Ethnobotanies of refusal: Methodologies in respecting plant(ed)-human resistance

Elaborating on conversational exchanges with a Brazilian shaman about biopiracy and interweaving scholarly literature from the ontological and ‘botanical’ turn, the author examines the disciplinary as well as the political ramifications of plant healers and practitioners – particularly indigenous ones – going largely uncited in plant-centred discussions. In Brazil, indigenous claims for territory and political sovereignty gain traction when they are linked to cultural patrimony. Highlighting ayahuasca as an example of the way that certain plants and people can be involved in collaborative survival, the author demonstrates the entwined semiotic-material stakes of the botanical turn within claims for traditional knowledge and territory. Her analysis frames possible ethnobotanies and methodologies of refusal in respecting plant(ed)-human resistance.     

An Experimental Act: Formations of Wildness and Indigeneity in Far North Queensland

In this article, I focus upon the recent Wild Rivers Act controversy in Queensland, Australia, as an ‘experimental event’ that drew together a diverse cast of actors – including Indigenous traditional owners, state politicians, bureaucrats, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, and waterways – to contest the future of a region historically (over)coded as ‘wild’. In attending to these actors, and the discourses and arguments mobilised, I argue that this controversy reveals emergent trends in the imaginaries of wildness and indigeneity surrounding indigenous lands and waters in contemporary settler colonial nations. Critical insight into such issues, I show, requires reconceptualising the static ‘matters of being’ through which indigenous territory is often captured – such as tradition and development – as contingent and contested ‘matters of becoming’. It is precisely in events such as the Act controversy that the contemporary politics of indigenous territory, and its contingent and contested foundations, becomes visible.     

Wasting Coconuts? Consumption Versus Commerce in Colonial Wallis and Futuna

ABSTRACT

Early colonial officials and other newcomers frequently lamented the poor copra production in Wallis and Futuna, positioning the continued consumption of coconuts by Islanders as a waste. This article explores the contested uses of coconuts and the divergent visions of the islands’ landscape and future held by Islanders, officials, missionaries and traders during opening decades of French colony rule. In particular, a variety of incidents in the 1920s – from an indigenous co-operative to French expulsions – highlight the centrality of the emergent copra trade to the social and political status of these different groups. More broadly, however, the article demonstrates the failure of elites – both indigenous and newcomer – to substantially increase copra exports prior to the Depression in 1930, indicative of the limits of their ability to demand labour and transform the lifeways of the wider population.     

Two Centuries of Russian Sámi Policy: Arrangements for Autonomy and Participation Seen in Light of Imperial,Soviet and Federal Indigenous Minority Policy 1822–2014

Abstract

This article reviews arrangements for Russian Sámi self-government during the Late Imperial (1822–1917), Soviet (1917–1991) and Federal (1992–) Eras of Russian history, comparing them to developments in the country's general indigenous minority policy. Since the Soviet Era, indigenous minority policy has been delimited to a subset of the country's actual indigenous nations – smaller groups traditionally involved in certain rural economic activities. State paternalism, the framing of indigenous minority policy as giving aid to weak groups, is a constant trait of Russian indigenous minority policy. This paternalism has been channelled towards different goals at different times – the building of Communist nations, assimilation, or traditionalist preservationism. Indigenous minority policy has generally been weakly institutionalized, and its interests come into conflict with stronger actors who anchor their political activity in northern economic development and state security. Different forms of territorial autonomy have been practiced throughout the period, non-territorial arrangements becoming more common only in the Federal Era. Russian Sámi politics generally match the national trends but are a case of particularly weak indigenous autonomy and participation. A very case-specific phenomenon is the Federal Era conflict over whether or not to import the Nordic Sámi Parliament model. Case-specifics are explained by the weak demographic position of the Russian Sámi, the lack of any significant symbolic connection between the province and its indigenous people, and the border-proximity and border-transcendence of the Sámi people, which has repeatedly been used to frame their activism as a security concern.     

