Anti-Indigenous Film Broadcast in Sweden

Ideologies designed to undercut any indigenous claims to their identities and territories have long been a part of Eurocentric imperialist propaganda, with the hope that the home audience will be consume this ideological material. Indigenous peoples know where they stand and are not likely to be “persuaded” by assertions that they do not exist. In anthropology today, for example, once again we see the revival of arguments that indigenous peoples do not exist as such, at best they are ethnic minorities. There is indeed a debate that has been generated in part by the writings of Adam Kuper that the very concept of “indigenous” implies primitivism, exoticism, and racism, without however asking who reads it as such, and without investigating the myriad ways in which the concept is redeployed, adapted, and articulated by indigenous peoples themselves in the present.

There are two sides to a Catch-22 situation that has been set up for indigenous peoples:

One side is what I call anti-indigenous essentialism: indigenous cultures are those encountered in 1492, and since they are no longer identical to the cultures of that time, indigenous peoples have ceased to exist culturally, and even biologically if they dared to commit the sin of creating families with peoples of other nations. Thus an indigenous person today, who is seen to wear jeans and speak English, as two random examples, has his or her head forced under the water of anti-indigenous essentialism for daring to not be a carbon-copy replica of the past, for failing to be a breathing museum piece.

The other side is what I call anti-indigenous anti-essentialism: those indigenous groups that claim long historical continuity, that continue to wear traditional costumes during special ceremonies, that claim unbroken ancestry, are charged with being frauds. All cultures change, goes the argument, so anyone trying to show seamless continuity is simply putting on a show.

If you accept either of those sides of the debate, you find yourself in a Eurocentric Catch-22 designed to make the very idea of “indigenous” implode.

From:
http://groups.google.com/group/first-nations-skyvillage/browse_thread/
thread/19e2ee040b425d26?hl=en

If you would like to express your outrage about this film, you can write the Director, Poul Erik Heilbuth, at plh@dr.dk. You can also write to the documentary department of Swedish TV for airing it, dokumentarfilm@svt.se

Anti-Indigenous Propaganda film airs on Swedish TV February 8, 2008

http://intercontinentalcry.org/
anti-indigenous-propaganda-film-aires-on-swedish-tv/

This past Monday,

Swedish Television aired “Historiens Fångar” (History’s Prisoners) – an anti-indigenous propaganda film that claims there are no traditional Indigenous cultures left in the world, and that the only chance of survival for the remaining ‘drunk and pathetic few’ is through assimilating into colonial society. “The most notable voice in the program,” Jim Barrett explains, is Keith Windschuttle, author of “the Fabrication of Aboriginal History, a controversial book that attempts to resurrect an array of colonial fallacies toward indigenous people: that colonization was justified, “that Australia was never truly owned by its original inhabitants, that they were too savage to understand such a concept as property, too primitive to organise a war and too vulnerable to survive settlement.” Another speaker in the film is David Yeagley, who, according to Wikipedia (once upon a time. The page has been gutted) is “a white supremacist who poses as a Comanche Indian. He was mistakenly enrolled in the Comanche Nation because the stepmother who adopted him is Comanche. He falsely claims descent from the Comanche leader, Bad Eagle (1839-1909). Comanche elders and members of the tribal government all deny he is actually Comanche. In 2006 Yeagley, his employer David Horowitz, and Front Page magazine used legal threats to try to silence Kiowa activist Cinda Hughes and the Native American Times for revealing his impersonation. Apparently, the film also features someone from “One Nation United,” a privately funded, anti-indian lobby group based out of Oklahoma. The social and political integrity of these characters speaks directly to the legitimacy of the position maintained in the film. It’s propaganda — a film drenched in archaic and biased, insulated opinions that will utterly misinform every viewer. But don’t take my word for it. See it for yourself. “History’s Prisoners” It is currently available online. (it’s in English). It’s also set to air on Swedish TV once more, this coming Sunday.

