Notes on Indigeneity

1- Clifford, J. 2007 Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren Foundation . To understand the constantly changing configurations of indigeneity, there is a need to unpack concepts of native and sovereign, in their implications of a fixed attachment, and examine for example the superposition of multiple sovereignties. If indigeneity and diaspora are analyzed as different experiences, he proposes to explore the diasporic dimensions of indigenous experience. One case could be the relation of urban indigenous people with their homelands, and the cyclical returns. Most indigenous groups have been involved in cosmopolitan encounters. The contradictory complexity with respect to belonging both inside and outside national structures in contemporary social worlds may be diasporas most productive theoretical contribution (201). Diaspora may help describe situations of connectedness-in-dispersion of social groups, which are many times dismissed as acculturation and denied in land claims, but that in turn conform greater scales of affiliation (as tribal). The term also points to the sense of belonging outside the nation state where the group is situated. We can recognize pragmatic sovereignties when the ties to place have not been lost: from everyday contacts to seasonal or deferred returns. Dispersion allows us to think on a different scale of identification. Patterns of circulation associated with political forces reshape sociability in the locations within the network. This opens up the possibility of other patterns of modernity, which do not simply follow the traditional description of cultural loss, rural poverty, etc. Different kinds of performance are required in specific relational sites. Diaspora cannot explain the constraints that lead to displacement or the restraints that people experience in diaspora. Finally, diasporic sovereignty unfolds in multiple dimensions, from being a domestic dependent nation to a nation state or an economic corporation (as casinos), which are examples of claims for sovereignty without secession.

1- de la Cadena , Marisol y Starn, Orin (eds.) 2007 Indigenous Experience Today, Oxford-New York: Berg Publishers The authors set the discussion from some common grounds. Indigeneity shows that the aspiration of the West to disseminate progress and civilize the others worldwide has not unfolded as it was expected. Contrarily indigenous populations (an estimate of 250 million worldwide) still exist and constitute economic, cultural and social movements that do not just constitute alternative, counter forces to modernity. Scholarly analysis seem to be divided among those who celebrate the political mobilization that indigeneity generates, and those who see it as problematic definition of boundaries and a machinery of exclusion. A basic idea is then that "indigenous people are highly heterogeneous" (2). Indigeneity is generated in complex nets of self and alter definitions in complex and "changing boundary politics and epistemologies of blood, culture, time and place" (3). How then conceptualize indigeneity in the context of a neoliberal multicultural politics that recognizes indigenous existence? "Indigeneity emerges only within larger social fields of difference and sameness; it acquires its "positive" meaning not from some essential properties of its own but through its relation to what exceeds and lacks. (...) Indigenous cultural practices, institutions and politics become such in articulation with what is not considered indigenous within the particular social formation where they exist" (5). In this way indigeneity is historically contingent and names a relationship that implies a particular space- time (Pratt). The different shapes this relationship has taken are not just a question of different ideologies, but effected material relations and state policies that configure post colonial formations, in which "colonizers" are not only from the West. The global indigenous movement was both conformed in the articulation of diverse indigenous activism and also in the travelling of the notion of indigeneity. It keeps insisting the waves of destruction that colonialism and capitalism generate(d), something that give a common ground to articulation with subaltern groups, which brings into play a diverse range of indigenous "positionings" enabled in contingent configurations that articulate "particular patterns of engagement and struggle" (Li). Thus indigeneity is a field (not just of political identities but) of governmentality, subjectivity and knowledge, in which "becoming indigenous is always only a possibility negotiated within political fields of culture and history" (13) on "national formations of alterities" (Briones). Indigeneity encompasses questions of territory and political sovereignty, while challenging the "ethnospacial fix" (Moore) that veil displacement, expulsions and "indigenous diasporas" (Clifford). In many cases there is a "perverse confluence of neoliberalism and political mobilization that conform new gorvernmentalities

