Content area
Full Text
Key Words
postcolonial ethnicity, indigenous rights, populism, indigenous movements, multiculturalism
Abstract
Throughout the twentieth century, social and cultural policies toward indigenous peoples in Latin America have been closely related to indigenismo, an ideological movement that denounced the exploitation of aboriginal groups and strove for the cultural unity and the extension of citizenship through social integration and "acculturation." This review traces the colonial and nineteenth-century roots of indigenismo and places it in the context of the populist tendencies in most Latin American states from the 1920s to the 1970s, which favored economic protectionism and used agrarian reform and the provision of services as tools for governance and legitimacy. Also examined is the role of anthropological research in its relation to state hegemony as well as the denunciation of indigenista policies by ethnic intellectuals and organizations. In recent decades, the dismantling of populist policies has given rise to a new official "neoliberal" discourse that extols multiculturalism. However, the widespread demand for multicultural policies is also seen as the outcome of the fight by militant indigenous organizations for a new type of citizenship.
INTRODUCTION
The concept "indigenous people" gained legitimacy in the contemporary vocabulary of international law with the creation in 1982 of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) (Gray 1997, pp. 9, 13-15). The establishment of this group, which meets annually, helped to open up a new political space. In the words of its chairperson, the WGIP has allowed grassroots movements "to gain direct access to the UN" (quoted by Karlsson 2003, p. 403; see also Gray 1997). It has also influenced NGOs, state institutions, and international development agencies-the World Bank included-to express greater concern for the plight of "the indigenous" and to propose new strategies and policies designed to benefit them. In turn, numerous social movements worldwide have adopted the term "indigenous people" as a self-identifying and self-empowering label that epitomizes a past of oppression and that legitimizes their search for social, cultural, and political rights (Karlsson 2003, pp. 404-6). (An important leader of the Miskito movement in Nicaragua once told me: "As peoples, we are entitled to free self-determination; as ethnic groups, we are objects of anthropological study.") Anthropologists have also contributed to the diffusion of the term, although recently there...