Indigenism and Essentialism, 2

In a previous post on “Anti-Anti-Essentialism,” I began by outlining some of what I think are the problems with anti-essentialism in anthropology, one of the now dominant conceptual pillars of the discipline. I wish to add a few more personal notes to that here.

Again, this is by no means “finished” work, but more like doodling for a public audience (always in hope of feedback), in keeping with the spirit of “open anthropology”.

I have been more interested in “anti-essentialism” as a rhetorical and political strategy than as simply a philosophical position. I have been specifically interested in essentialism and the politics of indigenous representation. As far as I can see, while essentialism may be inevitable (see that previous post), it is not clear that anti-essentialism is always the same as anti-indigenism, that is, opposed to the representability of the indigenous as indigenous.

Let us consider some examples of the range of positions:

• anti-indigenous anti-essentialism: disclaiming any effort, of any kind, to even speak of the “indigenous” as itself fundamentally and inescapably entailing essentialism. To be against essentialism in this case means that no identity that permits ideas of commonality and historical continuity is valid. Exemplars of such thinking are Adam Kuper (1993, 2003, 2005) in anthropology (whose work will be discussed at greater length in future posts);

• anti-indigenous essentialism: this is much more common outside of academia, and can be easily encountered in popular discussions about indigenous identity and indigenous rights in places such as Canada, the United States, and Australia. The idea here is simply that of the “real Indian” or the “real Aboriginal”–to be considered real, depending on the culture in question, one must look, speak, dress, and/or live in an “authentic” aboriginal manner, which means without any signs of change having occurred in the past five hundred years.

• pro-indigenous essentialism: this is much less common, and takes us back into academia as well as advocacy. The position is more or less represented in the work of Andrew Lattas (1993), and again I will defer further consideration of his contribution. The basic idea here is that representational strategies used by indigenous representatives which adopt essentialist tactics (of perhaps dressing up to meet dominant white expectations of Aboriginal difference, autenticity, and continuity) are in fact valuable and useful if they help Aboriginals to achieve their social and political aims. Moreover, the role of the anthropologist should not be to criticize and dismantle such representational strategies–anthropologists should not feel free to morally authorize themselves to act as expert arbiters of other people’s forms of indentification, and they should not impose themselves as those authorized to create pristine political positions.

• pro-indigenous anti-essentialism: this is a perspective that one would expect to find clearly articulated as such in the works of academics, but remains, I think, somewhat muted. To some extent one can find this in the works of two New Zealand anthropologists, Steven Webster (1993) and Jeffrey Sissons (2005), as well as in the work of Jonathan Warren (2001) on “post-traditional Indians” in Brazil. The idea here is that reinforcing expectations of continuity, cultural survival, and strong traits of indigenous difference will work to bolster ideas of “the real Indian” (see anti-indigenous essentialism above), and that this is a flaw of both anti-indigenous essentialism and pro-indigenous essentialism. What is lost in essentialisms of the kind outlined above is a notion of culture as resistance, of processual modes of identification, of new ways of being and becoming indigenous through the adaptation and incorporation of the “stuff” of modernity and cultural creolization.

Unfortunately, in the case of pro-indigenous anti-essentialism, one finds readers coming to many mistaken impressions. Those sympathetic to aboriginal causes might think that any discussion of how cultures are changed, or traditions “invented”, must be an indictment of those aboriginal causes–as Jean Jackson once put it, what is at work is a stereotype that for culture to be deemed “good culture” it cannot be seen as having been “corrupted” by the everyday workings of culture brokers. The accusation against the pro-indigenous anti-essentialist is that he/she is “deconstructing” indigeneity and revealing it to somehow be fake or adulterated. In my view, the problem rests entirely with the accuser.

