between indigeneity and belonging is reworked and modified in translocal and transnational communicative and interactive processes. Consequently, these concepts intersect with local, national, and global sociopolitical debates and are confronted with the challenges posed to indigenous aspirations by the neoliberal agenda of nation-states and their concerns with sovereignty. Therefore, apart from being of academic interest, the politics of indigeneity are significant in the context of nation-building, the accommodation of minority rights, neoliberal policy reforms, and political debates in growing rights activism at a global scale. Given these contexts, how should we address indigeneity on the move in its various manifestations at different levels? What are the challenges that indigenous peoples across the world face in the interface between local, nationalist rhetoric and global, political dynamics? How are these challenges crucial for indigenous people living in different regions across the globe? These are the leading questions, in relation to national and transnational indigenous activism, that this book seeks to address, with the aim of shaping a potential framework to better understand the various manifestations of indigeneity.
Apart from some very good ethnographies on indigenous issues published across the world, there exist various edited volumes on indigeneity, on the indigenous dynamics of translocal politics, and on indigenous cosmopolitanism (see, e.g., Cadena and Starn 2007; Dev, Kelkar, and Walter 2004; Forte 2010; Karlsson and Subba 2006; Rycroft and Dasgupta 2011; Venkateswar and Hughes 2011), which focus mainly on the present discourse on indigeneity and the struggles of indigenous people with the diverse issues they experience, in the context of a recurrent and rapidly transforming socioeconomic and political reality. These collections portray the present situation as a consequence of the past, where indigenous people were thought of as a “backward human race,” this category being produced in colonial scholarship on civilization in the mid nineteenth century. However, the situation has now considerably—though not completely—changed; indigenous peoples receive global attention, and their rights are acknowledged in different international forums. Indigenous people represent themselves at every level of society—locally, nationally, regionally, and globally—which gives birth to potentially new, as well as problematic, dimensions of the concept of both indigeneity itself and concurrent identity politics. This book focuses on “indigeneity on the move” with a critical assessment of local, translocal, and transnational figurations, and their relevance to the notions of indigeneity and indigenous activism, based on empirically informed analyses of past experiences and present challenges.
Indigeneity, Identity Politics, and Nation-States
The idea of indigeneity as a political resource in identity politics, referring to individual and collective attachment to a particular place, culture, and nation, is not a new phenomenon. It intersects with local, national, and global sociopolitical debates following the framework of “us” versus “them” in various contexts. The politics of nationalism, and that of naming and categorizing in postcolonial states, along with developmental interventions and displacements and, more recently, certain states’ neoliberal agendas, have seen indigenous activists and those sympathetic to indigenous claims fight for legal and constitutional recognition within the political space of particular nation-states. Such recognition is usually framed in the language of rights (Cowan 2001; Gellner 2011) and relates to ideals of justice, equity, development, and democracy.
Ethnographies from all over the world have shown that the negotiations between indigenous activists and governments are framed within very different discourses, which differ from region to region and from one country to another. For instance, in the Americas, the discourse has been determined by images of indigenous people as the victims of settler colonialism, while in postcolonial states in South and Southeast Asia it involves cultural politics and the exclusionary policies of nation-building and state formation. In many countries, development programs directed towards economic growth at the cost of indigenous people and their habitats have given activists grounds to criticize development both as a discourse and as a set of practices (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994; Ziai 2013). Economic, political, and social marginalization have fostered the emergence of new, pioneering indigenous movements, which have been (partly) successful in introducing policy reforms and formulating alternative visions of society (e.g., Esteva and Prakash 1998; Laurie, Andolina, and Radcliffe 2005). Taking up a notion of indigeneity that is strongly linked with environmentalism and that line of activism, some movements have produced new visions for development, and new concrete versions thereof, such as the Buen Vivir initiative (see Ruttenberg 2013; Villalba 2013). Some of these activist movements have become particularly successful in claiming access to state resources, as the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador show (see Molyneux and Thomson 2011).
Whereas definitions of indigenous people in the Americas have been largely undisputed, activists in many parts of Africa and Asia, in contrast, have faced more difficulties because of different historical backgrounds or ethnic settings. Many Asian and African states refrain from acknowledging indigenous people as a category of citizens who are eligible for special rights and benefits on the basis of being oppressed (Gerharz 2014; Hodgson 2011; Pelican 2009). The arguments employed by these governments often rely on an interpretation of the notion of indigenous people that relates to specifics of the American populations—for example, the exposure to a colonialist force and its repercussions. At the same time, activists draw upon globalized notions of indigeneity to legitimize their claims. Paradoxically, both of these strategies can be interpreted as being directly related to globalization, in the sense of deterritorialization, which has opened up new avenues for denationalization and the permeability of boundaries, and therefore paves the way for universalist claims, such as human rights or collective rights pertaining to the specific conditions assigned to the indigenous “way of life.” In this sense, the emergence of indigenous activism can be regarded as a challenge to the modernization efforts of nation-states (Clifford 2013). However, the rising number of incidents of collective violence can also be traced back to growing pressure from globaliz-ing forces, which threatens nationalist ideals of cultural purity within nation-states and leads to the reassertion of us/them constructions in ethnic terms (Appadurai 2006). Minorities with cultural differences thus become a problem because they challenge, from the statist perspective, the national narratives of social cohesion, solidarity, and homogeneity. In stark contrast to the universalist claims that unfold in transnational social spaces, we witness the recurrence of nationalist claims to social and cultural homogeneity.
Indigeneity as a Subject of Global Policy
Whereas indigeneity remains a highly contested concept in many countries with respect to the ideas of modern nation-states, a global discourse with more or less transnationally standardized meanings and connotations has emerged, especially following the support of international organizations with measures such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, the definition by the World Bank, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). These imply the right to self-identification and self-definition, for example, but also offer guarantees such as freedom from oppression, as well as enshrining a special relationship between indigenous people and their land, and seeing mobility as a way of life. Debates on indigeneity and indigenous activism have shown a remarkable continuity throughout recent decades and have led to “place-making” at the level of the United Nations (Muehlebach 2001). In the early 1980s, the United Nations had already started to respond to the claims of indigenous activists, who highlighted the marginalization of so-called indigenous peoples. With the formation of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP), in 1982, struggles for equality that had been taking place in several nation-states around the world gained global recognition, and regular meetings within the UN also encouraged local civil society groups and rights organizations to expand their networks beyond the national space by building connections with transnational indigenous activism. These alternate, global institutionalizations were accompanied by an increasing interest from the ILO, which adopted the first international legal mechanism for the protection of indigenous peoples in 1989, in the form of the ILO Convention 169.
Due to the continuous efforts of the WGIP to raise the concerns of indigenous people, the UN Human Rights
