The Shady Side of Consultation and Compensation: ‘Divide‐and‐Rule’ Tactics in Bolivia's Extraction Sector

The rights to prior consultation and compensation have been established within the framework of international indigenous peoples’ rights. However, in practice these processes have often gone hand in hand with adverse social consequences for local populations, such as the exacerbation of conflicts, the division of communities and the weakening of indigenous organizations. These phenomena have received little attention, despite their great relevance for these populations. This article sheds light on the use by the Bolivian state and extraction corporations of exclusionary participation and negotiation processes, on the one hand, and ‘carrot‐and‐stick’ techniques on the other, which have together accounted for negative social impacts on the ground. The article is based on recently conducted field research, focus group discussions and semi‐structured interviews in Guaraní communities in Bolivia. The findings extend the existing literature by providing a fine‐grained and systematic analysis of divisive undertakings and their sociocultural and sociopolitical consequences in neo‐extractivist Bolivia. The broader implications of the study add to academic debates about participation in development, about ‘divide‐and‐rule’ tactics and about the practice of indigenous peoples’ rights.     

The Predicament Of Ideas In Culture: Translation And Historiography

Rather than a simple transfer of words or texts from one language to another, on the model of the bilingual dictionary, translation has become understood as a translingual act of transcoding cultural material — a complex act of communication. Much recent work on translation in history grows out of interest in the effects of European colonialism, especially within Asian studies, where interest has been driven by the contrast between the experiences of China and Japan, which were never formally colonized, and the alternative examples of peoples without strong, centralized states — those of the Indian subcontinent and the Tagalog in the Philippines — who were colonized by European powers. This essay reviews several books published in recent years, one group of which share the general interpretation that colonial powers forced their subjects to "translate" their local language, sociality, or culture into the terms of the dominant colonial power: because the colonial power controls representation and forces its subjects to use the colonial language, it is in a position to construct the forms of indigenous and subject identity. The other books under review here are less concerned with power in colonial situations than with the fact of different languages, cultures, or practices and the work of "translating" between the two — particularly the efforts of indigenous agents to introduce European ideas and institutions to their respective peoples.     

EXEMPLIFYING ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION: MINING AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE PHILIPPINES

Using a case study from the Philippines, this article applies David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession to show how neoliberal policies enable mining corporations to locate, lay claim to, and develop mineral resources in formerly inaccessible areas, which for centuries have provided safe haven for indigenous peoples and their cultures. It explains why these factors are leading to an increase in armed conflict between military forces and guerrilla groups, which recruit their members from displaced indigenous people. The article concludes that the theory of accumulation by dispossession offers an appropriate analytical tool for understanding these processes.     

“It is loved and it is defended”: Critical Solidarity Across Race and Place

Since 2010, the Wixárika (Huichol) indigenous people of western Mexico have struggled against transnational mining activity in their sacred pilgrimage site of Wirikuta in the semi‐desertic plateaus of San Luis Potosí. This struggle has been accompanied by a multitude of non‐indigenous and largely urban actors who have joined the Wixárika, bringing with them their own cultural, political and geographic registers for understanding and mobilising against mining in the region. Taking Wirikuta as a contemporary demonstration of interracial and cross‐geographic alliance building, I analyse how social movements that express solidarity and affective ties with the territories and cultures of indigenous peoples struggle to unsettle entrenched racial and spatial relations.     

(RE)MAPPING INDIGENOUS ‘RACE’/PLACE IN POSTCOLONIAL PENINSULAR MALAYSIA1

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous ‐ were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno‐nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.     

Co‐opting Conservation: Migrant Resource Control and Access to National Park Management in the Philippine Uplands

The history of political and economic inequality in forest villages can shape how and why resource use conflicts arise during the evolution of national parks management. In the Philippine uplands, indigenous peoples and migrant settlers co‐exist, compete over land and forest resources, and shape how managers preserve forests through national parks. This article examines how migrants have claimed lands and changed production and exchange relations among the indigenous Tagbanua to build on and benefit from otherwise coercive park management on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Migrant control over productive resources has influenced who, within each group, could sustain agriculture in the face of the state's dominant conservation narrative — valorizing migrant paddy rice and criminalizing Tagbanua swiddens. Upon settling, migrant farmers used new political and economic strengths to tap into provincial political networks in order to be hired at a national park. As a result, they were able to steer management to support paddy rice at the expense of swidden cultivation. While state conservation policy shapes how national parks impact upon local resource access and use, older political economic inequalities in forest villages build on such policies to influence how management affects the livelihoods of poor households.     

