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Adam Kuper

The return of the native

Article (Published version)(Refereed)

Original citation:Kuper, Adam (2003) The return of the native.Current Anthropology,44 (3). pp. 389-402. ISSN0011-3204

DOI:10.1086/368120

2003The WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research

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The Return of the Native

Author(s): Adam KuperSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 44, No. 3 (June 2003), pp. 389-402Published by: The University of Chicago Presson behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/368120.

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389

C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 3, June 2003 2003 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2003/4403-0004$2.50

CA FORUM ONANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC

The Return of theNative1

by Adam Kuper2

On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations pro-claimed an International Year of the Worlds IndigenousPeople. A Decade for Indigenous Peoples was subse-quently launched, to run from 1995 to 2004, and a Forumof Indigenous Peoples established. The inaugural meet-ing of the Forum, held in Geneva in 1996, was unfor-tunately disrupted by gate-crashers. A self-styled dele-gation of South African Boers turned up and demandedto be allowed to participate on the grounds that they toowere indigenous people. Moreover, they claimed thattheir traditional culture was under threat from the newAfrican National Congress government. They were un-ceremoniously ejected, and no doubt their motives were

far from pure, but the drama might usefully have drawnattention to the difficulty of defining and identifyingindigenous people.

The loaded terms native and indigenous are thesubject of much debate in activist circles.3 Native stillhas a colonial ring in many parts of the world, thoughit has become an acceptable label in North America. Itis now always capitalized (Native), perhaps in order tosuggest that it refers to a nation of some sort, and in factthe term First Nations is often used as an alternativedesignation in Canada and the U.S.A. In internationaldiscourse, however, the term indigenous is usuallypreferred. This has a slightly foreign ring to English ears,

1. Versions of this paper were presented in June 2002 at the 23dCongress of the Association of Brazilian Anthropologists and in anaddress delivered at the opening ceremony of the Max Planck In-stitute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. I also had theopportunity to try out the argument in a small seminar of humanrights specialists at the London School of Economics under thechairmanship of Stanley Cohen. Detailed comments on the paperwere made by Alan Barnard, Mark Nuttall, and Evie Plaice. RobertHitchcock kindly gave me copies of his unpublished papers on cur-rent developments in Botswana.2. Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge,Middlesex UB8 3PH, U.K. ([email protected]).3.See, for example, the correspondence published in AnthropologyToday18 (3) (June 2002):2325 under the title Defining Oneself,and Being Defined As, Indigenous.

but perhaps it comes across as more scientific. At thesame time, the names used for particular indigenous peo-ples have undergone changes, and therefore we nowhave, for example, Saami for Lapp, Inuit for Eskimo (seeStewart2002:8892), and San for Bushman.

As is so often the way with this sort of relabelling,

San turns out to be a pejorative Hottentotor Khoe-khoeterm for Bushmen, connoting vagabonds andbandits (Barnard 1992:8), but the principle is defensi-ble. It is a good idea to call people by names they rec-ognize and find acceptable. Nevertheless, discredited oldarguments may lurk behind new words. Culture hasbecome a common euphemism for race. Similarly, inthe rhetoric of the indigenous peoples movement theterms native and indigenous are often euphemismsfor what used to be termed primitive (cf. Beteille 1998).Indeed, one of the major NGOs in this field, SurvivalInternational, began life as the Primitive Peoples Fund.It has since changed its name, but clinging to the sameanachronistic anthropology it now promotes itself as a

movement for tribal peoples. Once this equivalencebetween indigenous and primitive, tribal, hunt-ing, or nomadic peoples is grasped, it is easier to un-derstand why the secretary general of the United Nationsglossed indigenous peoples as nomads or huntingpeople (Boutros-Ghali 1994:9). The indigenous peoplesforum from which the Boers were ejected was dominatedby delegations speaking for Inuit, San, Australian Abo-rigines, Amazonian peoples, and others, precisely thequintessential primitive societies of classical anthro-pological discourse.4

Not only has the ghostly category of primitive peo-ples been restored to life under a new label but the UNsecretary general of the day, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, iden-tified common problems that these peoples suffered inthe modern world: They had been relegated to reservedterritories or confined to inaccessible or inhospitableregions and in many cases seemed doomed to extinc-tion. Governments treated them as subversive be-cause they did not share the sedentary lifestyle or theculture of the majority. Nations of farmers tended toview nomads or hunting peoples with fear or contempt.However, the secretary general noted that a welcomechange is taking place on national and international lev-els. The unique way of life of indigenous peoples hadat last come to be appreciated at its true value. Organ-izations of indigenous people had been formed. Collec-tive rights in historical homelands were being recognizedand land claims pressed with some success (Boutros-Ghali1994:913).

The secretary general was certainly right to identifynew international thinking on these issues. The ILOConvention no. 169 (1989) concerning Indigenous andTribal Peoples in Independent Countries laid down thatnational governments should allow indigenous peoplesto participate in the making of decisions that affect them,that they should set their own development priorities,

4. For a historical review of the notion of primitive society, seeKuper (1988).

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390 F c u r r e n t a n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 3, June 2003

and that they should be given back lands that they tra-ditionally occupied. This convention has been ratifiedby Denmark and Norway among European states and byBolivia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Par-aguay, and Peru in Latin America. However, no Africanor Asian state has adopted it. (For a trenchant critiqueof the logic of the Indian tribal movement, see Beteille1998.) More recently, a United Nations Draft Declarationon the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has been negotiated,but particularly because of strong opposition from anumber of African states it has not yet been put beforethe General Assembly.5

The rhetoric of the indigenous-peoples movementrests on widely accepted premises that are neverthelessopen to serious challenge, not least from anthropologists.The initial assumption is that descendants of the originalinhabitants of a country should have privileged rights,perhaps even exclusive rights, to its resources. Con-versely, immigrants are simply guests and should behaveaccordingly. These propositions are popular with ex-treme right-wing parties in Europe, although the argu-ment is seldom pushed to its logical conclusion giventhat the history of all European countries is a history ofsuccessive migrations. Even in the most extreme na-tionalist circles it is not generally argued that, for in-stance, descendants of the Celts and perhaps the Saxonsshould be given special privileges in Britain as againstdescendants of Romans, Vikings, Normans, and, ofcourse, all later immigrants.

Where hunters and nomadic herders are concerned, itmay be argued that they represent not merely the firstinhabitants of a country but the original human popu-lations of the world. In a certain sense primitive, abo-riginal, humankinds first-comers, theirs is the naturalstate of humanity. If that is so, then perhaps it followsthat their rights must take precedence. However, whileUpper Paleolithic hunters and gatherers operated in aworld of hunters, every contemporary community of for-agers or herders lives in intimate association with settledfarmers. In certain cases, including those of the KalahariBushmen and the Congo Pygmies, they interacted withfarming neighbours for centuries, probably for at least amillennium, before the colonial period (see Wilmsen1989a). Exchanges with farmers and traders are crucialfor their economy, and their foraging activities are gearedto this broader economic context. Moreover, the dividebetween a foraging and a farming way of life is not nec-

essarily hard and fast. People may forage for some sea-sons, even some years, but fall back on other activitieswhen times are tough. Alternatively, farmers may bedriven back on foraging as a result of war or naturaldisasters. All this suggests that the way of life of modernhunters or herders may be only remotely related to thatof hunters and herders who lived thousands of years ago.Furthermore, even where technologies are very simple,cultural traditions vary between regions rather than ac-cording to modes of gaining a livelihood. For example,

5. For a convenient review of the institutions and treaties dealingwith human rights and indigenous peoples, see Roulet (1999).

