Year of the World’s Indigenous People.”1 This was followed by the first “International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People” (1995–2004). Indigenous activists made use of these ten years to initiate a variety of activities, including resolving problems related to the rights to lands, the preservation of nature and protection of habitats, health and education issues, and the constitutional recognition of identity—in all parts of the world. The Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues was formed in 2000, and a UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous People was appointed in 2001, although the impact of these measures on UN policies was limited.2 Consequently, the UN declared 2005–14 as a second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, making the “integrity and dignity” of indigenous peoples across the world a goal, which was in turn crucial for growing indigenous activism at both the global and local level, re-fueling as it did the rights movement of indigenous peoples working for cooperation, dignity, and integrity. Amidst this mounting indigenous activism, indigeneity became “a global ethnoscape” (Appadurai 1996), which now serves as a powerful tool for political negotiations because the international recognition of indigeneity has created a political space for indigenous people across the world to press their claims and demands (see Gerharz 2012; Ghosh 2006).
These international developments in creating and developing legal instruments were supplemented by the rights-based and promotional activities of transnationally organized initiatives such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Forest People’s Movement, Survival International, Cultural Survival, and Rainforest Action Network, among others.3 Much of this transnational activism relates to global debates on environmentalism, both in the 1980s when the Green Movement gained momentum and, more recently, in relation to the climate change discourse. At the same time, the relative success of indigenous activists in lobbying for their goals by relating them to environmental issues has convinced other activists that it is a strategy worth following (Baviskar 2006). Such a strategy therefore holds enormous potential for claims articulated in various political domains. While some scholars are skeptical about an essential affinity between the environment and indigenous people (e.g., Linkenbach 2004), others strongly favor the idea that indigenous people are the best caretakers of environmental and natural resources (see Laungaramsri 2002). Moreover, Shalini Randeria (2003) demonstrates that the focus on environmentalism might lead to new strategic alliances with other civil society actors.
Indigeneity as an Academic Concept
Among activists, indigeneity is commonly defined by referring to collectives of people who believe that they share specific historical roots and experiences that are closely tied to certain territories, specific ethnic traits and linguistic autonomy, as well as specific customs, institutions, worldviews, and a characteristic way of life. Researchers seeking to document the project of indigenous identity politics have supported these activist claims with their academic analyses. With a tendency to embark on ethnographic naturalism, however, these perspectives have dismissed the essentialist connotations entailed in the notion of “indigenous peoples.” Adam Kuper’s much-cited article “The Return of the Native” (2003) strongly criticizes the entire idea of indigeneity as a postcolonial reproduction of what Andre Béteille calls “the re-emergence of primitivity” (see also Béteille 1998). These critical voices have reminded us that research on indigenous peoples entails several ethical and analytical dilemmas that need to be explicitly addressed. According to Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 1), “The word itself, ‘research,’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful.” However, ethnographers undertaking intensive research on indigenous peoples during the last couple of decades have been more sensitive to the colonial past in dealing with indigeneity and formerly colonized peoples, and also more politically conscious about the politics of representation (see Bal 2007; Hodgson 2011; Shah 2010).
A different path out of the impasse has been chosen by Kay Warren and Jean Jackson (2003). Based on their observation that, in order to represent indigeneity to make their claims, activists have adopted the notion of culture as a concept to depict commonality among particular groups and thus embarked on strategic essentialism, Warren and Jackson draw a sharp distinction between the culture concept applied by activists and the perspective of the researcher. Their task is not to reproduce the essentializing view of culture by isolating cultural practices that are used as markers of identity, but to examine “the ways essences are constructed in practice and disputed in political rhetoric” (ibid.: 9). Acknowledging that indigeneity has become a powerful tool in identity politics thus opens an analytical perspective academics have from the very beginning been trying to find a “middle point” between the perspectives of activists and an essentialist framework of categorical approaches in understanding the concept of indigeneity (see Barnard 2006; Merlan 2009).
One should, however, also be aware that for some decades now, “indigeneity” has been discussed in various academic disciplines, under varying perspectives, and sometimes detached from identity politics and the sociopolitical framework that has come to dominate the social scientific discussions of the concept in many research fields. In the field of psychology, for example, so-called “indigenous psychology” has taken the form of a sub-discipline with a growing number of representative and influential scholars worldwide. Although this academic movement’s beginnings and goals can quite easily be traced back to the beginnings of postcolonial studies, psychological research is less interested in the potential political nature of the sub-discipline’s origins; rather, its interest focuses on the question of whether there are psychological traits, pathologies, intervention strategies, therapies, and other psychologically relevant phenomena, including theories and methods, that—for good reasons—can be understood as indigenous features of very specific groups with very specific histories and their very own ways of experiencing, thinking, feeling, and behaving (Chakkarath 2012, 2013). Similar questions have been raised and investigated in other fields, such as the educational sciences (Snively and Corsiglia 2001; Verran 2001), sociology (Khoury and Khoury 2013; Morgan 1997), within the discourse on postcolonialism (Baber 2002), or archaeology (Bruchac, Hart, and Wobst 2010), to name just a few. One of the main queries that resonates from all of these concerns with the human psyche and so-called indigenous science approaches is the crucial academic question of whether our scientific theories can claim universal validity unless they have successfully met the challenges embedded in and conveyed by the concept of indigeneity.
Since questions like these are fundamental questions within the general philosophy of science, we should be cautious when merely treating these issues as simple offshoots of the postcolonial discourse, identity politics, and their sociohistorical background. This is another important reason why the contributions to this book attempt to understand indigeneity as an academic perspective beyond political and cultural binaries, while paying particular attention to the context that has been shaped in relation to manifold discourses and their various manifestations.
From Rights to Dignity
The last four decades of indigenous activism can be summarized as the era of movements, struggles for international recognition of identity, and campaigns for rights to lands, forest, natural resources, and habitats—on both local and global scales. Following the two International Decades of the World’s Indigenous People (1995–2004 and 2005–14), and the continuing annual International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (9 August), indigenous peoples have gained the support of the international community and human rights bodies, as well as national-level civil society organizations. In this process, the rights of indigenous peoples have been established by international legal protections; however, at the country level, many indigenous peoples are still waiting for official recognition. Currently, the futures of indigenous people lie with the state of dignity they look to gain at both local and