2- Tsing, Anna 2005 Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton University Press. Tsing presents us a challenging picture: how to understand globalization through the tradition of ethnographic work, which has traditionally been local? And the answer is not by just connecting the global and the local as oppositional forces, as the current tendency on anthropological research on globalization tends to claim. The local is not just the site of the particular, opposing a universal force of expanding capital, which abstracts resources, social relations and culture under the homogenizing force. Capitalism and the global are the particular, conjunctural articulations of different, contradictory interest that meet: the Suharto family governing Indonesia and Canadian and American capitals. The power of capital seems not to need any type of articulation because it is presented as absolute and universal, thus to propose to understand the articulation of capitalism is pointing to take a new direction. Capitalist power is also conjunctural, it takes different forms in different social formations, it creates differential effects. Capital does not just flow, it needs grip and creates friction. Friction refers not only to the oppositional forces of domination and contestation, but the condition (and the limits) of possibility of production of power, it makes possible for capital to expand. Meanwhile people do not just receive globalizing forces but also shapes the conditions of their participation of forest exploitation. Yet her focus is not only capital but also rather the environmental movement. She explores the way environmentalist discourse, identity and practice is built as a political force in Indonesia as one capable of overthrowing a government. Far from constituting a unique articulate identification of political interest and positioning, the environmental movement is made in the tension between a specific local and a particular global, which works through the bringing together diverse perspectives. Why is affect important? I think this is one of the most interesting dimensions of the book. It helps to understand the aesthetics making it possible for people to immerse in relations of exploitation and violence. It is at the same time effected and a means of creating power, it permits us to understand the acceptance of the creation of the social space of the frontier. Affect is also the way environmentalism as a discourse and practice finds its subjects. Tsing shows us that affect and power are not abstract vectors of energy, but they (as physical forces do) have to deal with the stickiness of the surface they encounter. This stickiness creates a friction that can divert the directionality and even light a fire.

3- Li, Tania 2000 Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot Comparative Studies in Society and History 42(1):149-179.Li wants to approach indigenous identity articulation without collapsing it in either a strategic essentialization and inventing a tradition, or a type of false consciousness in which indigenous identification represent a failure in recognizing a class condition. Indigeneity is not an inevitable condition, not just an invention, but rather a positioning based on practices, meanings, and landscapes that arise as particular forms of struggle and engagement. The conjunctures at which (some) people come to identify themselves as indigenous, realigning the ways they connect to the nation, and their own, unique tribal place, are the contingent products of agency and the cultural and political work of articulation(4). She describes two cases in terms of limitations and possibilities one in which people with worse economic conditions and less integrated to the nation so not weave any type of identity, while other group of peasant communities which are better off economically, with higher levels of education articulate an indigenous identity in particular in the context of fighting against the construction of a damn (5).Double articulation lets us understand how ideological elements come together (or not) as a coherent unity in particular contexts, under certain conditions, to particular subjects. Articulation is never fixed and it permits us to see both the internal processes of bringing together and the external delimitation of an other as arbitrary and contingent definition. She considers how ideology finds its subjects within the available slots for social recognition. Identities are always about becoming, and not only invented; they are part of flows of meaning and power that transcend the temporary fixation. It transcends too the experience of individuals to focus constellations of shared or compatible interests, that mobilize collectives. The tribal slot is significant in this particular context and made available in regards to negotiated regimes of representation. The Indonesian state had no category to draw ethnic distinctions, only general isolated populations which is the majority of rural landless population. The environmentalist NGOs working in the forests, have been responsible for installing the category of indigenousness and have used the term isolated populations. In the history of Indonesia it was the Dutch who played an important role in differentiating tribal groups from loosely differentiated social formations. The identity of the Lindu as indigenous people with valuable knowledge and ancestral rights to their land was firmly established in the context of opposition to the hydro plan and the threat of forced resettlement. There has been much written about how subaltern struggles are distorted by representations created and imposed by outsiders, which is an important critique. However, it treats representation as a one-sided imposition. By paying attention to the process of articulation it is possible to appreciate opportunities as well as constraints. In their work on behalf of tribal and indigenous people, NGOs have also articulated their own positions within broader fields of power. As positions are recalibrated, no doubt the risks and opportunities associated with the tribal slot will be reassessed by those it potentially engages, also by those who seek to place the resource struggles at the center of a broad social movement.