Negotiating Cultural Heritage? Aboriginal–Mining Company Agreements in Australia

Mining and other forms of industrial development can result in profound and often irreversible damage to the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples. Fear of such damage regularly results in indigenous opposition to development and, in many cases, to delays in construction of development projects or even to their abandonment. Government legislation has generally proved ineffective in protecting indigenous heritage. An alternative means of achieving protection arises from the growing recognition of indigenous land rights and the opportunity this creates for negotiations with mining companies regarding the terms on which indigenous landowners may support development. To evaluate the potential efficacy of negotiated approaches, this article analyses forty‐one agreements between mining companies and Aboriginal peoples in Australia. It argues that negotiated agreements do have the potential to protect indigenous cultural heritage, but only where underlying weaknesses in the bargaining position of indigenous peoples are addressed. This finding has wider implications given that negotiation and agreement making are increasingly being promoted as a means of addressing the structural disadvantages faced by indigenous peoples and of resolving conflicts between them and dominant societies.     

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Deuteronomy and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

Deuteronomy portrays itself as Moses's speech at the edge of the promised land. This article examines the book's attitudes towards the other within this rhetorical setting by concentrating on the indigenous peoples, also in contrast to those outside the land of Israel. It is pointed out that the ideology of Deuteronomy is very exclusive, and its treatment of indigenous peoples compatible with ideologies that accompany genocides and conquests. Mitigating such exclusive thinking can serve as a model for human interactions today, and this would also seem to be compatible with the overall thinking of the New Testament canonical documents.     

Unstable properties: British Columbia,aboriginal title,and the “new relationship”

In the span of a few years, Premier Gordon Campbell transformed himself from a strong political critic of Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia to their apparent champion within a “new relationship.” The subsequent sudden collapse of Campbell's alliance with First Nations is a window into federal‐provincial relations, constitutional change, Aboriginal political organization, and the consequences of decisions made more than a century ago. Drawing on Nietzsche, we argue that Campbell's intentions, either to control or support Aboriginal peoples, were almost irrelevant; our focus should be on the “will to power” and efforts to stabilize power through territory. As a result of the collision of Aboriginal political mobilization, the expansion of natural resource development, and a series of court decisions, the unresolved nature of Canada's territorial claim to most of the land that is now British Columbia has finally reached a point where it can no longer be ignored, either politically or legally. However, the province lacks the legal authority to recognize or deny Aboriginal title, leaving the provincial government and indigenous peoples in British Columbia equally held hostage by the federal government.     

Town Twinning in Greece: Reconstructing Local Histories Through Translocal Sensory‐Affective Performances

Twinning arrangements between members and non‐members of the European Union are one of the many Euro‐symbolic measures taken with the aim of making indigenous populations “feel like citizens of Europe at the local level”. This article addresses the ways in which trans‐local projects of indoctrination, such as twinning, force indigenous peoples to reposition themselves toward what is culturally defined as local history. Its focus is on the exchange of small‐scale civilities through which partners engage themselves in sensory and affective performances of their history, and are gradually led to the reorganization of their domestic sensorium or public memory.     

The Activist Polis: Topologies of Conflict in Indigenous Solidarity Activism

Interpersonal conflict poses a serious threat to social justice activism. In the context of indigenous solidarity activism in southern Arizona, conflicts are often born of the challenges accompanying differentials in social privilege due to differences in race and ethnicity relative to white supremacist settler colonialism. This paper examines activist collaboration between Tohono O'odham and non‐Native anarchist activists in southern Arizona, arguing that a topological activist polis is a useful lens through which we can better understand the roots of conflict in social justice activism. Non‐Native activists are often aware of the ways white supremacist settler colonial society privileges particular identities while marginalizing others. Nonetheless, settler and white privilege give rise to tensions which can be seen topologically through the very different relationships non‐Native and indigenous activists have to ongoing processes of white supremacy and to histories of the genocide of indigenous peoples.     

种族问题研究中三个基本概念的界定与阐释

"原住民"、"土著"和"第一民族"是种族问题研究中常常遇到的三个基本概念。原住民是指最早定居在某地方的族群;土著最初是西方殖民者对当地原住民的称谓,而现在也泛指原住民;第一民族原来是加拿大的一个种族称谓,与印第安人同义,指的是在当今加拿大境内的北美洲原住民及其后裔,后来也可指代其他国家的意在凸显其历史渊源、独特文化和地位的原住民。     

Mare Nullius: Indigenous Rights in Saltwater Environments

This article uses two case studies to illustrate the subjection of indigenous peoples’ marine territories to a ‘double jeopardy’ of exclusion — jurisdictional and proprietary — through the legal and administrative practices of European ‘settler’ states in Australia and Canada. While the fiction of terra nullius as a legal rationale for refuting indigenous rights of property and governance has steadily eroded in recent decades, its counterpart mare nullius has proven, so far, more resistant. The authors examine how state conceptions of jurisdiction, property and boundary‐making in coastal areas accomplish the distortion and fragmentation of the coastal and marine spaces of Torres Strait Islanders in northern Queensland, Australia, and of the Cree and Inuit peoples of James and Hudson Bays in northern Que´bec, Canada. Assumptions of land–sea continuity underlie these peoples’ cultural constructions of coastal and marine environments. In examining the progress that each has made in reasserting ownership and control of coast and sea, it seems that recognition and reinforcement of their institutions for managing marine spaces and resources offer the best prospect for reconnecting fractured jurisdictional domains, and for bringing about social equity, environmental protection, and self‐determined regional development.     