Kalahari hunter-gatherers have more in common in theirreligious beliefs or kinship systems with neighbouringKhoi or Hottentot herders than with the Hadza of Tan-zania or the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Congo,many of whom lived until recently largely by foraging(see Barnard1992).

Several generationsin some cases many centu-riesof European settlement have also greatly compli-cated the picture. Local ways of life and group identitieshave been subjected to a variety of pressures and haveseldom, if ever, remained stable over the long term. It isnevertheless often assumed that each local native groupis the carrier of an ancient culture. In familiar romanticfashion, this culture is associated with spiritual ratherthan with material values. It is unique and expresses thegenius of a native people. To be sure, it is conceded (evenangrily insisted) that the authentic culture may surviveonly in rural enclaves, since (again in good romanticstyle) native cultures are represented as being every-where under threat from an intrusive material civiliza-tion associated with cities, with stock markets, and withforeigners. However, it is argued that the essence sur-vives and can be nursed back to health if the resourcesare provided. The alternative is represented in the bleak-est terms. The loss of culture is sometimes spoken of asa form of genocide. Even in less apocalyptic discoursesit is taken for granted that a people that loses its culturehas been robbed of its identity and that the diminutionof cultural variation represents a significant loss for allhumanity.

Boutros-Ghali accordingly insisted that the indige-nous-peoples movement was not only about land orhunting rights. It was, even more fundamentally, con-cerned with culture and identity. Indeed, beyond the con-ventional list of individual human rights something newwas at issue. Henceforth we realize that human rightscover not only individual rights, Boutros-Ghaliclaimed,but also collective rights, historical rights. We are dis-covering the new human rights, which include, first andforemost, cultural rights. . . . We might even say thatthere can be no human rights unless cultural authentic-ity is preserved (1994:13).6 (He did not consider the pos-sibility that collective rights might undermine in-dividual rights.)

Finally, there is a strong ecological thread in the in-digenous-peoples rhetoric. According to the dogma,hunters are in tune with nature in a way that the ex-

ploitative and greedy farmers are not (see Brody2001; cf.Gill 1994 and Kehoe 1994). As Boutros-Ghali summedup, in appropriately cliched language, It is now clearlyunderstood that many indigenous people live in greaterharmony with the natural environment than do the in-habitants of industrialized consumer societies (Boutros-Ghali1994:13).

An eloquent statement of the natural-harmony thesishas been published recently by the anthropologist and

6. See Kuper (1999:chap. 7 ); see also Chanock (2000) for an inter-esting discussion of the new prominence given to culture andcultural rights in postcold war international discourse.



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k u p e r The Return of the Native F 391

activist Hugh Brody (2001), but he has chosen to focuson Canadas far north, where the way of life has beenshaped for centuries by the international fur trade. Inuitcommercial hunters flourished here, in time embracingthe new technologies of hunting rifles, motorized

sleighs, and radio communications, but this trade hasbeen in decline for decades, and the consumer boycottof furs has made further inroads in the rump of the in-dustry. Since the 1950s the Canadian government hasimplemented a policy of sedentarization. Today there arestill a few part-time commercial hunters and, as else-where in North America, some men still hunt for rec-reation, but hunting is a marginal activity. Ethnogra-phers have emphasized the continuing importance ofwhat Stewart calls the imagery rather than the subsis-tence aspects of hunting (Stewart 2002:93; cf. Omura2002). However, few could quarrel with Doraiss (1997:3) conclusion that Inuit society, in many respects, is asmodern as its Euro-American counterpart.

Some activists wish that the Inuit would take up hunt-ing again and restore an ancient environmental balance,but such hopes are not justified by experience. The 1971Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act created 12 Native-controlled profit-making corporations, which now ex-port resources to Japan and Korea. Recently the Inupiatof Alaskas North Slope have supported oil drilling onthe coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge(although they are opposed by the Gwichin Indians). InGreenland, the Inuit-led Home Rule government regardshunting as anachronistic and objectionable and favoursthe exploitation of non-renewable resources (see Nuttall1998).

Leaving aside the question of how the land might beused, land claims on behalf of former nomads typicallyraise very tricky issues.7 Canadian courts have found thatit is difficult to establish the boundaries of lands huntedby former generations or to grasp how ancestral popu-lations understood rights to resources and rights in land.They must also consider whether rights exercised byhunters are in some way equivalent to rights that arisefrom clearing virgin lands for agriculture or to other com-

mon-law entitlements. Finally, they must decidewhether native chiefs legally entered into treaties thatalienated some or all of their lands.

Some activists argue that too much emphasis is placedon treaties which may have been poorly understood bythe natives and that courts should recognize that thereare different cultural modes of encoding historical set-tlements. Hugh Brody, a leading theorist of the Canadian

7. There is now a substantial literature on this issue; see, for ex-ample, Wilmsen (1989b). For an excellent account of the Australiansituation see Hiatt (1996:chap. 2).

First Nations movement,8 favours recourse to unwrittenhistorical resources, and in line with other Canadian ac-tivists he suggests that if there are no appropriate oraltraditions the court should take evidence from shamans,who are able to see in dreams the arrangements that theirancestors made with the first European settlers (Brody2001:13436).

Brody concedes that questions may be asked about thefactual status of oral traditions, let alone the dreams ofshamans, but he insists that there is a reliable test of thehistorical value of these accounts. It all depends on whotells them. For the peoples of the Northwest Coast,he writes, as to any hunter-gatherer society or, indeed,any oral culture, words spoken by chiefs are a naturaland inevitable basis for truth (Brody 2001:207). Now,where chiefs exist, the word of one may carry weight,but it will not necessarily be accepted as a natural andinevitable basis for truth by anyone other than, perhaps,the chiefs most loyal and trusting subjects. It is surely

unfortunate if advocates of native rights grant powers tochiefs that they would be reluctant to allow to merekings or emperors or even to elected presidents. Anyway,while some of the native peoples of Canada did havehereditary chiefs, in other cases it is far from certain thatchiefs were recognized before the office was establishedby colonial authorities. There are also frequent disputesabout who should be chief, and land claims regularly pitnative against native, chief against chief (and anthro-pologist against anthropologist). Precisely because mythsfunction as charters, there are inevitably competing sto-ries, and disputes often rage over who owns a particularstory and who has the right to use it to back up claimsto resources.

Other problems arise when myths are compared withhistorical or archaeological evidence. As a consultant toCanadas Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples inthe 1990s, Brody organized a historical workshop inwhich archaeologists explained that the Arctic was col-onized across the Bering Straits by way of a land bridgethat connected Siberia and Alaska (2001:11314):

One of the workshop participants was a womanfrom a Cree community who was enrolled in aPh.D. programme at a prestigious American univer-sity. She was not happy about the Bering Strait the-ory. She pointed out that her people, and most In-dian people, do not believe that archaeologists

know anything about the origins of human life in

8. The blurb of his book presents Brodys credentials: Oxford-ed-ucated, he has taught social anthropology at Queens University,Belfast, and in the 1970s he worked with the Canadian Depart-ment of Indian and Northern Affairs and then with Inuit and Indianorganisations, mapping hunter-gatherer territories and researchingLand Claims and indigenous rights in many parts of Canada. Hewas an adviser to the Mackenzie Pipeline Inquiry, a member of theWorld Banks famous Morse Commission and chairman of theSnake River Independent Review, all of which took him to theencounter between large-scale development and indigenous com-munities. Since 1997 he has worked with the South African SanInstitute on Bushman history and land rights in the SouthernKalahari.



