• Home
• About
• Program
• Abstracts
• Papers
• Directions
• Contact

Titles and Abstracts

1. Panel I - Collaborative Articulations: The Challenges of Engaged Anthropology
   1. Terence Turner: Culture, Social Consciousness and Political Mobilization among the Kayapo of Central Brazil
   2. Theodore Macdonald: Indigenous Politics and Politicians: Private Policies and private Actions in Ecuador
   3. Félix Julca-Guerrero: Education and Indigenous Communities: The ‘Yachaq’ or Indigenous Intellectuals
   4. María Elena García: Collaboration in a Postcolonial ‘Contact Zone’: The Challenges of Intercultural Education
   5. Audra Simpson: On Ethnographic Refusal: Citizenship and Nationhood Contemporary Kahnawake
2. Panel II - Politics of Recognition: Media, Arts, and Cultural Revival (Chair: José Antonio Mazzotti)
   1. Luis Millones: Taki Onqoy Reloaded: Contemporary Uses of an Ancient Andean Topic
   2. Víctor Montejo: Maya Organic Intellectuals, Politics and the Baktunian Prophecies
   3. Faye Ginsburg: Rethinking the Digital Age
   4. Jefferson Arak: Los Con Voz, Those With Voice
3. Panel III - Post-Colonial Encounters: Decolonizing Epistemologies and Politics (Chair: María Elena García)
   1. J. Kehaulani Kauanui: Hawaiian Self-Determination and the Politics of Decolonizing Research
   2. José Antonio Lucero: The “African” Origins of Indianismo?: Fausto Reinaga, Frantz Fanon, and the Challenges of Decolonization In Bolivia
   3. Dale Turner: On the Idea of Indigeneity
   4. Jesse Little Doe Baird: Wôpanâôt8âôk: An exercise of action rather than reaction
4. Keynote Speaker Stefano Varese - Indigenous Intellectuals and Decolonizing Anthropologies: The Difficult Dialogue on Dissent

1. Terence Turner (Cornell University, Emeritus): Culture, Social Consciousness and Political Mobilization among the Kayapo of Central Brazil
   The success of the Kayapo people of Central Brazil in defending their extensive territory (nearly 150,000 sq. km., with 22 autonomous communities) has been gained through a combination of traditional Kayapo tactics of armed struggle, demonstrative expressions of collective political will through the idiom of ritual performance, and inter-cultural diplomacy employing sophisticated forms of self-representation. All this has involved creative applications and extensions of received Kayapo culture, as well as selective assimilation of alien cultural and ideological elements. The presenter, an anthropologist, has accompanied, and to a minor extent participated in this process since beginning to do research among the Kayapo in 1962.
   
   
2. Theodore Macdonald (Harvard University): Indigenous Politics and Politicians: Private Policies and private Actions in Ecuador
   This talk will first review the recent, highly dramatic, and well publicized entry into national politics by indigenous organizations, as part of a broad “plurinational” public policy. It will then consider some of community-based efforts of local indigenous leaders, mainly mayors. Each approach aims to introduce the sort of participatory democracy, that, many Latin Americans--indigenous and non-indigenous—agree, is sorely lacking (UNDP 2003 Report on Democracy in Latin America). The talk will then consider the sorts questions needed to understand which approach has been or might be more effective. It will do so, obviously, by considering political strategies, but the talk will emphasize the personal choices and resultant actions of individual leaders caught between local demands, inevitable globalization, and personal needs.
   
   
3. Félix Julca-Guerrero (Quechua, University of Texas, Austin): Education and Indigenous Communities: The ‘Yachaq’ or Indigenous Intellectuals
   This paper explores the subject of education in the Andean world from an indigenous perspective. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Callejón de Huaylas in the department of Ancash in Peru between 2000 and 2006, the author reflects on the relevance of Andean indigenous communities, indigenous ways of teaching and learning, and the role of official education in the region. Within this frame, this paper sketches some interpretations regarding indigenous intellectuals as bearers of knowledge and as principal agents in education. This paper also explores the socio-political roles of indigenous leaders and intellectuals, and discusses the necessity of quality professional training that emphasizes cultural and linguistic membership.
   
