I am currently working with a group of scholars here in Helsinki on the discourse of global indigeneity or indigenism following the September 2007 adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the UN General Assembly. We are reading through some contemporary anthropological and legal literature on the topic, and presenting case studies from our own research. Last week we discussed Cameroon, and in particular the Mbororo. This week we are moving to Indonesia and transformations in adat and tribal identity there. We will be discussing Sami as well. If our cases span the globe, this is because the construct ‘indigenous’ has become more and more persuasive in recent years precisely through linkages that are transnational in nature. How are these linkages sustained culturally and organizationally? What has drawn diverse people(s) together? As Ronald Niezen points out, indigenous activism is in a sense necessarily transnational because it seeks a politics that does not conform to the liberal logic of the nation-state. Reflexive ‘cross-nationality’ is thus a key component of successful indigenous organizing, drawing on national boundaries and cultures of nationality but cutting across them, putting them under erasure, so to speak.

This is one claim that Anna Tsing makes in an essay called ‘Indigenous Voice.’ (No, SM is not becoming an Anna Tsing fan site — I wanted to post this before Kerim’s recent posts, but Kerim’s prodigious blogging can hardly be matched.) Tsing argues that political identities must sustain a public to have effect, and they do this through a ‘voice’ that can be heard:

I track variations in the public articulation of indigeneity in different places. I follow not the ambivalence of ordinary people but the claims of those who set the terms of discussion — for example, activists, community leaders, and public intellectuals. Their claims become influential discursive frames to the extent they can gain both a following and an audience. These frames inform what one might call ‘indigenous voice.’ By voice, I am referring to the genre conventions with which public affirmations of identity are articulated. Because it is the genre convention, not the speaker him or herself, that has power, totally unknown people can speak with this kind of voice; but they must speak in a way that an audience can hear.

One might expect then to read an essay about kinds of speech, an analysis of rhetoric or register, a focus on discourse and text, as well as an essay about the conceptual (discursive, cultural) preconditions that precede and enable transnational recognition. However, Tsing follows this argument with a further thesis: “Cross-National Links Inform Transnational Fora.” What follows are lucid little synopses of different (national) cases and their (cross-national) linkages, each illustrating one axis around which indigenous political organizing gathers. Her first example is the connection between Canadian First Nations activism and New Zealand Maori activism in the 1970s — she boldly claims that this particular transnational axis is the most consequential source of contemporary rhetorics of sovereignty in indigenous movements (cf. Michael Brown in the same volume). Further examples concern ‘pluri-ethnic autonomy’ in the Americas, and environmental stewardship in the Amazon and elsewhere. At each of these sites, people secure political purchase by finding ‘allies’ in other national settings (sometimes the alliance is unreciprocated; some groups, unbeknownst to them, become models for others). This all makes a lot of sense and the essay is not merely celebratory, but points out problems (fissures or ‘friction’) generated along each of Tsing’s comparative poles.

Yet I was still left wondering. A principle (in fact, the main) analytic difficulty with the concept of ‘indigeneity’ is defining what it means, as is so often the case with our concepts. Tsing sidesteps this issue by looking at concrete and particular histories of organizing under the indigenous banner. But in doing so, the question of how it is that people are able to see themselves in (an)others’ circumstance, that is, the moment of recognition where a Canadian activist sees his situation in that of a Maori, remains implicit, inchoate, or untheorized. If audience is crucial to voice, the relation between the two in this model is thin. One is left with a simple equation between analogous structural circumstances (marginalized or disenfranchised). This leaves out the question of why people seeking political influence would choose ‘indigenous’ instead of something like simply ‘ethnicity’ or ‘minority.’ In analyzing the ‘frames’ of indigenous discourse, the essay paints a curiously empty picture as to the content of what is being framed.

To my mind, it is that very moment of recognition (and its repetition), and its now notorious cunning, that merits critical reflection. This is in part because of the area of the world in which I work: Papua New Guinea. So far, the discourse of indigeneity has not swept through PNG for structural and historical reasons, principal among these being that most PNG peoples have never experienced expropriation of their lands. Nonetheless, as in the BBC article pictured at the top of this post (featuring a man from PNG’s Western Highlands Province), PNG peoples apparently typify the idea of the indigenous within what might be called ‘the global scene.’ Note crucially that PNG is one of the countries that did not in fact vote on the UN’s Declaration (anyone out there with thoughts or work on PNG and the Declaration, please contact me). So my interests are about people who live under an embracing and magnanimous description that they might nevertheless not themselves recognize.

The content of this discourse I think cannot be summed up merely in an account of axes that frame it: its topoi need to be pictured. Or, alternatively, these frames need to be refigured less as boundaries within which a comparatively empty signifier floats, but as comprising a constitutive intersection, matrix, or topography. An assemblage? A knot? Though she would wish to bracket that moment when one takes up the identity ‘indigenous’ and all the ambivalence this taking up might generate, I think Tsing’s analysis of ‘indigenous voice’ would be strengthened by further modeling of its reverberations and resonances because it is these that reproduce the instances of recognition (and the conventions of performativity informing them) enabling a particular kind of political voice to be heard – and spoken. {I hasten to add that Tsing opens her essay with the observation that this whole discursive field is full of paradox and contradiction.} Consider the voice of Mick Dobson, Australian Aboriginal representative (as quoted in Niezen, p 47). It is moments like the one described below that fascinate me:

My First session at the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations was a moment of tremendous insight and recognition. I was sitting in a room, 12,000 miles away from home, but if I’d closed my eyes I could just about have been in Maningrida or Dommadgee or Finders Island. The people wore different clothes, spoke in different languages or with different accents, and their homes had different names. But the stories and the sufferings were the same. We were all part of a world community of Indigenous peoples spanning the planet; experiencing the same problems and struggling against the same alienation, marginalisation and sense of powerlessness. We had gathered there united by our shared frustration with the dominant systems in our own countries and their consistent failure to deliver justice. We were all looking for, and demanding, justice from a higher authority.