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the Americas. The idea that people first came as im-migrants from Asia was, she said, absurd. It wentagainst all that her people knew. . . . There had beenno immigration, but an emergence. . . . She wouldhave nothing to do with so-called scholarship thatdiscredited these central tenets of aboriginal oralculture.

This objection broke up the workshop. Brody recalls feel-ing confused. Could something be true at the Universityof Toronto but false in Kispiox?

Yet the Cree student had good reason to be troubled.If their ancestors were themselves immigrants, then per-haps the Cree might not after all be so very differentfrom the Mayflowers passengers or even the huddledmasses that streamed across the Atlantic in the 1890s.To be sure, the great population movements from Siberiaacross the Bering Straits began a very long time ago, butit was still relatively late in the history of the coloni-zation of the world by fully modern humans. Accordingto a recent authoritative review, nothing found thus farchallenges the view that significant human populationmovements through the area occurred only after the peakof the last glaciation,16,000yearsb.c. (Snow1996:131;see also Dillehay 2000: esp. chap. 2). These migrationsthen continued for many millennia. The first wavepassed quickly to the south, and the Arctic and Sub-Arctic were settled at a later stage. The ancestral Aleut-Inuit may have begun to colonize the far north only inthe past4,000years. The ancestors of the Cree are datedfrom3,000years ago (Mason2000), while the proto-Ath-apascans are dated from 2,000years ago (Clark 2000).

Precisely whose ancestors came and when may alsobe problematic, and, of course, over the centuries com-munities migrated, merged, died out, or changed theirlanguages and altered their allegiances. Archaeologi-cally well-known populations that predate the last4,000years may never be assigned clear linguistic identities,a modern authority concludes (Snow 1996:128). Conse-quently, it is difficult to sort out the various strains thatintermingled to produce the native populations withwhom the first Europeans made contact in Alaska andin the far north of Canada. However, it cannot be doubted

that some of the First Nations were not merely immi-grants but actually colonizers. Innu, for instance, enteredthe Quebec-Labrador peninsula only1,800 years ago, dis-placing and assimilating earlier populations (Mailhot1999:51).

Ever-changing colonial and national contexts have, ofcourse, added layers of complexity to the histories ofpopulations that derived from the precolonial commu-nities, and with the best will in the world it may not bepossible to return to a pre-Columbian state of nature. InLabrador (to continue with a Canadian example), an or-ganization called the Innu Nation demands the resto-ration of ancestral lands. One difficulty it faces is that

the northern portion of its claim overlaps land claimedby another ethnic movement, the Labrador Inuit Asso-ciation. A further complication is that this area is alsohome to another category of people, originally of Euro-pean stock, known locally as the Settlers. Their presenceraises another sort of problem, one of principle. Therehave been several generations of intermarriage betweenSettlers and Inuit; both Inuit and Settlers are often bi-lingual, and their ways of life are similar (see Plaice 1990,Samson2001). If the phrase has any meaning, one mightsurely say that they have a common culture, though ap-parently not a common identity. Under certain condi-tions, Settlers are accepted as members by the LabradorInuit Association, but the Innu Nation regards them asits main adversaries, and the government excludes Set-tlers from collective land claims and treats them assquatters because they cannot prove aboriginal blood-lines. At the same time, a person who has lived his orher whole life in, say, St Johns in Newfoundland anddoes not speak a word of a native language may begranted aboriginal status in Labrador having demon-strated a sufficient proportion of aboriginal ancestry.

In short, for the Canadian government native claimsto land are based not only on descent but on a calibratedmeasure of descent. One has rights only if one has acertain number of appropriate grandparents. This mightfairly be called the Nuremberg principle. A drift to rac-ism may be inevitable where so-called cultural identitybecomes the basis for rights, since any cultural test(knowledge of a language, for example) will exclude somewho might lay claim to an identity on grounds of de-scent. In the indigenous-peoples movement, descent istacitly assumed to represent the bedrock of collectiveidentity.

The Canadian situation is not unique. Courts in Aus-tralia, New Zealand, and the U.S.A. have also been per-suaded to grant land rights to indigenous peoples. Inmany Latin American countries there have been massmovements of indigenous peoples that purport tospeak for a majority of the population, but there are alsomovements of small minorities of hunting peoplesthat demand the return of ancestral homelands, and theirclaims have been sympathetically considered by some

governments. In most Asian and African countries, how-ever, government policy has been firmly (not to say op-pressively) assimilationist with respect to minorities offormerly foraging peoples and nomads. Occasionally, asin the case of the Bushmen of Botswana and Namibia,they have been treated as victims of poverty requiringeconomic aid.

Botswanas treatment of its Bushman minority hasbeen in the news recently, and the case is instructive.On April19,2002, a Botswana court refused to order thegovernment to continue to provide services to peopleliving in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. This casehad been supported by a number of NGOs, notably Sur-



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vival International, which organized vigils outside Bo-tswana embassies, and the judgement was given prom-inent coverage in the serious U.K. press. The Times(April22), for example, under the headline Last Bush-men Lose Fight for Right to Be Nomads reported thatsub-Saharan Africas last nomadic people have lost alegal battle against being evicted from their ancienthomeland, ending 40,000 years of a hunter-gathererlifestyle.

Even when Botswana was still a British colony (theBechuanaland Protectorate), Bushman policy had at-tracted international attention from time to time. In1958the colonial government appointed a Bushman Sur-vey Officer, George Silberbauer, a district commissionerwho had been trained in anthropology, and asked him toreview the situation of the Bushmen and to come upwith a fresh policy. In his report, Silberbauer estimatedthe countrys Bushman population at around25,000, buthe noted that only some6,000lived by hunting and gath-ering and so should be classified as what he called wildBushmen9 (1965:14). Silberbauer was engaged in post-graduate research on the G/wi-speakers west of Ghanzi,and his main proposal was that the government shouldestablish a game reserve in the G/wi area in which onlywild G/wi and, in the east of the reserve, someG//ana would be allowed to hunt. The government ac-cepted this recommendation, and the Central KalahariGame Reserve was established in 1961 with a territoryof130,000square kilometers and an estimated Bushmanpopulation of some 3,000, although some hundreds ofKgalagari cattle farmers also found themselves withinits borders. The second-largest game reserve in Africa, itoccupies an area larger than South Korea or Portugal andabout the same size as Bangladesh and Nepal.