   
4. María Elena García (Tufts University): Collaboration in a Postcolonial ‘Contact Zone’: The Challenges of Intercultural Education
   The Program for Training in Intercultural Bilingual Education for Andean Countries (PROEIB-Andes) is a master’s program based out of Cochabamba, Bolivia and supported by international development agencies. Since 1996, this program has trained indigenous students (intellectuals, leaders, teachers, and others) from at least six different South American countries with the aim of creating a critical mass of indigenous professionals who will work toward the advancement of an intercultural education agenda. This paper explores the constitution of the PROEIB as a sort of “contact zone,” a term borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion of colonial encounters “in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish on-going relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” Though PROEIB founders sought to turn this concept on its head and create a horizontal and democratic space of interculturality, for a variety of reasons the program found itself wrestling with the legacies of coercion, inequality, and conflict. This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which progressive politics, colonial legacies, and pedagogical practices came together in unexpected and often contradictory ways.
   
   
5. Audra Simpson (Kahnawake Mohawk, Cornell University): On Ethnographic Refusal: Citizenship and Nationhood Contemporary Kahnawake
   This paper takes up the notion of an ethnographic “limit” in anthropological analysis. In it, the author asks the questions “how do we write along a limit that is reflective of the goals and objectives of our interlocutors and yet is theoretically generative?”; “in the context of Native North America, how do we engage in an analysis of sovereigntist questions and projects and reflect those articulations in text to good effect?” The author examines the ways in which debates over “membership” in Kahnawake agitated and then forced a reconceptualization of nationhood and citizenship. She investigates as well, how this process required writing along a limit constructed from the possibility or impossibility of return, of writing away from purist cultural paradigms in Iroquois studies, as well orienting towards productive social pasts and futures of sovereign but still, in some ways, subaltern peoples.
   

1. Luis Millones (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Emeritus): Taki Onqoy Reloaded: Contemporary Uses of an Ancient Andean Topic
   In the 1560s, an indigenous Messianic movement called “Taqui Onqoy” (the illness of singing) appeared in the Central Andes as a form of cultural and political resistance to the Spanish invasion. The leaders envisioned the return of the “huacas” or local shrines/spirits and the expulsion of the Europeans. This paper studies the use that several artists, writers and indigenous leaders have made of the topic in contemporary Peru and elsewhere. Poems by Enrique Verástegui, scripts by filmmaker José Carlos Huayhuaca, a soap-opera by Michel Gómez, a novel by Fietta Jarque, an opera by Heredia in Buenos Aires, and several theater plays performed in Lima and Cuzco are some of the examples of this modern phenomenon. The author evaluates its importance and its implications in the context of the current indigenous movements and the ongoing process of a multicultural nation-building.
   
   
2. Víctor Montejo (Maya, University of California, Davis, and National Congress of Guatemala): Maya Organic Intellectuals, Politics and the Baktunian Prophecies
   The author will discuss the participation of Maya intellectuals in the construction of a political future based on the prophecies of the Thirteen Baktun or end of the 5th Maya Millennium.
   
   
3. Faye Ginsburg (New York University): Rethinking the Digital Age
   Concepts such as the digital age taken on a sense of evolutionary inevitability, thus creating an increasing stratification and ethnocentrism in the distribution of certain kinds of media practices, despite efforts de-Westernize media studies. In this talk, the author considers some examples of work in new (and old) media that are being produced in indigenous communities in Australia and North America and suggest how this new work might expand and complicate our ideas about the digital age in ways that take into account other points of view in the so-called global village.
   
   
4. Jefferson Arak (Brandeis University): Los Con Voz, Those With Voice
   Radio Chanul Pom, located in the mountains of Chenaló, a Tsotsíl- speaking region of Chiapas, it is one of many grass-roots communication projects that have sprung up in Southern Mexico in the last couple decades. Run by a faith-based group called "Las Abejas" ("The Bees"), the radio station acts as a mouthpiece of peaceful community organizing and information sharing, as the members attempt to reclaim the airwaves dominated by non-indigenous voice. In some ways, Radio Chanul Pom represents a model for successful community communication campaigns in the region although all of the labor is volunteered and the equipment is not exceptionally powerful. Given these limitations, Las Abejas continue to affect the communities that their transmission reaches while also attempting to broaden the scope of their reach and incorporate new topics into their programming.

