was to avoid villagers losing their land, it has been unable to counteract the disparities in power and wealth that have always been prevalent within village communities. Moreover, in much of the Garo Hills there is a tendency towards the privatization of land use, as well as ownership. This commodification of land is unavoidable for the modernization of agriculture, and yet it challenges Garo notions of indigeneity, as well as related perceptions of land and nature. De Maaker, in this chapter, analyzes the transformation of land relationships, the legalities in which these are founded, and the consequences they have for Garo notions of indigeneity.
In another case from Southeast Asia, Ian Baird in Chapter 2 discusses how indigeneity functions as a strong political resource, using the case of land management in Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos. He brings out the political rhetoric of indigenous people, explaining that over the last couple of decades the concept of “indigenous peoples” has gained increasing traction in Asia, with some countries—such as the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and Cambodia—having adopted legislation that recognizes indigenous peoples. Still, other national governments in Asia continue to resist, with many following the “saltwater theory,” which specifies that the concept of indigenous peoples is only applicable in places where there has been considerable European settler colonization (such as the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand). Elsewhere, the concept is seen as irrelevant, since everyone is considered to be indigenous. Still, even in these countries the movement has made some inroads, albeit unevenly, due to varying political and historical circumstances. Much of the increased attention on the concept of indigenous peoples is linked to advocacy associated with attempts to gain increased access and control over land and other natural resources. In this chapter, Baird considers the links between the indigenous peoples’ movement and land and resource tenure issues in three countries in mainland Southeast Asia where the concept of indigeneity is variously recognized.
Becoming ‘Indigenous’
Indigeneity is also challenged by various local, regional, and international political dynamics of identity and locally embedded public and political discourse. Therefore, a deeper understanding of the dynamics of indigeneity depends on how local political rhetoric negotiates with international indigenous activism. In Chapter 3, Gabriele Herzog-Schröder draws our attention to the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil, who are often represented as an “isolated,” indigenous, ethnic group of the South American lowlands, prototypically as Amerindian societies of Amazonia. In the Brazilian part of their territory they have, over the last three decades, been invaded and abused as part of a disgraceful gold rush. However, anthropologists, too, became notorious for inappropriate projections of the Yanomami in Venezuela. Due to this history of invasion and worldwide media attention, the Yanomami have been subject to representation as the stereotypical “exotic” within both anthropological academia and beyond. This widespread publicity has obscured the fact that presently, growing contact with the “outside” world is taking place in quite heterogeneous ways among the Yanomami. While some Yanomami personalities are well informed about city life and symptoms of globalization—for example, the famous Davi Kopenawa from Brazil—the majority of Yanomami have not yet traveled outside their traditional territories. The misrepresentation of indigeneity, and the processes of approximation of an isolated area in southern Venezuela, demonstrate how a gradual understanding of the “outside world” goes hand in hand with the Yanomami’s own understanding of being “indigenous.” At the same time, this new indigenous identity situates the actors as members of a nation, and makes them appear as belonging to a particular indigenous group within a choir of other indigenous people within these newly conceived national complexes. These freshly acquainted forms of identity—being “Yanomami” (as an indigenous group), being indigenous, and being Venezuelan or Brazilian—are contested by a traditional cosmological worldview, in short by being determined as “shamanic.” New forms of “knowledge,” as well as spatial imaginaries—novel to the traditional worldview—are discussed in this chapter, focusing particularly on schooling as an interface between indigeneity and modernity.
The increasing pace of connectivity and networking is helping indigenous activism reach translocal and transnational spaces, which in turn provide transnational incentives to local and national activism. In Chapter 4, Eva Gerharz argues that indigeneity is made use of by activists as a crucial category, one that signifies belonging in various ways, and more or less successfully. Using the case of Bangladesh’s indigenous activist movement and its demands for the recognition of diversity as an example, the article identifies three different domains in which indigenous activism is at work, and locates these within translocal space. In particular, Gerharz shows how international claims to indigenous rights are translated into the national legal framework and how these attempts are being negotiated between actors who draw on globalized concepts and discourses in different ways. A second domain is development, one of the classical fields of international and transnational interaction in Bangladesh, in which indigenous issues have been taken up only recently. These initiatives, however, have provoked quite controversial debates, especially from those actors who seek to preserve indigeneity as a distinct way of life. The third dimension is concerned with the ambiguities emerging from the representation of indigenous people, their culture, and way of life in the public space of the Bengali-dominated national society. These three dimensions, Gerharz argues, rest upon activist configurations that are marked by dynamic boundary-making processes, which are enacted in multiethnic settings and not only allow the inclusion of non-indigenous activists but also foster the exclusion of indigenous people who do not support the political claims and demands of the movement. Gerharz argues that understanding the constellations of belonging from a translocal perspective helps us to move beyond essentializing concepts of indigeneity that run the risk of reproducing stereotypical images.
In Chapter 5, Nasir Uddin also focuses on indigenous people in Bangladesh, but from a different angle. His interest is in the various forms of identity politics, cultural politics, and the politics of nationalism that are produced locally, but that also compete with global notions of indigeneity, and which therefore also deserve attention, critical discussion, and analysis from academics. He particularly focuses on the complex networks of the politics of indigeneity, in which the identity of a particular group of people becomes a conflict between local articulations of selfhood, national politics of “otherness,” and transnational discourses of indigeneity. His discussion critically engages with recurrent debates on indigeneity, identity politics, and the politics of nationalism in local, national, and transnational spheres, using the case of the Khumi people who live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), in southeastern Bangladesh. The Khumi, culturally different from the majority Bengali population and from other ethnic minorities in Bangladesh, confront multiple identities—Khumi, Pahari, upajatee (sub-nation), tribe, jumma (shifting cultivators), adivasi or indigenous people, khudra-nrigoshti (ethnic minority), and so on—amid the local and global politics of indigeneity. The state’s politics of nationalism, transnational politics of indigeneity, and postcolonial practice of colonial discourse in the South Asian subcontinent place the Khumi in an identity crisis, and demonstrates the problems with subscribing to the idea of indigeneity as an international category. Consequently, the Khumi are now in the position of losing their “self” in “others” who themselves claim to be indigenous people. With the case of the Khumi, Uddin examines the idea of indigeneity, politics of identity, and belonging, as well as the notions of nationalism in Bangladesh, against the wider background of the relation of the CHT to the state, which has been shaped over time and through regimes, from the colonial (British), through the semi-colonial (Pakistan), to the post/neocolonial (Bangladesh) era.
Indigeneity as a Political Resource
The emergence of the idea of indigeneity was strongly motivated by indigenous activism across the world, which resulted in the international endorsement of various legal frameworks for the rights of indigenous people. Since then, indigeneity has become a political resource.
In Africa, “indigeneity”