2014). Uday Chandra in Chapter 9 discusses the case of Maoists in Jharkhand, India, to illustrate relations between indigeneity and the state. He argues that the Communist Party of India (Maoist), in both its own words and those of its critics, is fighting a revolutionary guerrilla war to overthrow the bourgeois state in India. Yet everyday local realities in their tribal bases show Maoist cadres making claims on the state to raise minimum wages, implement new forest laws, and ensure the timely payment of rural employment guarantee funds. Since 2009, Maoist factions and splinter groups have also routinely campaigned for adivasi political parties, such as the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), and have even begun contesting state and panchayat elections in scheduled tribe constituencies. By participating in the electoral arena, are Maoist rebels abandoning their radical political project in favor of indigenous politics? Or does the agenda for radical social change spill over into “revisionist” avenues such as elections? To explain this apparently anomalous state of affairs, Chandra proposes the notion of “radical revisionism,” encompassing political practices that work within existing democratic structures but push them to the hilt and seek to transform them from below, in the hope of radical democratic futures. He draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in central and southern Jharkhand to shed light on the everyday tactics and maneuvers of adivasi youth, who, as radical revisionists in Khunti and West Singhbhum districts, abandon the party line and, paradoxically, accentuate the modern state-making process in the tribal margins of modern India. In particular, Chandra focuses on how new political subjectivities, as well as new notions of democratic citizenship, community, and leadership, emerge on the ground.
Within the framework of state–indigeneity relations, Wolfgang Gabbert discusses in Chapter 10 how, since the 1980s, constitutions in several Latin American countries have been reformed to acknowledge the multicultural and ethnically diverse character of the nations and to recognize existing indigenous legal and political practices. Thus, a first step in creating a more accessible and more adequate legal system has been taken. However, these legal reforms touch on a number of practical and theoretical issues related to such fundamentals of social anthropology as the reification of culture and tradition. Gabbert discusses four of these topics: the political fragmentation of the indigenous populations; their cultural heterogeneity; the relationship between law and social structure; and the incidence of power relations in customary law. He argues that much of the current debate on the recognition of so-called indigenous customary law applies to an earlier model of the nation-state, thereby running the risk of fostering new forms of cultural homogenization and sustaining the current domination by the state over indigenous groups.
Philipp Zehmisch discusses the issue of state and non-state relations in Chapter 11 in relation to the idea of indigeneity, by arguing that discourses, definitions, and practices relating to indigeneity have shifted across time, spaces, and contexts. He understands the term as contingent upon the relationship between the state and non-state actors. Zehmisch captures indigeneity as a dialectical process between essentialist classifications of indigenous groups by authorities, and creative appropriations of such categories by indigenous people themselves. His ethnographic example, the Andaman Islands, serves to demonstrate the trajectory of the notion of indigeneity. Here, popular definitions, representations, and discourses of the British Empire, the Indian nation-state, and the global sphere intersect. The shifting notions are scrutinized by looking at state policies and indigenous–settler dynamics. He highlights how specific spatial arrangements and contact scenarios were interpreted, explained, and described through references to indigeneity. In the Andamans, colonial notions of “savagery” were indicative of indigenous warfare and co-optation at the frontier; they justified the taming and civilizing of “primitive” islanders and their forests through the settling of convicts and “criminal tribes” from the Indian subcontinent. The transformation of ecological “wilderness” into ordered settler colony spaces was executed by “aboriginal” forest laborers: adivasi migrants from Chota Nagpur, the Ranchis, and the Karen, a Burmese “hill tribe.” After independence, anthropologically informed “tribal” governance led to protection acts, reserve zones, and welfare policies. Parallel to that, forestry, infrastructure development, and migrations degraded indigenous resources and led to violence. More recently, transnational, national, and local civil society actors have appropriated the notion of indigeneity. Conservationists and indigenous activists have promoted their own “ecologically noble savage” agenda when involved in conflicts with the government about the isolation of indigenous peoples; in contrast, local politicians advocate the “mainstreaming” of backward “junglees.” Beyond that, Ranchi elites are fighting for official recognition of their indigenous status, while the majority of adivasi peoples are threatened by eviction due to environmental governance. Such conflicting and fluid characteristics appear to be essential elements of indigenous futures.
Indigenous Knowledge and Its Futures
The idea of indigeneity is quite often discussed within the paradigm of indigenous knowledge, as indigenous peoples have for generations been effectively practicing a particular type of knowledge system that is now recognized as eco-friendlier, more sustainable, and more productive than the modern Westernized developmentalist paradigm (see Sillitoe 1998). Therefore, a deeper understanding of the significance of indigenous knowledge is important to comprehend indigeneity on the move. As part of this debate, the ideas and roles of indigenous medicines have appeared as substitutes for biomedicine because of their effective, lasting, and significant capacity for healing diseases. Therefore, the futures of indigeneity demand a serious discussion on the futures of indigenous medicine, which William Sax addresses with empirically based information and analysis in the postscriptum. It has been argued that although biomedicine (also called “modern medicine,” “cosmopolitan medicine,” or “allopathy”) began as a form of indigenous or local knowledge in Europe, it then transcended its origins and became universal or “cosmopolitan.” It is therefore often regarded as a timeless and culture-free form of universal (as opposed to indigenous) knowledge that can be transplanted from place to place without undergoing fundamental change, much like chemistry, physics, or mathematics. Sax argues that, on the contrary, although there may be some heuristic value in describing it as an abstract system divorced from its context, knowledge is in fact always “done”: acquired, owned, disputed, implemented, or, as the positivists would have it, “discovered.” Knowledge has no ontological status outside the human practices that produce and reproduce it, and such practices are always historical and contextual. Thus, argues Sax, all medicine, including modern cosmopolitan medicine, is “indigenous” at the point of application. Although it is true that in our times, biomedicine is epistemologically, institutionally, and politically dominant, this has to do less with universal and context-free truths than with the circumstances of its dissemination. When we compare what are called “indigenous medicines” (e.g., tribal medicines, traditional healing) with modern biomedicine, we are not comparing a context-bound with a context-free system, because there are no forms of knowledge that are free of context. Rather, we are dealing with what Bruno Latour would call “networks” of different sizes. Sax discusses and compares several of these networks, focusing on various forms of “traditional” and “religious” healing from Asia, in an attempt to show that their growth in recent decades has much to do with their context dependency.
Conclusion
The book brings together the findings of empirically grounded research from different parts of the world, particularly in the “Global South.” Based on various transdisciplinary contexts—anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, geography, and history—it critically engages with debates on indigeneity and its historical and ideological trajectory, in order to determine its theoretical and political destination. The scholars who have contributed to this book examine the current state of indigeneity as an active force, the potential space of identity in a deterritorialized world, and highlight the scalar and temporal dimensions of indigeneity’s sources, contents, and
