it may be reasonably objected that formal attempts to define the indigenous can only be understood in the political context of peoples’ struggles, against the odds, to restore their security, dignity, well-being and self-esteem after years of marginalisation and oppression. The intent and meaning of any definition…must lie in the effort to reconfigure the relations between a historically disadvantaged…minority and the encompassing nation state. To focus excusively on criteria of eligibility [i.e. descent]…in isolation from the contexts of their application, surely misses the point. My response to this objection is simply to stress that what follows is not intended as a contribution to the analysis of relations between indigenous minorities and nation states…To observe that people face a genuine dilemma in articulating their aspirations within the hegemonic discourse of their erstwhile oppressors is not to question the worth or integrity of their political project. They may indeed have no alternative (p.133 Perception of the Environment)

But he does try to explain how such thinking came about. The conclusion of this section (p.151) contains an argument that the opposition between indigenous and non-indigenous is a product of colonial history, and a definition rendered from the viewpoint of colonial authorities. The genealogical model is a colonial model – land is a surface to be occupied, with settlers bringing endowments of heritable substance and knowledge with them. The idea of belonging as inherited was not originally part of indigenous people’s worldview but has come to be adopted by them due to the exigencies of finding themselves citizens of nation-states. In order to express difference within predominant discourses of homogeneity (i.e. citizenship) they have to create representations of identity; a series of properties or attributes that belong to them alone. So relational experience becomes attributional definition.

So although Ingold can help explain how the genealogical model creates dilemmas like the one Wilk found himself in, how to extricate oneself is a much bigger ask.

Ingold has a footnote where he evades the question of how his critque of the ‘indigenous’ concept might relate to the political struggles of groups in contemporary post-colonial societies who claim that status. He is too PC to tell them he thinks they are wrong!

This kind of struggle can get pretty hairy for an anthropologist. Rick Wilk (U. of Indiana) once mentioned in personal conversation that he had been caught in a situation where the people he worked with (descendants of black African slaves) would be dispossessed of land on which they had lived for more than two centuries if he testified correctly that Native Americans who were claiming to be “indigenous” were right if you went back far enough.

When I referred to the role of anthropology in defining indigeneity, I certainly didn’t mean that anthro was solely responsible, or that it should take the lion’s share of the blame. I just meant to suggest our role has been important in this process, and whatever that role has been it is worth thinking about. To quibble about ‘defining’ versus ‘inheriting’ is futile since the concepts are continually reworked, rediscovered and redefined in practice by academics and their subjects – my point isnt ‘who came up with the idea’ but ‘what is our role in the process by which indigeneity is created/imagined’.

The morally quagmiric bit comes in this formation and tacit acceptance of the concept, not erroneous usages of it. Yes, the Hamitic hypothesis in Rwanda was first formed by Speke in the 1800s. But the present-day anthropo-linguistic replacement of that story is just another account of indigeneity: The hunter-gatherer Twa were there first, then came the invading agriculturalist Bantu-speaking peoples. It’s the underlying genealogical assumptions that I worry about. How do people partake in the ‘aboriginality’ of their predecessors? What substance is passed on? How does this connect them to land? Anthropology has imported this ‘genealogical model’ (sensu Ingold) into the notions of culture and ethnicity that you refer to in your last sentence. Ingold provides a pretty decent critique of these ideas, and so in a tangental way does James Leach in ‘Creative Land’ (which I think you have read) – in fact Ingold cites Leach’s PhD. But both of them are interested in the matter theoretically – Ingold has a footnote where he evades the question of how his critque of the ‘indigenous’ concept might relate to the political struggles of groups in contemporary post-colonial societies who claim that status. He is too PC to tell them he thinks they are wrong!

The example of Rwanda and the Hamitic hypothesis is a good case in point — is nineteenth century diffusionist theory ‘anthropology’? Particularly the stuff that is spun-out from a reading of Genesis? Or that Radcliffe-Brown built British anthropology as a reaction _against_ diffusionism? We know that story is wrong today BECAUSE OF anthropology, not despite it.

