the productive limits to these terms of debate have already been reached. Anthropological and indigenous understandings of identity can conceivably be reconciled on another terrain: through common understandings about both the constructedness (even contrivedness), as well as the relative validity of all—not just indigenous—identities. Ultimately, it is not the constructedness of any identity that is in question, but how powerful that construction is in military, economic, and political terms, and therefore how threatening the deconstruction of those identities, by anthropologists for example, could be. A reconciliation between anthropologists and indigenous scholars/intellectuals/ leaders could, by contrast, facilitate the use of constructionist analysis of indigenous history and culture in certain circumstances, while in other circumstances anthropologists could make progress in valorizing indigenous concepts of historical and spiritual knowledge. Situating anthropological knowledge and ethnographic work in a few ways can avoid replicating the chimera of anthropologists wielding dangerous deconstructions over misconceived indigenous essentialisms. These suggestions help make explicit the false unity of the anthropological “we,” as well as address Vargas-Cetina’s questions. Situating Anthropological Work In Indian Country, USA, these power relations are never more than one Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office away. I have been working with unrecognized tribes in California for the last decade, for whom anthropology has historically functioned as a crucially important means by which they have been disenfranchised and, in the Argentinean sense of the word, disappeared. The BIA, and the corps of professional anthropologists who work for the Branch of Acknowledgement Research, wield an “official anthropology” over the fate of unrecognized tribes, insofar as the ways these anthropologists mobilize knowledge, and sometimes even more importantly, the ways they dismiss the importance of certain kinds of knowledge about unrecognized peoples, has the power to reproduce and reify the current status of these peoples. By contrast, the anthropology I utilize in helping unrecognized tribes to assemble their federal acknowledgement petitions must challenge, indeed deconstruct, the premises of official knowledge about unrecognized tribes. I try to do this work without recourse to essentialized concepts of indigenous identity, yet because any identity is constructed, I must accept at least a core essentialized precept of peoplehood. The mixture of deconstructive work and affirmation of peoplehood in my work has not been universally well received by all Native intellectuals in California, but that is neither possible nor my intention. My representations of identity are geared towards particular goals and outcomes.
Likewise, Native intellectuals within and outside academic circles increasingly practice and deploy anthropological tools for particular tribal and community goals. These goals may be linked to linguistic research, as in the proliferating movement to revitalize California Indian languages, or to ethnographic work in the case of Nasa political leadership in Cauca, Colombia (which Joanne Rappaport in particular has elaborated), or to ethnohistorical and archaeological research I have observed in California and Ecuador, in the latter case by indigenous anthropologists from the national Indian confederation, CONAIE. The development of anthropologies organic to indigenous communities, and their opposition to “official anthropologies” further corrodes the concept of “we” in relation to the representation of indigenousness. When and if indigenous movements in Latin America make even limited progress towards territorial revindication, constitutional rights, and cultural enfranchisement, Latin American governments may grow increasingly concerned to identify, document, and police who is and is not “legitimately” Indian. At that point, an official anthropology much like the one that has existed in the US for well over a century may be summoned to do this work, and the split between anthropologists who are thusly empowered and those who are not. In that sense, the so-called “anthropological community” invoked at the AAA and other national and international meetings could be seen as a kind of false consciousness that obscures the deep cleavages among anthropologists concerning power and its deployments in indigenous and other communities. As Vargas-Cetina observed, there are significant misconstruals involved in representing indigenous peoples as inherently good, or as ecological saints, or as “peaceful people.” But as I have argued, engaging with these misconstruals demands that anthropologists query their own motives and the effects of their work in advance, rather than conceiving themselves as simply wielders of dangerous truths. In Nicaragua, my analysis of the inextricable intertwining of mestizo and indigenous identities proved useful to at least one Indian leader, which was my intention. Nonetheless, mestizaje is a discourse far less threatening to Native communities in Nicaragua, where so far, at least, no government has deployed an official anthropology to certify who is and is not allowed to call themselves Indian. In other circumstances, the work I did in Nicaragua may well have posed a threat to some individuals and groups, and it would have been incumbent upon me to re-examine my motives, and the effects my work could have had. To summarize, like Vargas-Cetina, I favor looking deeply into the relationships between anthropologists, anthropology, and indigenous communities, past and present, in order to evaluate what, in Lenin’s succinct words, is to be done. There can be no blanket statement about the possibilities or exigencies facing anthropologists’ relations with indigenous communities and leaders, because supporting indigenous movements, or particular segments of indigenous communities will inevitably be complex and specific in each case. Just as “we” anthropologists are not really much of an “us,” indigenous peoples can hardly be boiled down to a “them.” Les Field has worked with indigenous communities in Nicaragua, Colombia and Ecuador, and with federally recognized and unacknowledged tribes in California. Abalone Tales, based on current research, is forthcoming from the University of California Press. |
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