1. J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Indigenous Hawai’ian, Wesleyan University): Hawaiian Self-Determination and the Politics of Decolonizing Research
   This paper addresses the politics of indigenous-produced Kanaka Maoli research in the context of Hawaiian nationalist struggles. Kanaka Maoli scholars are working to address indigenous issues within the wider framework of self-determination, including decolonization, where our work strives to affirm and advance our sovereignty as a people and nation. Moreover, we produce our scholarship within a charged political climate in which there are three key political divisions constituted by: 1) Hawaiians and allies in support of an independent nation-state of Hawai`i; 2) Hawaiians who are proponents of federal recognition of an indigenous governing entity within US federal policy on Native Americans; and 3) non-Hawaiians in Hawai`i who oppose both of these political movements in the name of "equality," while they assert that anyone in Hawai`i is a "Hawaiian" by virtue of residency, and are challenging indigenous programs through legal suits aimed at dismantling Hawaiian trust lands and other institutions, as well as all federal funding for Hawaiians. With an eye towards this current context of nationalist struggle (and resistance to it), the author will first discuss the academic fields where Kanaka Maoli researchers locate and produce their work and explore some of the problems with asserting our own research agenda. Second, the author will offer a brief overview of the state of Hawaiian Studies scholarship. Then she will draw upon aspects of her own research and critical scholarship on Hawaiian sovereignty politics.
   
   
2. José Antonio Lucero (Temple University): The “African” Origins of Indianismo?: Fausto Reinaga, Frantz Fanon, and the Challenges of Decolonization In Bolivia
   Fausto Reinaga (1906-1994) was one of the most influential theorists of indianisimo in Bolivia and Latin America. His work, especially his 1969 classic La revolución india, had a profound impact on the development of indigenous intellectuals and social movements. Yet, curiously, his work remains sorely understudied. This paper examines the encounter between Reinaga and the thought of the better-known postcolonial critic, the Martinican-Algerian theorist Frantz Fanon. This essay addresses Fanon’s influence on Reinaga’s views on colonialism, compares Fanon’s and Reinaga’s deployments of the concept of race, and contrasts their views on postcolonial nation-building. It concludes with some reflections on what a Fanonian reading of Reinaga can teach us about the contemporary politics of indianismo and decolonization in Bolivia and beyond.
   
   
3. Dale Turner (Temagami First Nation, Dartmouth College): On the Idea of Indigeneity
   In this paper, the author begins by examining Jeremy Waldron's characterization of Indigeneity and argues that his approach is fundamentally flawed. The idea of Indigeneity cannot be understood by demarcating between first occupancy and prior occupancy. These criteria are insufficient because they measure Indigenous political legitimacy solely against colonial modes of justification. The author argues that Indigeneity is a complex, rich concept that is primarily rooted in Indigenous communities, but is also in dialogue with the evolving legal and political discourses of the dominant culture. Herein lies a fundamental tension: Indigeneity is rooted in Indigenous cultures, yet one source of its legitimacy lies in its dialogical relationship with the dominant culture. The papaer will show that this tension has profound philosophical and practical consequences for how we ought to recognize the significance of indigenous rights, sovereignty, and nationhood within constitutional democracies
   
   
4. Jesse Little Doe Baird (Wampanoag Tribe of Mashpee, Massachusetts): Wôpanâôt8âôk: An exercise of action rather than reaction
   This talk will clarify the reclamation process of Wôpanâôt8âôk within the framework of Wampanoag life and prophecy. The process is alive for the Wampanoag as a fulfillment of required responsibility to bring Language home again rather than a reaction to any structure(s) within the paradigm, and ensuing vestiges, of colonialism in New England.