The original policy was radically incoherent. Was thissupposed to be a reserve for wild animals or for wildBushmen? Who could live there, and what rights wouldthey enjoy? A few non-G/wi Bushmen migrated into thereserve, but they were not entirely welcome. What aboutthe Kgalagari pastoralists who made their homes therebefore the proclamation of the reserve? And what aboutthe majority of Bushmen in the country, who had noclaims there at all? Botswana became independent in1966, and the new political class was generally unsym-pathetic to the policy behind the reserve and tended topoint to a clear parallel with the South African Bantustansystem. Initially, the Botswana governmentlike its co-

lonial predecessorwas nevertheless prepared to makeallowances in order to allay international concerns, butin the late1970s the situation changed and governmentpolicy hardened. During the drought years of the late1970s and early 1980s many people left the reserve,though perhaps intending to return. (G/wi had long beenaccustomed to labour migration to the Ghanzi farms in

9. Silberbauer used this term to describe Bushmen who are ableto subsist on the proceeds of their hunting and foodgathering andwho either live in remote areas without moving out on any visits,or who only make brief visits in some years to Ghanzi farms orBantu-owned cattle-posts, for the purpose of trading or finding foodand water (Silberbauer 1965:14).

hard times.) The government established a settlementwith a school and clinic outside the reserve and triedwith some success to persuade Bushmen to congregatethere.

Two sets of considerations were crucial in the changein official thinking.10 First, environmentalists com-plained that residents were keeping donkeys and goatsthat interfered with the game and that they were engagedin poaching. This was to turn the conventional appealto environmental values against the Bushmen. Second,officials were committed to a national policy of bringingaid and development to what were called Remote AreaDwellers, a term coined precisely to avoid ethnic dis-crimination. Officials found the special provisions madefor people in the reserve an expensive anomaly. As aminister of local government put it in a letter to theBotswana Centre for Human Rights in January 2002,Weas Government simply believe that it is totally unfair toleave a portion of our citizens undeveloped under thepretext that we are allowing them to practise their cul-ture (Hitchcock2002a:2). Yet while senior members ofgovernment rejected the argument from culture, therewas a feeling that the Bushmen were simply backwardand had to be civilized. The permanent secretary in theMinistry of Local Government was reported in the pressas remarking, in terms which would have been familiarto his colonial predecessors, that Botswana owns theBasarwa and it will own Basarwa until it ceases to be acountry; and they will never be allowed to walk aroundin skins again (Hitchcock 2002b:18).

In May and June 1997 more than 1,100 people weremoved in trucks to two settlements outside the reserve,where the usual depressing concomitants of forced re-settlement soon manifested themselves in the form ofalcoholism, domestic violence, and the spread of pettycrime. In November 2001 the government announcedthat it would no longer provide public services or welfarepayments to anyone remaining in the reserve. At thispoint 500600 people remained within its borders, andit was an appeal on their behalf for services to be restoredthat the court rejected in April2002. These actions weretaken in the face of international protests. Indeed, therewas something of a backlash in government circlesagainst the activities of NGOs, notably Survival Inter-national. The Botswana government has concluded thatsome international agencies are effectively proposing aform of apartheid and sabotaging a rational policy of

development.On the face of it, the situation in South Africa is verydifferent to that in Botswana. Bushmen, or San, withinSouth Africa were generally believed to have died out orto have been assimilated by the late 19th century. TheHottentots, or Khoi, had been largely acculturated to theso-called Coloured group, though there are some bilin-

10. Survival International has insinuated that the real reason forthe population removal is that a deal has been hatched between DeBeers and the government to exploit diamond resources in the area,although if diamonds were found in the reserve they would be atthe disposal of the government, since the reserve is designated asstate lands (Survival International, news release, April 19, 2002).



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gual Afrikaans-Nama-speakers in the northern Cape.Moreover, at the time of the political transition the ANCwas unsympathetic to any movement of ethnic assertionwithin the country. In 1996, when he was deputy pres-ident, Thabo Mbeki represented the Khoi and San asSouth Africas first freedom fighters but in the convictionthat they had since passed from the scene.11 The gov-ernment was evidently caught by surprise when the in-digenous-peoples movement was taken up by UN agen-cies and NGOs in South Africa began to champion thecause of the countrys own indigenous peoples.

The first movement to achieve prominence was theGriqua movementor, rather, movements, since therewere competing organizations that claimed to speak forthe Griqua people. The Griqua emerged on the frontierof the Cape colony in the late 18th century. At first theycalled themselves Basters, but the missionaries per-suaded them to adopt a less shocking name. They werelargely Khoi, or Hottentot, by ancestry, but they wereChristians and spoke Dutch. Equipped with horses andguns, they operated as cattle ranchers and freebooters.In 1804 they settled under the auspices of the LondonMissionary Society at Klaarwater, later called Griqua-town. In the course of the next generation the commu-nity split, there were various migrations, and treatieswere made and abrogated with the Boer republics. Laterin the 19th century descendants of the original com-munity, by now largely landless, were divided betweenthree widely separated settlements and increasingly as-similated into the broader Cape Coloured society (seeRoss1976).

Under apartheid, many Griquas were initially classi-fied with the Bantu-speakers, but they managed to getthemselves reclassified as Coloureds, which was a moreprivileged situation. In the1990s, however, some Griquapoliticians declared that they were Khoi and San, indig-enous people, and demanded restitution of ancestrallands and representation in the House of TraditionalLeaders. Support was forthcoming from the UnitedNations Indigenous Peoples Forum. The governmentwas ready to treat with them but became frustrated whenthe various Griqua spokesmen refused to agree on a sin-gle representative body for purposes of negotiation. Tosort out the claims to leadership, officials consulted gov-ernment anthropologists. Ironically, this was a return tothe practices of the apartheid regime. These selfsamegovernment anthropologists had been accustomed to

similar duties when they were employed by the Depart-ment of Bantu Affairs. Now, redeployed to the Depart-ment of Constitutional Development, they found them-selves faced with the familiar task of identifying thetraditional leader, although as its happens they were un-successful on this occasion. The rival claimants to theGriqua leadership came together only for brief official

11.Mbeki said: I owe my being to the Khoi andSan whose desolatesouls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Capethey whofell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has everseen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle todefend our freedom and independence, and they who, as a people,perished in the result (quoted in Bredenkamp2001:192).

visits from Nelson Mandela or the U.S. ambassador. To-day the various Griqua settlements seem to have optedrather more enthusiastically for participation in evan-gelical Christian movements (Waldman2001).

On another front, however, the South African govern-

ment did make a grand gesture. A(

khomani San As-sociation was set up to make claims to rights in theKalahari Gemsbok Park, an enormous game reserve thathad been established in 1931. There were only about adozen people in South Africa who could still speak the(khomani language, but the movement was stronglysupported by an NGO based in Cape Town. Rathervaguely specified rights of ownership in the park weresymbolically handed over to the (khomani people.People classified as (khomani were also allowed tograze stock in certain areas. This more specific and prac-tical right was crucial. As Steven Robins has pointed out,while San livestock farmers are often perceived to beless authentically San by donors, for many Kalahari San,

goats and sheep have been, and continue to be, their mainstrategy for survival (Robins 2001a:24, b). Unfortu-nately, these privileges have created tensions betweenthose classified as San and other local residents, who hadbeen classified as Coloured under apartheid. And just asunder apartheid, people have been obliged to reformulatetheir ethnic identities in order to get access to resources.Williams Ellis, describes, for example, Oom Frik, whosays he is not a San, but he is part of them by virtueof his grandmother having been a pure San, she hadaccording to him the correct phenotypic features (Ellis2001:259).

