Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics PDF Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691225303
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics. The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics PDF Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691225303
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book

Book Description
In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics. The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America

Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America PDF Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292786743
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity. The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin America. They address the double binds of indigenous organizing and "working within the system" as well as the flexibility of political tactics used to achieve cultural goals outside the scope of state politics. The contributors answer questions about who speaks for indigenous communities, how indigenous movements relate to the popular left, and how conflicts between the national indigenous leadership and local communities play out in specific cultural and political contexts. The volume sheds new light on the realities of asymmetrical power relations and on the ways in which indigenous communities and their representatives employ Western constructions of subjectivity, alterity, and authentic versus counterfeit identity, as well as how they manipulate bureaucratic structures, international organizations, and the mass media to advance goals that involve distinctive visions of an indigenous future.

Indigenous Interfaces

Indigenous Interfaces PDF Author: Jennifer Gomez Menjivar
Publisher: Critical Issues in Indigenous
ISBN: 081653800X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
"This book explores how Indigenous people in Mesoamerica use social networks to alter, enhance, preserve, and contribute to self-representation"--Provided by publisher.

The Transit of Empire

The Transit of Empire PDF Author: Jodi A. Byrd
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452933170
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Examines how “Indianness” has propagated U.S. conceptions of empire

Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples PDF Author: Jolan Hsieh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135514275
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
The focus of this book is on the PingPu peoples in Taiwan and their right to official recognition as "indigenous peoples" by the Taiwanese government. The result of centuries of colonization, indigenous tribes in Taiwan have faced severe cultural repression because of the government's refusal to accept ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity. The PingPu Status Recognition Movement is the result of a decade of activism by impassioned people seeking the right to self-determination, autonomy, and tribal legitimacy from the Han-Chinese-controlled Taiwanese government. This book examines, through in-depth interviews, questionnaires, field observations, and analysis of governmental and United Nations documents, the perspectives of those directly involved in the movement, as well as those affected by "indigenous" status recognition. Study of the PingPu Indigenous movement is vitally important as it publicly declares Taiwanese Indigenous population's humanity and collective rights and provides a more comprehensive analysis of identity-based movements as a fundamental form of collective human rights claims.

Policing Indigenous Movements

Policing Indigenous Movements PDF Author: Andrew Crosby
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN: 1773630458
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In recent years, Indigenous peoples have lead a number of high profile movements fighting for social and environmental justice in Canada. From land struggles to struggles against resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking, land and water defenders have created a national discussion about these issues and successfully slowed the rate of resource extraction. But their success has also meant an increase in the surveillance and policing of Indigenous peoples and their movements. In Policing Indigenous Movements, Crosby and Monaghan use the Access to Information Act to interrogate how policing and other security agencies have been monitoring, cataloguing and working to silence Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism. Through an examination of four prominent movements — the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation — this important book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, the criminalization of dissent and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance. In one of the most comprehensive accounts of contemporary government surveillance, the authors vividly demonstrate that it is the norms of settler colonialism that allow these movements to be classified as national security threats and the growing network of policing, governmental, and private agencies that comprise what they call the security state.

Red Skin, White Masks

Red Skin, White Masks PDF Author: Glen Sean Coulthard
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

Engaged Anthropology

Engaged Anthropology PDF Author: Stuart Kirsch
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520297946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Does anthropology have more to offer than just its texts? In this timely and remarkable book, Stuart Kirsch shows how anthropology can—and why it should—become more engaged with the problems of the world. Engaged Anthropology draws on the author’s experiences working with indigenous peoples fighting for their environment, land rights, and political sovereignty. Including both short interventions and collaborations spanning decades, it recounts interactions with lawyers and courts, nongovernmental organizations, scientific experts, and transnational corporations. This unflinchingly honest account addresses the unexamined “backstage” of engaged anthropology. Coming at a time when some question the viability of the discipline, the message of this powerful and original work is especially welcome, as it not only promotes a new way of doing anthropology, but also compellingly articulates a new rationale for why anthropology matters.

Reconciliation, Nations and Churches in Latin America

Reconciliation, Nations and Churches in Latin America PDF Author: Iain S. Maclean
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131707047X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book examines the recent phenomenon in Latin America of national Truth and Reconciliation commissions. Few studies have examined the role of Churches or religion in political processes that proclaim valued theological terms as their agenda - truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This book questions the role of religion, specifically of established Churches. The impact of such reconciliation commissions on Indigenous Native Americans is also examined, as is the role of women and how both commissions and Churches or religions were challenged by their experiences. The contributors offer differing perspectives on one or more national truth and reconciliation processes and thus offer a collection that serves as valuable source for the disciplines of Religious Studies, Ethics, Theology, Political Science, Social Sciences and Women's Studies.

A Finger in the Wound

A Finger in the Wound PDF Author: Diane M. Nelson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520920606
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Many Guatemalans speak of Mayan indigenous organizing as "a finger in the wound." Diane Nelson explores the implications of this painfully graphic metaphor in her far-reaching study of the civil war and its aftermath. Why use a body metaphor? What body is wounded, and how does it react to apparent further torture? If this is the condition of the body politic, how do human bodies relate to it—those literally wounded in thirty-five years of war and those locked in the equivocal embrace of sexual conquest, domestic labor, mestizaje, and social change movements? Supported by three and a half years of fieldwork since 1985, Nelson addresses these questions—along with the jokes, ambivalences, and structures of desire that surround them—in both concrete and theoretical terms. She explores the relations among Mayan cultural rights activists, ladino (nonindigenous) Guatemalans, the state as a site of struggle, and transnational forces including Nobel Peace Prizes, UN Conventions, neo-liberal economics, global TV, and gringo anthropologists. Along with indigenous claims and their effect on current attempts at reconstituting civilian authority after decades of military rule, Nelson investigates the notion of Quincentennial Guatemala, which has given focus to the overarching question of Mayan—and Guatemalan—identity. Her work draws from political economy, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, and has special relevance to ongoing discussions of power, hegemony, and the production of subject positions, as well as gender issues and histories of violence as they relate to postcolonial nation-state formation.