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From the May 2003 Anthropology News

Representations of Indigenousness

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina
U Autónoma de Yucatán

Anthropology and anthropologists everywhere are traversing difficult waters. The current world situation is making enemies out of peoples and countries that used to be on friendly terms. In the meantime, anthropologists continue to make fieldwork and the creation of rapport with locals our privileged methodological principle. Theoretically, we tend to look at events through multiple angles, without assuming that any specific group of people owns the Truth. Rather, we look at the complexity of situations—the dynamic relationships between the different actors. Just how is “Truth” produced, circulated, contested, transformed in particular times and places?
Still, the Darkness in El Dorado controversy and the resulting El Dorado Task Force report have made it clear that we, as a discipline, need to reflect constantly on both the academic and the human dimensions of our work. Many things have changed since the “golden age” of anthropology, when Malinowski, Boas and Radcliffe-Brown could see themselves as detached scientists whose main duty was to contribute to the study of (hu)mankind. We are beginning to find ourselves constantly torn between the political interests of local people and our own academic objectives. Furthermore, as multi-sited ethnography becomes an increasingly established methodological principle, we are being called upon to support the diverse, and often conflicting, purposes of local groups at our field locations.

A Saami, with a baby reindeer (the Saami have traditionally been reindeer herders), poses with a New Zealand tourist at an outdoor hertiage center in Nordkapp, Norway.

Choosing one local side over others, or trying to understand and negotiate differences between the two, is not as easy as it would have once seemed. For over two decades now, we have been deconstructing the “objective” pretensions of our discipline while deconstructing, along the way, most tenets of local thought. We have come to see local knowledge and worldview, including those in our own societies, as particular ways to construct the world and create meaning out of arbitrary, albeit historically influenced, bits of information and memory, all heavily laden with power relations. Can we continue to deconstruct local truths while we are asked to espouse locals’ positions on key issues? Are we to support notions of authenticity while we analyze the arbitrary basis on which it is established? How can we enter a candid dialogue with local and trans-local activists?

Construing Indigenous Peoples
I have proposed elsewhere (“Postcolonial Sites and Markets,” TAMARA: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science 1(3):68-79, 2001) that indigenous peoples are being constructed (or rather construed) through a series of misrepresentations:

That they are all more or less the same, because their structural situation as minority populations has been naturalized, turning them all into representatives of a single type of people, different from the dominant majority. This perception includes the notion that all indigenous persons are direct descendants from pre-European occupation populations, and they have preserved their cultural integrity though the centuries. This is a denial of their history, and it results in the figurative positioning of indigenous populations in the past, rather than in the present we all inhabit (see J Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology makes its Object, 1983).

That they are inherently good and incapable of evil. They are seen as passive victims of evil social forces they cannot control and against which they need protection. This is why, for example, it was inconceivable for the Mexican government to believe that Chiapas peasants could rebel on their own, without input from “external agitators.”

That they are natural ecologists. They are thought to possess ancient secrets about nature, which tie them to the earth and all forms of life, even if they have been urban dwellers for generations.

That they live in harmony among themselves and others. It seems, therefore, incomprehensible that they may, like others, disagree among themselves. Because of this, when there is factionalism or internal strife, it has to be hidden from the public, lest the indigenous group in question loses its funding, or the particular community fails to draw support from the wider public.

Under these politics of misrepresentation, ethnography becomes complicated. Since the image of indigenous communities as oases of social and natural harmony is fragile and not susceptible to close scrutiny by the general public, anthropologists have to be very careful about what we say and publish about these communities. As indigenous peoples occupy the lower rungs of the global social ladder and frequently must rely upon resources from others, deconstructing this image without replacing it with something positive and constructive can be detrimental to the group in question, and to our discipline’s reputation among these and other groups. As anthropologists often side with social activists, especially regarding the interests of local minorities, this is, of course, a concern. Indigenous activists are working to come to terms with hegemonic discourses on indigenous populations. Some of them are trying to build images of local identity based on one or several of the forms of misrepresentation I have outlined.

A Moroccan lets a Norwegian tourist pose with him and the snake he charms for onlookers on a street in Tangier.

Pan-Indian movements everywhere are relying on those representations to construct their own identity politics. Their leaders are using them in the construction of representational narratives based on the same premises that turn them into representatives of the past in our present. And they want our help to construct these new identities. What does this all mean? Are we expected to be responsible first to our discipline and only second to the people we work with in the field, or is it the other way around? Not all people in “the field” feel the same way. So, should we support those leaders who are likely to be successful in drawing attention and support to local causes? Current international legislation on indigenous rights favors collective over individual rights. In this context it becomes complicated, for example, to denounce violence against women or children in indigenous communities, since doing so would imply a breach of what Michael Herzfeld calls “cultural intimacy” (Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State, 1997).
The Darkness in El Dorado controversy has put the question on the table in a rather blunt way: How might we both serve our discipline and the communities with whom we work? To whom are we primarily responsible? If the communities we work with are divided and undergoing conflict, should we take sides? This issue has filled the pages of the AN for the last two years (see all AN issues since November 2000 to date!). Today, in these turbulent times, we can even rephrase it: how do we meet our obligations to our own communities (familial, disciplinary, national, transnational) and those of the people with whom we work? How are these linked, traversed, and, at times, at odds? What should we do when they are at odds? How do we inform our choices? Oftentimes these questions have been framed in “either-or” ways. Can we find fair and peaceful “but-and” ways to address them? These choices are not always self-evident, and they all imply a great deal of self-questioning and thought on each anthropologist’s part. May we continue to have a fruitful and enlightening AN dialogue on these questions.

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina is the AN Contributing Editor to the Society for Latin American Anthropology.

Speaking Truth to Power

Beth A Conklin
Vanderbilt U

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
Speaking truth to power requires having a credible voice. Our first obligation is to accuracy in our research and writing. In pragmatic political terms, accurate hard data are some of the most powerful resources anthropologists can contribute to indigenous struggles.

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
Another role for socially engaged, theoretically grounded anthropology is to support indigenous auto-critique—internal debates about rethinking local cultural practices. Indigenous women’s organizations in particular are increasingly vocal in criticizing cultural practices that hurt women and children. Always there is tension between pressures for internal change and pressures to present a united front, but silence in the name of relativism and static traditional culture is, again, both wrong and a political liability, more fodder for critics to denigrate native cultures. Brazilian politicians, for example, have used claims about the cultural roots of Yanomami violence against women this way. When indigenous individuals speak truth to abuses of power within their own societies, anthropologists should help them be heard.

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
Over the past century, anthropology’s founding theoretical position of cultural relativism gradually moved toward the center of public awareness. At the beginning of this century, our evolving understandings of culture and identity may be some of the more useful ideas we can offer. The challenge is to recover the disciplinary self-confidence to feel we have something coherent to say; find clear ways to talk about culture, tradition and identity that get past reifying essentialisms; and use our ethnographic skills to convey and legitimize the dynamism of native peoples’ efforts to carve out new political, cultural and social spaces for being indigenous in 21st century ways.

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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