The change of ANC policy is at least in part a responseto agitation by NGOs, with their international connec-tions (Robins2001b). The government could not ignorethese pressures while it harboured aspirations to recog-nition as Africas leading actor in the field of humanrights. Moreover, ANC leaders were committed to ges-tures of restitution for the injustices of apartheid. Sym-bolic acts of solidarity with San are now popular, and onthe occasion of South Africas Sixth Freedom Day, onApril 27, 2000, President Mbeki unveiled the new na-tional coat of arms, which displayed at its centre twofigures from a Bushman rock painting. Below is a textfrom an extinct Cape Bushman language, !ke e: /xarra//ke, which has been translated as Unity in Diver-sitythe motto of the New South Africa, though the

precise meaning of this passage in an obscure, dead lan-guage is a matter of some scholarly controversy.12 (Themotto of the old Union of South Africa was Unity IsStrength.) The advantages of this official gesture arenevertheless apparent enough. None of South Africas 11official languages is being privileged. The only ethnicgroup that is given special status has long vanished fromthe scene. And the new symbol may boost South Africasreputation in the field of human rights, since in some

12. Alan Barnard writes (personal communication) that the literaltranslation of the motto is !ke (people or men) e (who, plural)/xarra(different) //ke (meet, be together with).



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circles today the litmus test is a governments policy onindigenous peoples.

The indigenous-peoples movement has been fostered bythe UN and the World Bank and by international devel-opment agencies and NGOs. Despite the fact that theideas behind the movement are very dubious, the mo-tivation is surely generous. Whatever the reasons behindit, a grant of land to poor people may be a good thingeven if very large tracts of land are sometimes beinghanded over to extremely small communitiesor,rather, to small categories of people defined in terms ofdescent. But I am doubtful about the justice or good senseof most of these initiatives. Policies based on false anal-ysis distract attention from real local issues. They areunlikely to promote the common good, and they willcertainly create new problems. Wherever special landand hunting rights have been extended to so-called in-digenous peoples, local ethnic frictions have been ex-acerbated. These grants also foster appeals to uncom-fortably racist criteria for favouring or excludingindividuals or communities. New identities are fabri-cated and spokespeople identified who are bound to beunrepresentative and may be effectively the creation ofpolitical parties and NGOs. These spokespeople demandrecognition for alternative ways of understanding theworld, but ironically enough they do so in the idiom ofWestern culture theory. Since the representations ofidentity are so far from the realities on the ground andsince the relative wealth of the NGOs and the locals isso disparate, these movements are unlikely to be dem-ocratic (see Sieder and Witchell 2001).

Why have these discredited ways of thinking becomeso influential once again? As always, our conceptions ofthe primitive are best understood as counters in our owncurrent ideological debates (see Kuper 1988:79). The im-age of the primitive is often constructed today to suitthe Greens and the anti-globalization movement. Au-thentic natives represent a world to which we should,apparently, wish to be returned, a world in which culturedoes not challenge nature. At the same time, the move-ment exploits the very general European belief that truecitizenship is a matter of ties of blood and soil. In Europetoday, this principle is used to justify anti-immigrant

policies. The obverse of this, however, is the painlessconcession that faraway natives should be allowed tohunt in their own Bantustans. And so the indigenous-peoples movement garners support across the politicalspectrum for a variety of different, even contradictoryreasons. (The founder of Survival International, RobinHanbury-Tenison, recently achieved new prominence aschief executive of the Countrywide Alliance, a move-ment formed to oppose the banning of fox hunting inBritain.) But whatever the political inspiration, the con-ventional lines of argument currently used to justify in-digenous land claims rely on obsolete anthropologicalnotions and on a romantic and false ethnographic vision.

Fostering essentialist ideologies of culture and identity,they may have dangerous political consequences.

Commentsk e i i c h i o m u r aFaculty of Language and Culture, Osaka University,Osaka 560-0043, Japan ([email protected]).5 i 03

Kuper tells us that essentialism is still one of the mostcrucial issues that we must address if we are to avoidmaking the same mistakes as the modern anthropologycriticized by postmodern and postcolonial anthropologyas a collaborator of colonialism. This is because, as isdemonstrated in this article, although the indigenouspeoples movement has certainly contributed to the pub-lic recognition of collective rights and empowerment ofindigenous people, such as the establishment of NunavutTerritory in Canada, its theoretical and conceptual foun-dation is an essentialist ideology that creates and am-plifies the differences among ethnic groups and thus ex-acerbates ethnic frictions. As Kuper suggests, we shouldnot only criticize the theoretical foundation of essen-tialist ideology but also propose an alternative to it, forwithout some reformulation of culture and identity theprimitive will be restored to life under the veil of theindigenous.

How shall we begin to propose such an alternative? Ithink that a clue to this problem is suggested, althoughnot clearly stated, in this article, especially in the dis-cussion of the discrepancy between the reality of indig-enous peoples and the basic premises of the indigenouspeoples movement. Kuper examines the assumptionsunderlying the indigenous peoples movement, such asthe premise that each indigenous group constitutes theoriginal inhabitants of a country and is the carrier of anancient culture in which humans live in harmony withnature, and concludes that these assumptions are opento serious challenge. In reality, contemporary indigenousgroups have experienced continual sociocultural changein the course of the complicated modern history of hu-mankindmigrating, merging, changing their lan-guages, social organizations, and modes of subsistence,altering their allegiances, and influencing each other. No

indigenous group has lived in complete isolation andkept its way of life unchanged since the beginning ofhumankind. In this sense, the society and culture ofevery contemporary indigenous group is a complex ofvarious elements resulting from historical interactionsthat is still in the process of change. Nevertheless, asKuper points out, in the political arena and the courtsthe definition of indigenous and the authentic imagesof indigenous peoples are based on the assumptions ofties of blood and soil derived from the Euro-Americanessentialist or nationalist ideology of culture and iden-tity mentioned above, that is, constructed regardless ofthe reality of indigenous peoples societies.



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difference are indefensible, but the attempt to redresspast and present wrongs with the likes of the Forum ofIndigenous Peoples is at least understandable. ShouldWestern liberal democraciesnot attempt to succour thevulnerable? Do countering policies such as affirmativeaction and Citizen Plus not perform this task ade-quately? Or are they always likely to be corrupted bynationalist movements such as those that produced Na-zism and apartheid? Kupers example of the disruptiveAfrikaners is telling. The problem here may be one ofdefinition, but the issue goes a good deal farther whenthe intrinsic meaninglessness of arguing for special priorrights comes into play. Groups the world over have beeninvaded and conquered, usually with devastating con-sequences. The difficulty we find ourselves in currentlyis that it is unpalatable to watch on the sidelines whilethose recently conquered suffer a fate shared by millionsthroughout history whose societies have disintegrated.In a liberal Western democracy, we prefer to soften theblow with seemingly racist policies while doing very lit-tle to prevent the inevitable outcome: the loss of a dis-tinct way of life in favour of supporting the majoritystatus quo. We justify our complacency with Darwinianarguments about the survival of the fittest or the prin-ciples of democracy while making the most of the de-velopment opportunities that arise. In the end, only anadherence to the notion of human rights gives us thesemblance of moral progress.