4- Hall, Stuart. 1996. "Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and ethnicity." Journal of Communication Inquiry 10: 5-27.Hall argues that Gramsci makes very important contributions to thinking the field of the political as not just a superstructure of economical relations. Hall thus recognizes economy as a horizon of possibilities (13) rather than a field of determination. It is the domain of the state civil society, which is central for understanding social reproduction. In this process hegemony is a central process involving the cultural direction in all social fields. Hegemony is the direction of the general interest of a social formation with those of a dominant group, in a way in which the collective will but also the unspoken are taken for granted. Hegemony defines what is worth fighting for and also how that should be done. It is the play of hegemony what defines the historical unfold of social relations (rather than any deterministic line towards communism). For Hall there is not just a one way causality of change from economy to the political and ideological, but rather multiple reciprocal causalities [overdetermination]. Capitalism was not just developed equally, racism played a central role in the establishment of inequalities. Racisms as a practice and as a classificatory system have to be understood as the particular historical process resulting from specific social configurations [conjunctures]. The question is not then what is veiling a class-consciousness but rather how politics are actually articulated in terms of class, race, and ethnicity. It is the type of alliances rather than the position in the economic structure that define the political field. Racial and ethnic alliances are as significant as could be a class, however neither class nor race or ethnicity are given categories that should be made conscious, rather they are possibilities of creating collective movement. The state power is then operating by the dual movements of coercion and consent, where the former is mostly only operated in the times of crisis, the other is exercised more as a positive type of power that shapes civil society. Coercion is thus reserved as an armor to shield hegemony joining state and civil society. Racist ideologies may be activated within institutional and civil societys hegemonic struggles, it is not rare then to see that subordinated groups articulate in terms of race after being subjected by racism. For some groups this could be the meaningful articulation for ideological struggles. These struggles can generate transformations in the terms of hegemony, and thus reshape ideas about race and ethnicity.5- Grossberg, Lawrence (1996a) 'Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?', in Stuart Hall and du Gay, Paul (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. pp. 88-107. London: Sage.There is a need to resituate identities in the broader power configurations, by overcoming the idea of resistance. A reconsideration of identity would demand that we rethink three logics: of difference, of individuality, and temporality. But to do this we also need to critique the broader normative systems of modernity. Thus, he reframes identity in regards to the logics of otherness, productivity, and spatiality. Cultural studies distinguish two modes of production of political identities as: 1) struggle for presenting positive aspects of identities; 2) multiple, complex, and unstable; and 3) framed by a group of concepts not a unique theory. The notion of difference implies a dominant identity that is constituted in the negation of the subaltern (both necessary and destabilizing). This other can be either a supplement, in which the other is a total exteriority, an excess, or a negative other within the field of subjectivity. The notion of fragmentation points to the multiple lines of identification transversing any give subject position and the impossibility to predict articulations, the subject as a dis-membered and re-membered (Harraway). Hybridity, implying the simultaneous coexistence within two conflicting identities, implies: 1) subalternity as a third space always in-between identities; 2) as a permanent state of liminality; 3) border crossing, in which identity is in the movement of transversing (Anzaldua). Diaspora is linked to this but focuses on the particular diachronic experience of transnational migration. The concepts above have been criticized for: a) ignoring the diversity, fragmented forms in which power operate; b) ignoring the positivity of the subaltern (he also produces culture); c) ignoring the forms of power within the subaltern; d) assuming the subaltern as generator of a particular subjectivity; and e) if subalternity is a model of domination, this implies knowing subalternity is in advance. If these other identities are confined to produce their identities by mirror image of what is modern, then there is no escape to modernity. But modernity itself has been constituted in base of difference: difference that is always different to itself in time and space. Theories of difference are trapped in the discussion of negativity (Derrida: a negative that threatens reason form within) and positivity (Foucault, an autonomous other that affects reason). He proposes to think through theories of otherness, in which the other does not need to be defined