‘For Purposes of Political Camouflage’: Intelligence Gathering in Colonial Burma, 1933–35

Histories of colonial rule in Burma have noted the difficulties the British government had in ruling the population of that country and the state's reliance on the colonial army to suppress uprisings. However, the role of intelligence in sustaining colonial rule has been neglected in the historiography of Burma. This article discusses the efforts by the colonial state in Burma during the years 1933–35 to develop an intelligence-gathering bureau that reported on the affairs of the indigenous population with a view to preventing the outbreak of anti-government disorder. It illustrates the reliance of the colonial government on information gathered from indigenous informers in order to rule the country and the limitations of over-reliance on that intelligence.     

Knives for the Slaughter – Notes on the Reform and Governance of Indigenous Reindeer Slaughter in Norway

Abstract

Drawing on historical records and ethnographic fieldwork, the present article examines the history of the so-called curved knife, or krumkniv, as a window on the governance and regulation of indigenous Sámi reindeer slaughter in Norway. Originally developed by scientific activists in the 1920s, in the context of a series of experimental field trials held at a farmstead in Røros, the knives were designed to combine efficiency and ease of use with the elimination of visible animal pain, thus bringing indigenous slaughter in line with the shifting aesthetic and moral concerns of the time. The innovation was highly successful, and the knives rapidly adopted as essential tools of the herding trade – to the point where today, most users disregard their origins. Moving forward to the early 21st century, the situation had shifted almost entirely: animal welfare activists now decried the same knives as a barbaric anachronism, while herders defended them as part of their cultural heritage. Historical narratives of moral progress articulated with other discourses to produce a homogeneous present moment of the state, a moment that threatened to exclude herders from participation in the ongoing nation-building project – constituting them instead as objects of intervention and reform, targeting the successes of previous reform. Herders, meanwhile, challenged such negative constructions by defining the knife as an indigenous tradition, invoking the international commitments of the state to preserve their cultural heritage. Comparing these two historical moments, the article draws out how the technical minutiae of slaughtering practice could operate both as an instrument of social engineering, and as an arena within which complex, large-scale issues – to do with matters such as social inclusion and participation, the value of history, the function and obligations of the state – could be settled, contested and redrawn.     

The governance of urban indigenous spaces: Norwegian Sámi examples

How do different ways of governing urban indigenous social spaces facilitate or frustrate local indigenous self-government? A major challenge in Norway is the absence of actors that represent the entire local indigenous population. The main Norwegian Sámi NGO is a driving force in establishing and governing indigenous spaces, but is now one of several and often competing organizations due to specialization (new organizations form to promote specific subgroups' interests) and partisanization (organizations compete in elections to the Sámediggi representative organ). Social media facilitate communication across organizational divides, but do not produce any unified local indigenous “voice”. Private businesses and public cultural institutions take part in establishing and governing indigenous spaces – the former often in complete autonomy from Sámi NGOs, the latter more likely to seek cooperation or coordination. Local and regional state-based actors generally do not take initiatives to establish indigenous spaces, but involve themselves as co-organizers with Sámi leads and as sources of (often unstable) economic support. The state-based Sámediggi is increasingly proactive: financing, facilitating contact between actors, and occasionally participating directly in urban indigenous governance. The Sámediggi provides a unifying representative voice at the macro level that is missing at the local level.     

Ideologies of artistic vocation – implicitly gendered cultural policies?

This paper argues that notions of artistic vocation – the idea that artists receive a metaphysical calling to follow their path – can be understood as implicit cultural policies, among other functions deepening the connection between art and spirituality, as well as regulating gender access to creative production. The matter is addressed generally and with reference to two specific case-studies: the musical era of German Romanticism and contemporary Mexican indigenous groups of the Huasteca, both of which display reliance on narratives of vocation. Also, both cases – one historically remote, and the other removed from Western main-stream musical practices – are to act as mirrors to invite future discussions concerning the continuing cultural currency of ideas of vocation and their complex and subtle complicity in the perpetuation of arguably desirable (such as the promotion of creativity) and oppressive practices within the art world.     

