At the Risk of Being Heard: Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States (review)

Abstract

At the Risk of Being Heard. Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States Bartholomew C. Dean and Jerome M. Levi, eds. 2003. At the Risk of Being Heard. Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States. University of Michigan Press. 356 pp. The volume contains papers originally presented at an Invited Presidential Session at the 1997 meetings of the American Anthropological Association celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the organization, Cultural Survival. As David Maybury-Lewis notes in his closing essay, CS was founded to bear witness...and publicize the human rights abuses committed indigenous peoples, help mobilize action counter such abuses, and, with special reference anthropologists, analyze and clarify the issues [regarding indigenous rights] and provide counter-arguments against denying or ignoring them. All the contributors the volume agree that the purpose of fighting for 'cultural survival' is not preserve cultures as though under glass or in a zoo, but defend the right of maintain their cultural identity and difference the forced or more indirect efforts of states and organizations within states eliminate such difference. The effort is prevent not genocide but also 'ethnocide' or the social elimination of groups, a process often glossed as assimilation. The essays address the knotty questions of what is 'indigeneity,' what are the rights of claims based on indigeneity, can states be the guarantors of indigenous rights when so many cases reveal them be direct or indirect exploiters of indigenous groups, what are the chances for multicultural states, and what are appropriate roles for scholars, especially anthropologists, as well as activists in supporting 'cultural survival?' Anthropologists are (in)famous for subjecting key terms severe deconstruction, usually suggesting that they are 'polythetic' categories sharing 'family resemblances' as do the editors with reference the term indigenous. But the effort here is not refine the analytics but consider what the term does when it is employed by such different agents as groups calling themselves indigenous, state governments, international conventions, lobbying organizations, or lawyers. 'Indigenous' suggests original belonging a place in the English sense of a 'native' of x or y. But the authors see that as insufficient and tend emphasize definitions similar in various international conventions and statements of rights. Kirk Endicott refers us the definition of 'indigenous' as indicating not merely a pre-colonial presence but a status of non-dominant...ethnic groups that are disadvantaged in the modern nationstates they find themselves occupying. As he rightly emphasizes, the current definition of 'indigenous peoples' only has meaning within the context of states. Maybury-Lewis agrees in defining indigenous people as those who have been conquered by populations ethnically or culturally different from themselves and who have been incorporated into states that consider them outsiders and usually inferiors. They are usually minorities in terms of numbers as well as political status, as indicated by an earlier Soviet term for Siberian indigenes as small-numbered peoples (Balzer). Virtually all the essays provide detailed case studies of indigenous groups currently claiming certain 'rights' as indigenous in the face of marginalization or exploitation at the hands of governments and private entities. In addition, they all provide the reasons for why indigeneity, indigenous rights, and indigenous autonomy have become so pervasive-the flavor of the month in the words of Rodolfo Stavenhagen, cited in the book. The reasons are far more serious than the rather pleasant image of ice-cream cones (or, perhaps, designer coffee) conveys. Virtually all the indigenous discussed here were conquered and 'incorporated,' usually forcibly, into states, and were/are marked by being small-scale horticulturalists or pastoralists or hunter-gatherers, often mobile, with relatively simple and non-hierarchical political structures. …

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