The position of anthropology in this debate is decid-edly uncomfortable. In its guise as the discipline inter-ested in cultural diversity, it could be construed as theacademic wing of the indigenous rights movement,whose role is to advocate the rights of vulnerable culturalminorities. Anthropology is also motivated by the rela-tivist argument that all cultures must be respected asequal. This is only one side of the anthropological coin,however. The inseparable other is understanding humancommonality. How do we accommodate the two? Ku-pers position may well be the only tenable one, yet itdoes not address the inequality we are left with in thewake of misguided, misplaced, or blatantly racistpoliciesof the past. Nor does it appear to safeguard us from theperpetuation of an often racially biased status quo andthe seemingly inevitable erosion of diversity.

a l c i d a r i t a r a m o s

SQN107, Bloco 1, Apto. 601, Braslia, D.F.70 743-090, Brazil ([email protected]).6 i 03

One wonders what the point of Kupers paper really is.Is it a criticism of cultural diversity, a protest againstself-serving NGOs, or a repudiation of pseudo-ethnicclaims? Perhaps it is all three together. His discomfortwith the term indigenous is understandable, but to saythat its usage by the indigenous peoples movement isa euphemism for what used to be termed primitiveis to blame the conquered for the conquerors bad lan-guage. Similarly, if the image of the primitive is oftenconstructed today to suit the Greens and the antiglob-

alization movement it is hardly the fault of the indig-enous peoples. This phrase, added to another about theagitation by NGOs, with their international connec-tions, is reminiscent of the rhetoric of some oppressivegovernments that, in disclaiming the political agency ofindigenous peoples, attribute their actions to the manip-ulative powers of non-Indian agitators. One can see whysuch a cliche is used by authoritarian governments, butcoming from an anthropologist it is, to say the least,puzzling.

Again, Kuper asserts that culture has become a com-mon euphemism for race. With no further clarifica-tion this statement becomes yet another cliche, lackingthe depth and elegance of Verena Stolckes (1995) anal-ysis of what she called cultural fundamentalism, thecrypto-racism that plagues Western Europe today. To putin the same category indigenous claims for legitimatedifference, Nazi racism, and South African apartheid isto miss the point of differential power. In other words,to put Western powers of conquest on an equal footingwith ethnic demands for recognition is either to ignoreor to minimize the violence of Western expansion. True,there are plenty of conflicting situations in which ethnicgroups are pitted against each other for or against de-velopment (or local investment along the lines describedby Sahlins [1992] as develop-man). Such are the risksof hasty generalizations.

Kuper generalizes about the motivations of indigenouspeoples, about NGOs, about national situations, andabout anthropologists. Behind the politically correct crit-icisms of essentialist ideologies there is an embraceof development that does not withstand critical analysis(Rist 1997, Perrot et al. 1992). Kuper seems concernedthat indigenous movements will rock the boat: Wher-ever special land and hunting rights have been extendedto so-called indigenous peoples, local ethnic frictions areexacerbated. This argument is akin to the subterfugeaccording to which miserable British workers were quitecontented with their lot until Marx came along. Perhapsthe aftermath of apartheid has cautioned Kuper againstthe mess caused by ethnic battles, but in Latin Americawe cringe at the papers final statement: The conven-tional lines of argument currently used to justify indig-enous land claims rely on obsolete anthropological no-tions and on a romantic and false ethnographic vision.Fostering essentialist ideologies of culture and identity,they may have dangerous political consequences. Ob-

solete, romantic, false are all adjectives that re-quire much demonstration lest they remain at the sub-level of insults.

Poor argumentation contributes to the papers sour fla-vor. The repeated attempts to reduce complex issues tosimple statements can be illustrated in two examples.One is the contradiction between the disparaging rejec-tion of the use of the Cree shamanic idiom as legal ev-idence for land rights and his charge that, in makingtheir legal claims, indigenous spokespeople ironicallyenough . . . do so in the idiom of Western culture theory.From this perspective it seems that indigenous peoplescan never win. The other example is the following non



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sequitur: Since the representations of identity are so farfrom the realities on the ground and since the relativewealth of the NGOs and the locals is so disparate, thesemovements are unlikely to be democratic. First of all,it would be remarkable if representations and realitiesactually coincided. As for the rest of the sentence, I con-fess that the logic escapes me. If NGOs were as deprivedas the locals, what utility would they have? I also fail tosee what democracy has to do with ideal versus real andthe amount of NGO resources. Moreover, are spokes-people unrepresentative everywhere? Are new identitiesfabricated wherever they emerge? Are NGOs well offeverywhere?

Particularly regarding the thorny issue of ethnic re-surgence what we need is serious anthropological re-search, rather than casual generalizations, and open-minded anthropologists who neither adopt indigenouscauses as an article of faith nor reject ethnic strugglesas racist manipulations by unscrupulous opportunists.What is an appropriate analysis for South Africa will notbe for Amazonia. The enormous differences in historicaltrajectories, political conjunctures, and local responsesshould prevent us from assuming that in telling one storywe tell them all. This capacity to address broad issueswithout losing sight of the realities on the ground is,after all, a major asset of our anthropological training.

s t e v e n r o b i n sDepartment of Sociology, University of Stellenbosch,Private Bag X1, 7602 Matieland, South Africa([email protected]).15 i 03

Kupers article is an eloquent critique of the essential-izing tendencies of the discourses promoted by indige-nous peoples movements, and it raises some troublingquestions. For example, does the radical disjuncture be-tween indigenous identity narratives and everyday livedrealities delegitimize the indigenous rights movement?Who is to authenticate and legitimize these narratives?

Kupers caricature of indigenous rights activists asmisguided romantics does not do justice to the rhetoricsand strategic priorities of activist logics. Mainstream ac-tivists, NGOs, development consultants, and tradeunionists regularly essentialize their clientssub-sistence farmers, female-headed households, work-ing class, and so onwithout necessarily discrediting

their political projects. Indeed, such rhetorical strategiesoften make for effective activism. Gayatri Spivaks con-cept of strategic essentialism is useful for understand-ing such situated activist logics (see Robins 2001b).Moreover, essentialist constructions of identity are notnecessarily incompatible with an active embrace of thecontradictions of modernity and its bittersweet fruits.

Although ethnographic examples of the integration ofmodern, industrial technologies into indigenous culturalrepertoiresindigenous modernitiesrepresent a sig-nificant challenge to the Western dichotomy betweenthe traditional and the modern, such binary think-ing persists. For example, the San are still expected to

perform as authentic bushmen in their everyday livesif anthropologists and land-claims judges are not to dis-miss their identity claims as false and opportunistic. Noone expects the English to perform their Englishness;being English allows one both to be modern and tomake claims on an idealized English past of kings andqueens, castles, medieval villages, and pastoral land-scapes.

As Sahlins (1999:140) notes, the survival of indigenouspeoples is often dependent on modern means of produc-tion, transportation, and communication that they payfor with money acquired from public transfer payments,resource royalties, wage labour, or commercial fishing.Rather than being swallowed up by the homogenizingforces of modernity and globalization, however, many ofthem recast their dependencies on modern means of pro-duction in order to reconstitute their own cultural ideasand practices (1999:ix). Similarly, indigenous groups aredrawing on the resources of a global civil society to re-

constitute themselves as traditional communities.Kuper seems to expect indigenous peoples to conform totheir primordial identity narratives in their everydaylives when they often find themselves having to respondto contradictory demands that they be both Late StoneAge survivors and modern citizens of the nation-state.