From ethnographic knowledge to anthropological intelligence: An anthropologist in the office of strategic services in Second World War Africa

This article explores the overlapping modalities and practical purposes of anthropological ethnographic knowledge and political–military intelligence gathering – the commonalities as well as the boundaries between them – through an analysis of the career of the anthropologist Jack Sargent Harris (1912–2008), a secret operative for the United States’ Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War in Nigeria and South Africa. Calling upon archival and oral historical sources, the article relates Harris’s training in Boasian cultural anthropology and as a professional ethnographer of African societies and cultures to the ways he recruited informants, conducted surveillance, related to foreign Allied officials, utilized documentary evidence, and worked to establish authority and credibility in his wartime intelligence reporting. The article argues that political purpose is a central artefact of anthropological ethnography as it is in other ethnographic modalities even if the justifications for these endeavours remain distinct.     

Alan Turing: Artificial intelligence as human self‐knowledge

This article explores the life and ideas of Alan Turing (1912–1954), commonly known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI), and highlights the process whereby the human self is reconceptualized in the development of Turing's ideas of machine intelligence. I will further illustrate how this process of self‐reconceptualization – composed of the pursuit, adaptation and transformation of self‐knowledge – is closely related to contemporary digital life. In doing so, I wish to reveal the ways in which Turing's underlying self‐transforming agenda of AI can contribute to our understanding of the human self, for AI, as I will argue, leads to questions of existence and existential anxieties.     

A new Mexican nationalism? Indigenous rights,constitutional reform and the conflicting meanings of multiculturalism*

ABSTRACT. This article focuses on the recent Mexican controversy about the legal status of the indigenous population and the nature of nationalism, which is linked to recent constitutional amendments and new policy strategies. Changes in legislation and policy are examined in the context of a widespread economic and political crisis of the populist regime after 1982, which radically affected the previous indigenist discourse; but they are also seen as having been motivated by Indian demands and mobilisations against the official vision of citizenship as a function of cultural homogeneity and mestizaje. The article analyses the implications of the new constitutional amendments and the heated debates that they have provoked among different political actors, including indigenous organisations. In particular, it examines two areas of disagreement. The first concerns the multiple meanings of multiculturalism – as a threat of fragmentation and fundamentalism, a new form of state control or a strategy for indigenous national participation and empowerment. The second concerns the definition and levels of implementation of indigenous political autonomy. Negotiation over such disagreements, leading to inclusive citizenship, constitute a great challenge for ethnic intellectuals and theoreticians of Mexican nationalism.     

Whatever Happened to the Mother? A New Look at the Old Problem of the Mother's Brother in Three New Guinea Societies: Gimi,Daribi, and Iatmul

Kinship systems cannot be analysed as straightforward translations of the ‘facts of nature’ when those facts are limited to the production of a child by a heterosexual couple. Based upon analyses of three New Guinea societies (Gimi, Daribi, and Iatmul), I suggest that kinship systems take account – often by denying – certain ‘facts’ of human reproduction when those facts are extended beyond coitus and parturition to include both the very long period of infantile dependence upon one significant caregiver (always the mother in the societies in question and nearly universally) and the subsequent requirement for the child to be extracted from a dyadic maternal universe. Separation from mother is as critical to the survival and development of the individual as is the original prolonged and intense attachment to her. The question, then, is not whether indigenous peoples accurately understand coitus and conception – they do – but rather the ways in which they manipulate that knowledge in rules and rites of kinship in order to manage the growth and development of a child long after parturition. Rules of kinship and social relations neither ignore nor exist apart from theories of procreation as many anthropologists now claim. Rather, it is precisely because theories of procreation indicate and idealise the flow of bodily substance during coitus and pregnancy that they serve as organisational premises for social relations. The fact that kinship is a symbolic construction does not mean that it is wholly ideological nor, like a language, free to vary in ways that are arbitrary and unconnected to the ‘facts of life’ as Westerners understand them. Even when interlocutors openly deny such understanding and knowledge, especially of the male role in coitus and conception, evidence to the contrary is abundantly provided in myth, ritual, and indigenous theories of procreation. What kinship systems often do show, however, is a strategic denial of the role of the mother who, upon deeper understanding of indigenous concepts of procreation, turns out to be a ‘sterile vessel’ or without substantial contribution to her child. I illustrate this premise by extending earlier analyses of Gimi kinship and reexamining certain materials on neighbouring Daribi provided by Roy Wagner and on Iatmul peoples of the Sepik River as originally described in Naven by Gregory Bateson eighty years ago.     

