"Land, Water, and Truth": San Identity and Global Indigenism

Abstract

San peoples of southern Africa followed two very different trajectories through the 20th century. For some groups, colonial rule and apartheid meant segregation on geographically remote homelands (or in game parks); for the majority of San, however, they meant incorporation as a landless underclass of farm laborers, domestic servants, and squatters. This bifurcated history now presents obstacles to the recognition of a nascent pan–San identity as the contemporary San join other indigenous peoples in struggles over land rights, control over natural resources, and political voice in national and international arenas. This article discusses some of the ways in which international models of indigenism have colluded with essentialist conceptions of culture and ethnicity to (1) prevent the recognition of the San peoples' cultural identity, as it is shaped by their various historical experiences and socioeconomic conditions, and (2) distort the understanding of San claims for land and natural resources by transforming San struggles for social and economic justice into demands for "cultural preservation." [Keywords: indigenous peoples, San, southern Africa, social movements, cultural politics]

Tania Li, Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indiginous Frontier

“…Land's End presents a culmination of relational historical-realist thinking about how capitalist change involves indigenous people, emerging in the wake of the late twenty-first century global rise of indigenist activism. Such thinking is already seen in Tania Li's earlier work (Li 2000(Li , 2010, and also in that of anthropologists working in similar places where capitalist changes in the relational context that indigenous people live in did not come in the form of dispossession through large-scale, internationally financed development projects or multi-national companies, but in more subtle and insidious forms (see, for example, Dombrowski 2002, Steur 2014, Sylvain 2002. The point of such work has not just been to deconstruct colonial or essentialist notions of indigeneity as capitalist modernity's Other but to understand the tremendous role that class processes and a capitalist relational context have in directing and limiting change in indigenous livelihoods and politics.…”

Gambling debt: Iceland's rise and fall in the global economy

“…The Best Party does not fit well into any of these categories. It is not built on a single issue, as we see in many of the social movements described in anthropological texts, for example, women's rights (see Reddy 2005;Kristmundsdóttir 1997;Simonian 2005;Stephen 2005), HIV (Susser 2005), land and water rights (Sylvian 2005), globalization (Albro 2005;Doane 2005;Grimes 2005), and peace (Rutherford 2005;Bond 2005). The group has no history in politics and does not seek to ally itself with any particular social grouping or sector, as many separatist movements do.…”

Casualties of Heritage Distancing

“…Mortensen (2005Mortensen ( :65-72, 2009a While Honduran Ch'orti' identity is complex and diversely expressed, it does follow the general trends of the indigenous-rights discourse of self-determination-broadly construed as autonomy over local political processes, control of land and natural resources, and the right to self-representation (Sylvain 2002(Sylvain :1079 In this sense, the site core has become a symbol of the longevity and resilience of the Ch'orti' in Honduras.…”