It is unlikely that activists benign essentialism con-stitutes a threat to democracy as Kuper suggests, andsurely it is inappropriate to compare San and Inuit iden-tity politics to the violent outbursts of ethno-national-ism, racism, autochthony, and xenophobia in parts ofEurope and Africa. Finally, is a drift to racism reallyinevitable where so-called cultural identity becomes abasis for rights? I think not. Let me illustrate my ar-

gument by drawing on the case of the South African San.During the 1980s, anti-apartheid activists focused onpopulist class-based forms of political mobilization andpopular land struggles rather than on cultural strug-gles. Intellectuals in the popular left tended to be dis-missive of such struggles; from their perspective (see Ma-gubane 1973, Mafeje 1971, Boonzaier and Sharp 1988)ethnicity and tribalism constituted forms of falseconsciousness promoted by the architects of Pretoriashomelands and separate-development policies. With theend of apartheid, ethnicity and race replaced classas the keywords of the new official political discourse,and NGOs and indigenous peoples organizations beganto promote self-determination and cultural rights for in-

digenous peoples. It was in this context that indi-genous Nama, San, and Griqua ethnic revitalizationmovements took place.

In1999members of the (khomani San communityachieved the return to them of land in and around theKalahari Gemsbok National Park from which they hadbeen forcibly removed in the 1960s.1 Many of them hadbeen regularly performing for tourists at a bushman

1. The land restitution act does not recognize tribes or indige-nous or aboriginal land rights. Achievement of restitution ispossible only for individuals or communities that were forciblyremoved through racially based legislation subsequent to1913.



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village a few hundred kilometres from Cape Town, andtheir repertoire of performances was strategically de-ployed during the land-claim process. The 1999 landhandover ceremony was the culmination of extensiveNGO lobbying of government and massive media cov-erage that helped the (khomani San land claim jumpthe line in a process in which tens of thousands ofclaims were competing for attention. A senior Depart-ment of Land Affairs (DLA) official in Pretoria told methat the case had been prioritized by the minister of landaffairs and the president in an attempt to acknowledgethe wounds of San genocide and land and cultural dis-possession. It had captured the presidents vision of theAfrican Renaissance and the governments desire for rec-ognition as a leader in the promotion of human rightsin Africa. Essentialist constructions of San cultural con-tinuity by the (khomani San, the South African SanInstitute, the media, and the government fuelled thisagenda and provided a group of superexploited and hy-permarginalized ex-farm workers and their families withvisibility and support that strengthened their case. Thiswas indeed an instance of strategic essentialism inaction.

For Kuper, while the motivation for such interventionsby activists and indigenous movements may be gen-erous, their political consequences are generally un-desirable. If we were to accept his gloomy prognosis, itwould make sense to lobby the South African govern-ment to call off its land-reform programme. To denycommunities access to significant material resources asreparations for past injustices because they deploy es-sentialist ideologies of culture and identity would be aserious disservice to a tradition of anthropology and ac-tivism that has sought to reconcile a cultural politicsof recognition with redistributive justice. Deconstruct-ing essentialist ideologies of culture and identity shouldbe merely a first step toward understanding and situatinglocal constructions of truth, not the goal of anthro-pological practice. Surely anthropology should not striveto reduce subaltern voices and histories to a sanitizedand standardized version of the anthropologists truth.Kupers masterful analysis of global discourses on indi-geneity fails to convey a sense of the unruly and con-tested character of the creation of histories and identitiesfrom below. Is this thorough dismissal of the logics ofindigenous identity politics a sign of a growing desire toreturn to good old-fashioned ethnographic authority?

j a m e s s u z m a nAfrican Studies Centre, Cambridge University,Cambridge CB2 3RQ, U.K. ([email protected]).5 i 03

Despite the fact that the indigenous rights doctrine isout of step with much contemporary anthropologicalthinking, few anthropologists have openly criticized it.Of the few who have, most have been careful to add thecaveat that their critique is intended for theoretical con-sumption only. To this extent Kupers piece is a welcome

contribution to debate on an issue that has avoided con-fronting the implications of some potentially criticalproblems. Indigenousness, as Kuper shows, is no more ajustification for claiming special rights in perpetuitythan having red hair, white skin, or blue blood.

It would of course be easy to overlook the theoreticalpoverty of the indigenous rights discourse were it a uni-versally effective tool for solving those problems it setsout to deal with, viz., the precarious status of nominallyindigenous minorities in some countries. While the in-digenous rights message has arguably benefited minoritypopulations in the Americas and the Antipodes, its in-vocation elsewhere has sometimes been counterproduc-tive. The precarious status of San peoples in southernAfrica, for example, shows first that it is not always pos-sible to identify who is indigenous and who is not, sec-ondly that those peoples best placed to claim the privi-leges due to indigenes are not necessarily those most inneed of assistance, and thirdly that a focus on indige-nousness may well reinforce the very structures of dis-crimination that disadvantage these peoples in the firstplace (Suzman2001, 2002).

Indigenous rights instruments claim what credibilitythey have mainly because of their applicability to situ-ations in which the descendents of indigenous peoplesform clearly identifiable and, most important, conspic-uously marginalized minorities. Were the specialrights and privileges demanded in ILO 169 bestowedupon indigenous populations that formed empoweredmajorities they would be considered discriminatory andoffensive. As Kuper points out, the same broad concep-tion of culture underwrites both the indigenous rightsmovement and the political ideology of Europes farright. While it is a somewhat crude comparison, the lan-guage of ancestry, bodily substance, and land that Ingold(2002) shows to be at the heart of the indigenous rightsnarrative is not dissimilar to the Nazis blood and landslogan still popular among right-wing groups. Given thatfew European proponents of indigenous rights wouldconsider such thinking acceptable or appropriate in theirhomelands, this suggests that the contemporary indig-enous rights discourse is the progeny of a worldview thatconceptually differentiates a First World ordered aroundmarket forces and civil society from a Third World com-posed of organic islands of discrete culture (Chanock2000). Kuper is clearly correct to assert that indigenousis a contemporary gloss for primitive.

Key concepts in the indigenous rights narrative arederived from a conspicuously Western lexicon. Thus,for many indigenous people, the formal assertion oftheir rights as indigenes often involves the novel invo-cation or reconceptualization of concepts such as his-tory, culture, and tradition. Culture in these in-stances ceases to be grounded in a continuity of practiceand instead becomes the primary vehicle for the artic-ulation of identity. Interestingly, situations portrayed asbattles for cultural survival by the indigenous rightsmovement are often considered by the people concernedto be battles about livelihood, liberty, poverty allevia-tion, and access to development or social services. In-



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deed, when and if culture enters into local narratives, itis usually as an adjunct to other concerns. Southern Af-ricas San people are frustrated not because they cannotpursue their traditional culture but because they areimpoverished, marginalized, and exploited by the dom-inant population.

Thus, while the indigenous rights message may pro-vide succour to Europeans anxious to convince them-selves of the sanctity of other ways of being and doing,it also fuels ethnic tensions in Third World states at-tempting to build a national identity from the debris ofcolonial fiefdoms. As a result, proponents of an unso-phisticated indigenous rights message are easily dis-missed by anxious Third World governments as unin-formed and arrogant neocolonials.