In my own work, I tend to gravitate between both pro-indigenous essentialism and and pro-indigenous anti-essentialism, usually with greater emphasis on the latter. Either way, I think it is the duty of the anthropologist to not come to a decision of which of these is the preferable choice without consultation with, if not subordination to, the predominant tendencies voiced by one’s indigenous partners.

Anti-anti-essentialism. 1

I tell people that I am an “anti-anti-essentialist.” I am still working on what that is supposed to mean, so let me do this in bits and pieces, and this is the first entry for this topic.

I am not at all convinced that essentialism–the notion, in anthropology, that a culture or ethnicity consists of fixed traits, is unchanging, without variation, and endures perhaps above or below history — is either always politically negative (a common assumption being that essentialism, virtually by definition rather than by practice, is implicated with the likes of Nazi ideology, racism, etc.), is analytically flawed, nor am I convinced that essentialism is even indispensable to our basic analytical thought patterns. That is a general introduction.

Let me focus on the difference between essentialist and processual understandings of indigenous identity, for now, because this is something I address in my teaching in ANTH 303, Indigenous Cultures Today, and thus the example comes readily to mind. We will see how essentialism becomes unavoidable: it is the firmament.

An essentialist understanding of an indigenous identity would focus on surviving cultural traits, those practices and customs, objects and ideas, that have survived colonialism with little or no change. Of course if “everything is constantly invented” then that alone requires that you have one eye on something fixed and stable by which you determine that something else is being “constantly invented.” Then we have to ask, how would we, the outside observers, know what is changing? With reference to what? How “deep” is the change? How do we distinguish between minor and significant changes, and serious Change? There are such things that, if they change at all, change too slowly for any of us to perceive the change, especially those of us who are outsiders to begin with and are not in a position to judge.

Rather than dismiss cultural change, I am just saying for now that matters are not quite as simple as the anti-essentialists would have us believe. If there is a problem that essentialist definitions pose, it is that whole areas of indigenized change may be dismissed as not being “truly indigenous.” Essentialism can also deny people the active role they can perform in changing their minds, doing things differently, selecting, and reinterpreting. That is why I am not pro-essentialist, though I can sound that way if the politics of contention in a given situation demand it.

A processual understanding of indigenous identity is one that is not fixated on traits, but focused on struggle, struggles that renew indigeneity, that provide new arenas and means for being and becoming indigenous. If essentialism internalizes, processualism externalizes: indigeneity is relational, it involves parties locked in contention. As the New Zealand anthropologist, Steven Webster, put this: “Maori culture is not something that has been lost, it is the loss; being ‘a Maori’ is struggling to be a Maori” (Webster 1993: 228).

So why not just endorse processualism and call that a day?

One reason is that processualism externalizes indigeneity–it focused on relations with or against others. It has no “internal” life, no received history, no “stories that mama used to tell me.”

Another reason for not simply endorsing processualism–and this is why I say that essentialism can never be avoided–is that processualism can bear essentialist fruits:

Vignette:

A man from the Navajo Reservation in Colorado asks the activist, “what tribe do you come from? You call yourself an Indian, but you don’t live on any rez!” [essentialist]

The Indian activist: “What the hell kind of Indian are you? I don’t recall seeing you at the Seige of Alcatraz? I don’t remember your face from Wounded Knee.” [processualist cum essentialist]

We can take the reverse situation, where essentialism becomes processual, relational, and historical–all the things that the anti-essentialists say that essentialism cannot be. An essentialist representation (“this is our culture, this is who we are, what we do, we speak this language, eat this food, this is the way it has always been”) is itself an active construction, it is the result of agency, and it is usually brought into play in a relationship with or against others. In other words, there is no essentialism that is divorced from process.

What conclusion can we draw? Well one conclusion is a particularly dismissive one, and I am afraid that I must endorse it: the concept, outside of abstract philosophy, aside from metaphysics, is actually an empty concept because it is consistently undermined and upheld, in almost equal measure (depending on the situation), in actual practice.

The critique of essentialism in cultural analysis is the critique of nothing.