The Micropolitics of Indigenous Environmental Movements in the Philippines

Indigenous movements face what Stuart Kirsch has called the ‘risks of counterglobalization’, which can distort their objectives into an all‐or‐nothing position with respect to development. In this contribution, I explore a case from the Philippines, where a movement originally conceived in terms of indigenous rights grew to include a more diverse mix of constituents and claims. This trajectory has made the movement vulnerable to charges of inauthenticity, particularly since the corporation it opposes has sponsored a parallel indigenous group and fashioned itself as the noble custodian of a threatened marine ecosystem. Nevertheless, the movement's constituents do not evaluate their activities exclusively in terms of its formal objectives or identity politics. For them, organized protest is entangled with the ‘serious games’ of everyday life, including, for example, local elections, struggles to achieve upward social mobility and efforts to redefine ethnic identity. As a result, some constituents see their involvement primarily as a claim to socioeconomic parity and others as a pursuit of the exceptional rights that indigeneity confers. Without attention to such local‐level variation, we risk obscuring some of the most important motives and outcomes of indigenous movements — and, as a result, we may overlook the alternative visions of socio‐environmental justice that emerge from their day‐to‐day struggles for livelihood, dignity and empowerment.     

路易十四派遣“皇家数学家”传教士来华的背景

17世纪,葡萄牙国力日渐衰败,令其无法再从经济上支持传教士的东方拓展之旅,这不仅让罗马教廷颇为不满,而且让欧洲新崛起的法国看到了一个取而代之的机会。当时法国遇到的障碍主要有两个,一是葡萄牙所拥有的保教权;二是罗马教廷所要求的宣誓问题。但是,法国政治、科学和宗教的发展需求,加之暹罗使团的突然来访,让路易十四最终决定派遣有皇家科学院通讯院士之称的耶稣会士跟随暹罗使团前往东方。这些耶稣会士便是在中法交流史上赫赫有名的"皇家数学家"。     

Wood Chipping of Indigenous Forest on Private Land in New Zealand 1969–1993

In recent decades the international wood chip industry has been the major cause of indigenous forest destruction in New Zealand. This paper analyses how changing state forest policies have affected wood chipping of indigenous forest. Emphasis is placed on wood chipping on private land through a case study of the reactions and changing attitudes of farmers. It is argued that farmers and Maori landowners often have no other alternative but to allow wood chipping on their land. Although government policies have been tightened in recent years, and although attitudes among private landholders are shifting towards forest conservation, the pressure on New Zealand's lowland indigenous forest remnants continues unabated.     

Editorial Introduction

Abstract

Developing holistic accounts of indigenous peoples’ lifeways in colonial intercultural settings requires data that provide insights into patterns of landscape use and variations in social, economic, and cultural practices away from nodes of colonial activity. However, the mobile settlement patterns of some indigenous peoples mean that the data necessary for such investigations can be rare. In western Cape York Peninsula of northeastern Australia, culturally modified trees (CMTs) associated with the collection of wild honey or “sugarbag” provide opportunities to investigate indigenous patterns of landscape use and processes of economic change within colonial settings. Here we use CMT data to suggest that increased engagement with invader-settlers resulted in intensification of indigenous wild food production. This study exemplifies the complexity of socioeconomic shifts that accompanied European colonization worldwide, and illustrates how landscape-level data can provide information on the broader histories of indigenous peoples within colonial settings.     

Settlers,Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession

This article offers a critique of the Wolfe-an model, which has become so dominant within contemporary Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). It focuses particularly on the central claim made by Patrick Wolfe, and others after him, that settler colonialism is categorically differentiated from other forms of colonialism by its drive to “eliminate the native”, instead of exploiting them. This paper builds on the literature that shows how settler colonies have used elimination as well as exploitation in their relations with indigenous peoples—even transitioning from one to the other. Instead, the paper argues that focusing on accumulation by dispossession allows for an analysis of the specificity of settler social relations to emerge. It highlights the specific ways in which settlers collectively expropriate indigenous peoples and struggle amongst different settler classes over the distribution of the colonial loot.     

Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

Anglo‐Saxon attitudes: In search of the origins of English racism

In this article I examine the attitudes of the dominant ethnic group in Anglo‐Saxon England, the Germanic ‘settlers’, to the subordinate group, the indigenous British. 1 confine myself to the earlier period, before the tenth century, because the British population of England has disappeared from the historical record by that time. This probably means they had been absorbed into Anglo‐Saxon society and were no longer recognised as a distinctive group. Then, partly by means of a comparison with white English attitudes to black people today, I ask whether Anglo‐Saxon attitudes constituted, in modem terms, a racist ideology, and conclude that they did. Realising that this question will be held by some historians to be illegitmate, I finish by considering why they might take this view, and suggesting that racism has in fact been part of English national identity from the beginning.