Impersonating a Voter: Constructions of Race,and Conceptions of Subjecthood in the Franchise of Colonial New South Wales,c. 1850–1865

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the treatment of Aboriginal Australians as politically entitled subjects within New South Wales during that colony's first elections under ‘universal’ male suffrage. Using the case of Yellow Jimmy, a ‘half-caste’ resident prosecuted for impersonating a white settler at an election in 1859, it examines the uncertainties that surrounded Aboriginal Australians’ position as British subjects within the colony's first constitutions. By contrast to the early colonial franchises of New Zealand and the Cape – where questions of indigenous residents’ access to enfranchisement dominated discussions of the colonies’ early constitutions – in the rare instances in which indigenous men claimed their right to vote in New South Wales, local officials used their own discretion in determining whether they held the political entitlements of British subjects. This formed a continuity with the earlier treatment of Aboriginal Australians under settler law, where British authority and imperial jurisdiction was often advanced ‘on-the-ground’ via jurists and administrators rather than via the statutes or orders of Parliament or the Colonial Office.     

A first meeting place: John Webber’s An Interview Between Captain Cook and the Natives (January 1777)

On 26 January 1777, on the first stage of his third voyage to the Pacific, James Cook anchored in Adventure Bay on what is now called Bruny Island, Tasmania. Cook encountered the local Nuonenne people on two occasions, the second of which was recorded in an unfinished drawing (possibly done on the spot) by the expedition’s artist, John Webber. Comments in their journals from officers and sailors on board Cook’s ships indicate that the European perceptions and representations of Aboriginal people were initially mediated by the explorers’ stereotypical understanding of other races. However, through a close reading of a number of structural features of Webber’s composition – symmetry, resemblances in opposition, chiasmus, a figure who acts as a spectatorial stand-in, spatialisation – it is argued that Webber’s drawing recognises the Aboriginal people encountered by the British as individuals, attends to the dramaturgy of the encounter, and is marked in various ways by a powerful and grounded indigenous agency. It is proposed that anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ paradoxical aphorism ‘structure of the conjuncture’ might be used to illuminate and designate the particular quality of events, the ‘indigenous countersigns’, depicted by Webber in this drawing.     

THE HOUSE OF THE JAGUAR: Can it survive?

This narrative discusses the past, present and precarious future of Na Bolom museum in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico – a house museum dedicated to the study, conservation and support of Chiapas' indigenous cultures, communities and their natural environment.     

Caring for Country: History and Alchemy in the Making and Management of Indigenous Australian Land

This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of A?angu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby A?angu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within A?angu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields.     

Cannibalism & politics: The English Renaissance revisited

This article explores how anthropological approaches to Anglo-Native American exchanges in the 16th and 17th centuries – thinking through and beyond terms like ‘cannibal’ – can draw attention to different facets of encounter and shed light on the influence of indigeneity on English heritage. Using the Englishman Anthony Knivet’s travels to Brazil in the 1590s as a case study, what emerges is the importance of interdisciplinary approaches which acknowledge the complicated and at times surprising interactions between representations and lived experience, between rituals and their appropriations. Further, acknowledging the influence of indigenous American people and artefacts on English history has important implications for addressing the legacy of imperialism in cultural institutions, opening up new possibilities for collaboration, display and reconciliation.     