There were a lot of disciplines in play during this period which shaped Europe’s knowledge of its colonies — church apologetics, orientalism, classics, history, eugenics, historicial jurisprudence, philology, racial science, and others. Anthropology might claim some as ancestors. But the discipline as we know it now wasn’t around — all of OUR sins (and there are many) are of much more recent vintage.

Obviously anthropology (like the agricultural sciences) came of age during the colonial era. But that is a mucb broader (and less interesting) claim from saying that it “defined” rather than “inherited” morally quagmiric definitions of ‘native’ and ‘indigenous.’ Although to be fair I bet that anthropology did create in some distinct way a notion of culture and ethnicity that was connected with third worldism, elite reethnicization, and decolonization.

This was the source of my wider claim about Anthropological culpability. I don’t doubt the early origins of the concept of indigineity, but I think you would have to recognise that Anthropology as a disciplibe grew up with those same “really nasty historical processes” that you mention. Anthropology gives legitimacy to the concept because it in many ways developed as the ‘Science of the Indigenous’. And this plays out in everything from telling people their history, to hiding the TVs as you mention. What I was really thinking about though was the way we have unreflexively accepted the truth of the concept, or accepted it as a ‘political’ or ‘social’ truth and let it go. I suppose I am thinking of Ingold’s critique in Perception of the Environment, or Kuper’s recent Current Anth piece.

Today there’s a wide literature on how people have to ‘perform indigeneity’ in the courtroom or whatever in order to get into the indigenous slot, and of course in some situations (especially Australia) anthropologists are made to testify about who is and isn’t indigenous. But I think the terms ‘native’ ‘first nation’ ‘indigenous’ came about are the results of really nasty historical processes that occurred well before the rise of anthropology as a discipline. If Pagden’s argument in _The Fall of Natural Man_ is correct, the label of ‘indigenous’ probably owes more to Catholic clergy and military forces reading Aristotle in light of the new world than anything else.

The thing about Africa (which makes it like PNG but South America etc.) is that there is no large settler population against whom one can be ‘indigenous.’

I think you would find that there is quite a bit of variation actually – certainly South Africa, Zimbabwe etc. wouldn’t fit that claim. I am pretty sure in Rwanda after independence that the majority Hutu took to claiming that the Tutsi were foreign invaders (after years of Belgian support for the Tutsi according to the racial classifications of Rwanda’s colonial history) which, of course, built up to the violence in the 90s. There is a pretty vast literature on the latter case.

I actually think the role of Anthropology in defining ‘indigineity’ or ‘nativism’ is a moral quagmire that we have never really confronted.

Conklin and Graham, AA 1995 “The Shifting Middle Ground” (as well as their 1997 AE article on Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs).

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Mauro Almeida in Daedalus, “Indigenous People, Traditional People, and Conservation in the Amazon”

Andre Beteille “The Idea of Indigenous People” in Current Anthropology 1998

Tanya Murray Lee “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 2000 (I am a *big* fan of her work in particular)

The thing about Africa (which makes it like PNG but South America etc.) is that there is no large settler population against whom one can be ‘indigenous.’ Even in countries where there is a clear ethnic majority that runs things the situation is one of ‘majority’ versus ‘minority’ (a la Dru Gladney’s 1998 edited volume ‘Making Majorities’) rather than indigeneity.

It’s interesting to think about the position of Taiwanese ‘indigenes’ since in China similar people are part of the Approved Ethnic Minority System and haven’t really been labeled ‘indigenous’ afaik (this is similar to Indonesia, where ‘indigneous’ is only now gaining traction).

The up point of ‘indigenous’ is that it brings a lot of attention (and $$) from ‘global civil society.’ The downside is that you have to hide all the TVs in the village if you want the EU to build water tanks there.