Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism

Tracey Heatherington, Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2010. 314 pages.

The category of indigeneity has by now become a highly mobile form, migrating not just from "original" contexts such as the Americas into new terrains such as Africa and Asia, but, astonishingly and somewhat counter- intuitively, into the margins of Europe. In Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism, Tracey Heatherington's interlocutors, sheep herders in central Sardinia who have for decades struggled against the establishment of a national park on their communally held land, ruefully call themselves "Indians" from whom "the land is being stolen." Yet in Sardinia as elsewhere, such local alignments with a transnationally available politics are heavily mediated by environmentalists. To them, indigenous groups are only recognizable if they behave in properly indigenous ways; if they are slottable as eco-saints seamlessly aligned with what is deemed to be appropriate ecological behavior.

At the same time, many environmentalists use the category of indigeneity as a reservoir for their own conceptualizations of themselves as activists with a "spiritual" relationship to the land. This is why Heatherington's title metaphor of "dreamtimes of environmentalism"-the tendency on the part of environmentalists to misappropriate indigenous identities (19) and to spin out of their presumed cultural materials a highly moralized narrative of sacred, timeless nature-is an apt one (22-23). It underscores not only the neo-primitivist cadence of some global environmentalisms, but the profound effects this may have for local populations whom environmentalists seek to align with their own visions and dreams. It is at such moments that global dreamtimes become nightmares for local peoples, who are all too often so tightly trapped within the bounds of their presumed ecological and cultural alterity that any attempts to assert their own visions outside of these parameters are bound to fail.

Of course, Heatherington uses indigeneity quite irreverently as well, even as she acknowledges that there is "considerable awkwardness in using this category" in the Sardinian context (53). But the reasons to do so are multiple. After all, the people of Orgosolo, the small, very poor central Sardinian town where Heatherington's rich and imaginative ethnography is set, have been widely celebrated for protecting the local Commons from enclosure and...