Many ethnically fragmented African states that havehad to cope with the legacy of colonial divide-and-rulepolicies have developed flexible and imaginative ap-proaches to addressing the tensions experienced by theirpeoples between their status as citizens on the onehand and their status as subjects on the other (Mam-dani 1996). Debate on the question of collective versusindividual rights in these states is inevitably bound bythe immediate need to develop practically effective pol-icies towards the accommodation of minority concerns.Not unsurprisingly, these debates expose the tautologicaltwists and loops of the rights conundrum (see Nhlapo1999) that has hamstrung the ratification of the UNsdeclaration on the rights of indigenous people. They alsosuggest that any further elaborations on the basic indi-vidual human rights doctrine must be responsive to localpeculiarities rather than the pursuit of universal appli-cability. Broad critiques such as Kupers may stimulatethose involved in minority rights issues to generate al-ternative approaches to dealing with the problems ex-perienced by marginalized minorities.

Reply

a d a m k u p e rUxbridge, U.K. 3 ii 03

Suzman remarks that the indigenous rights doctrine isout of step with much contemporary anthropological

thinking. This is true, although it must be admittedthat it is thoroughly in step with certain strands of cul-tural theory. Some commentators, however, take theview that academic judgements on the premises andlogic of the doctrine are neither here nor therethatperhaps the rhetoric does come across as essentialist andromantic but, as Robbins remarks, such rhetorical strat-egies often make for effective activism.

Unfortunately, activism, however well-intentioned,does not always work out for the best. The case studiesI summarize in my paper indicate, hardly surprisingly,that if policies are based upon fantasies about primordialhunters rather than on local realities they are liable to

have unfortunate consequences. And a misleading rhet-oric is bound to have its costs. Suzman points out thatthe indigenist discourse promotes stereotypes of primi-tive tribesfolk. In consequence it may well reinforcethe very structures of discrimination that disadvantagethese peoples in the first place. Appeals to culturemay persuade Western audiences, but they can com-pletely drown out the voices of local people. As Suzmannotes, San people in Southern Africa are frustrated notbecause they cannot pursue their traditional culture butbecause they are impoverished, marginalized, and ex-ploited by the dominant population.

Perhaps, then, the rhetoric may be not only bad an-thropology but bad tactics as well. Ramos warns, how-ever, that any criticisms should be muted. Critics pro-vide ammunition to sinister forces with decidedlyunpleasant agendas, including some oppressive govern-ments that, in disclaiming the political agency of indig-enous peoples, attribute their actions to the manipula-tive powers of non-Indian agitators. I accept that thisis a real problem, but I am reluctant to go along withself-censorship. Are we to tell our students that for po-litical reasons weand theyshould pretend to believein ideas that have no intellectual justification? Must wecriticize Victorian evolutionism when it is invoked tojustify discrimination against a minority population butendorse it, or keep silent, when this logic is put to useto support land claims on behalf of the same minority?Should we ignore history for fear of undermining mythsof autochthony?

Even if we could accurately weigh up the medium-and long-term political costs and benefits of saying thisor that, our business should be to deliver accurate ac-counts of social processes. If anthropology becomes, asPlaice remarks, the academic wing of the indigenousrights movement, if we report only what is convenientand refrain from analysing intellectual confusions, thenour ethnographies will be worthless except as propa-ganda. Even as propaganda they will have a rapidly di-minishing value, since the integrity of ethnographicstudies will be increasingly questioned by the informedpublic.

Omura and Robbins raise the possibility that the in-digenist rhetoric can be self-correcting. Imaginative newtwists may be introduced, adapted to local circum-stances. (An interesting example involving the CanadianInuit is presented in Morin [2001].) Beth Conklin de-

scribes such a case in her contribution to the recentAmerican Anthropologist symposium IndigenousRights Movements (Hodgson 2002a)2. Conventional en-vironmental arguments in favour of land grants to in-digenous peoples are discredited in Brazil. Indigenousleaders have been implicated in too many well-publi-cized instances of ecological vandalism. Some activiststherefore choose rather to emphasize the ancient folkwisdom of shamans. As Conklin explains, this allows

2. The introductory essay (Hodgson 2002b) reviews recent litera-ture. This issue appeared after my paper had been circulated forcommentary.



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them to construct new discourses about indigenouspeoples identities by appealing to fashionable ideasabout indigenous knowledge. She points out furtherstrategic advantages. Brazilian nationalists were reluc-tant to alienate vast swaths of forest to particular ethnicminorities, but they are happy to agree that native ex-perts have some sort of collective copyright in ancientmedical lore. Awkward questions about political repre-sentation can also be avoided: Whereas the figure of thechief can raise the empirically testable question ofwhether a certain individual has or deserves his peoplessupport, Conklin suggests, the figure of the shamancircumvents such questions (2002:105355). In otherwords, spiritual leaders are not required to be democrats.This is creative enough, but I do not see that the newdoctrines represent a more reliable basis for social policythan the old pieties of the indigenist movement.

Omura and Ramos emphasize, very properly, that notall indigenous movements are the same, which I wouldhave thought a good argument against saddling them allwith the same ideology. A number of recent ethnogra-phies do bring out the specifics of local situations andexamine the strategies of particular state agencies ofNGOs. In an exemplary essay published in the recent

American Anthropologist symposium, Kirk Dom-browski lays out the interplay between U.S. governmentagencies, agro-businesses, and native leaders in the de-velopment of the Alaska Native Timber policies. Hefinds that industrial timber and pulp producers in south-eastern Alaska recognize Native claims for tactical rea-sons, since this helps them to evade environmental lawsthat were intended to curb production. He also reportsthat two classes of Natives have emerged, one madeup of people who became shareholders in terms of theAlaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 and theother of people, born afterwards and known as NewNatives, who are not shareholders and do not share inthe profits of the native corporations. Locally led evan-gelical Christian churches are now organizing a popularopposition to the indigenist movement (Dombrowski2002).

But while local case studies are often illuminating,various indigenist movements do share many features,both ideological and tactical. In part this is becauseAmerican and Canadian activists have fostered a com-mon approach, and the role of international agencies andNGOs deserves more scholarly attention than it is get-

ting. Several anthropologists have related the emergenceof the indigenous peoples movement to an even morewidespread fashion for movements of ethnic assertion.Attempts have been made to identify the global forcesthat produce them (see, e.g., Friedman 1994, Hannerz1996). The example of racial and ethnic movements inthe U.S.A., the end of the cold war, and the rise of NGOsare all relevant. The Internet has become the indispen-sable medium of internationalization. Big businesssometimes intervenes, although I doubt that it is helpfulto attribute the current wave of indigenist movementsto the mysterious workings of an otherwise poorly de-fined process of globalization or to the malign work-

ings of late capitalism that Dombrowski invokes. Per-haps capitalism is not as late as all that. Certainlyglobalization is neither as new nor as global as is widelyassumed. The discourse on globalization recalls Victo-rian ideas about the inexorable spread of civilization.Like the old enemies of civilization, those who inveighagainst globalization seem to expect the Noble Savageto stand in its way, like Obelix the Gaul hurling menhirsat the Romans.

Finally, Plaice expresses the fear that we may be forcedto watch on the sidelines while those recently con-quered suffer a fate shared by millions throughout his-tory whose societies have disintegrated. Yet she herselfhas demonstrated that ethnographers can contributefresh and realistic definitions of social problems bycoolly analysing the fluid and complex situations on theground and dissecting the goals of various agents. Suchstudies clarify the pros and cons of specific public poli-cies, and that is a worthwhile objective.

I am grateful to the colleagues who have responded tomy paper and helped to advance the argument.

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