From spirits to conspiracy? Nomadic perceptions of climate change,pandemics and disease

This article illustrates how the Yamal-Nenets, a group of reindeer pastoralists in West Siberia, perceive a series of recent natural disasters to be connected to one another through a conspiracy – i.e. caused by the agency of malevolent human forces which are beyond the pastoralists’ control. Recent fieldwork during the peak of the global Covid-19 epidemic served as a trigger for this observation. Their self-confidence in the robustness of their lifestyle and their embeddedness within their natural environment is so strong that Yamal-Nenets nomads believe only evil forces – not nature – can stop them from being mobile. Alongside Covid-19, they interpret the severe consequences of natural disasters, such as iced pastures, related reindeer starvation and the outbreak of anthrax as man-made attempts to reduce the number of people and animals in the tundra. The blame they place on humans for these disasters takes place in the context of hitherto unseen gas industry developments in the area. Such interpretations may become a general pattern for changing perceptions of the world by remote indigenous populations when deprived of their once customary shamanic dialogue with the spirits.     

‘It shocks me,the place of women’: intersectionality and mining companies’ retrogradation of indigenous women in New Caledonia

Indigenous women’s social positionings are complex and dynamic, informed by culture and post-colonial politics; gender and ethnicity intersect with age, socio-economic status, and social hierarchies. This article uses an ethnographic study of Kanak women’s engagements with mining in New Caledonia, to examine three questions. First, how do indigenous women’s dynamic social positionings shape their possibilities for negotiation with and resistance to industry? Secondly, how do women’s possibilities for engagement in turn shape the wider community’s possibilities for negotiation with or resistance to industry? Finally, what is the companies’ role in shaping women’s possibilities for such engagement? I draw on the critical feminist concept of intersectionality, bringing this into conversation with concepts of symbolic and cultural violence and hegemony. Over time, women began to actively negotiate with and resist industrial projects, in line with growing gender equity in New Caledonia, but the mining companies referenced – and thus reinforced – women’s dominated social position as an excuse to sideline their concerns, a type of cultural violence I term ‘retrogradation.’ Thus, this article recognizes indigenous women’s increasing agency in engaging with external actors, such as industrial projects, yet also shows how outsiders can commit retrogradation to further marginalize young, rural, poor community women. I discuss how such marginalization limits options for the larger group. Finally, I point to a way out of oppression, through transformation of hegemonic ideologies.     

Ontological politics of hydrosocial territories in the Salween River basin,Myanmar/Burma

In this paper, we question an often-unchallenged assumption that we all talk about the same ‘thing’ when talking about water. Taking the Salween River in Myanmar as a case study, we draw on a growing body of hydrosocial literature to analyze the multiple ontologies of water. Conceptually, we take each ontology to be constituted of – and enacted within – a human-more-than-human assemblage, the spatiotemporal dimensions of which demarcate a ‘hydrosocial territory.’ We present three illustrations, namely: the role of the Union Government's National Water Resources Committee and how it manifests and is situated within an ontology of ‘modern Water’; a Karen indigenous initiative to establish a Salween Peace Park and an associated revealing of an ‘indigenous’ ontology; and plans for the construction of mainstream hydropower dams and electricity export to neighboring Thailand, where different water ontologies and their hydrosocial territories collide. We examine how multiple ontologies of water are contested through ‘ontological politics’, whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. While not downplaying the role violent conflict plays, we argue that in the Salween basin ontological politics are an underappreciated terrain of contestation through which political authority and the power relations that underpin it are (re)produced, with implications for processes of state formation, territorialization and the ongoing peace negotiations.