in regards to essential or transcendent terms, but rather by the contextual capacities of affecting and being affected. Otherness uses a notion of difference as an effect of economies of power. The subject as the capacity to experience the world and know it is universal, but as a capacity subjectivity is unequally distributed, as some people have the possibility to occupy different positions or to defend and authorize their existence (stratifying machineries), operates producing a relation between content bodies and expression subjectivity as value. Subjectivity is thus abstract. Self, as an embodiment of this codification, only comes to be after the process of inscription of difference (differentiating machines). The subject can be considered as having a spatial existence defined in the vectors of movement. Articulation could be better understood as the intersection of different trajectories and the relations of habitation and empathy. The subject thought as spatialized can be fixed to space, have many possibilities of movement, be able to access or not particular places. Thus agency is the result of the relation between subjects and places, places that result from attempts to organize space. If subjectivity constitutes places as belonging, agency organizes the spaces and action form which people make strategic moves. Grossberg is interested in making these shifts towards a spatial frame for subjectivity, not so much to rethink agency and change, but rather to think of belonging based on singularity, what Agamben calls the coming community. This implies also a form of producing knowledge about the other without turning it into sameness or a radical other. Singularity as a mode of existence that is neither universal, nor particular, is not based on a concept nor on an individual, it is better an example that exists as within and outside the case it is supposed to belong. This belonging is in itself a production, an appropriation of the class. The example is defined in its capacity to be substituted is always replaceable, as such is always unrepresentable. The community is thus totally undetermined; it is defined by belonging itself. A politics of singularity demands a definition of the places people can get to or access to places.6- Ramos, Alcida. 1998. Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. (Selections)Ramos proposes to follow indigenism in Brazil as the complex process and ideas conveying the incorporation of indigenous people to the state and as citizens but also to the domain constituted in the multiple popular and dominant ways in which the indigenous are imagined as a mirror projection of the normal non-indigenous population. If Indigenism has a commonality with the term Orientalism as a site of construction of a national, civilized western identity which only defines its others in negative terms in respect to the ideal civilized nationhood, it differs in that indigenous people coexist temporally and spatially within the nation state which defines them as an inferior other. Indigenism is also framed in the concrete interethnic political field: the conflicts with state administration, tensions between indigenous and settlers, and indigenous activism in itself. Her starting point are the main ways in which hegemonic notions have shaped the indigenous as different and inferior, by defining natives as children, heathen, nomads, savage, primitives which justified and legitimized state (and church) violent interventions, exclusionary practices, and land expropriation, even under the name of their own development. Her final chapter is of particular interest as she presents the way not only the state but also indigenist NGOs have shaped a domain of indigenous politics dominated by western bureaucratic procedures which demand professionalization of activist groups and a predominance of managerial employees. The bureaucratization of politics has effected the constitution of an image of a hyperreal Indian, which under the demands of effective management of projects, have replaced the real people, which those NGOs represent. In this movement the complexities and contradictions of dealing with real people are displaced in an increasing separation of the field of indigenous politics form indigenous communities in themselves. She points to the ways the Brazilian state has attempted to both incorporate indigenous populations and lands in their sovereignty claims (especially the advancement of economic exploitation of the Amazon). Her work shows how these attempts constantly failed in recognizing indigenous peoples capacities in shaping their incorporation in the state, the complexities and contradictory positions of each group. However, this failure was also in the possibility to erase their cultural systems. She concludes that her interest in studying indigeneity is not just understanding the world of the Indians, but rather differential power characteristic of interethnic contact becomes more evident when seen through the manifestations of the dominant society. Ultimately, she argues, it is as though the Indians represented a part of the countrys unconscious intractable but necessary to its constitution. To study Indigenism, then, is to disclose the nation rather than the Indians themselves (25).7- Briones, Claudia. 2007.Teoras performativas de la identidad y performatividad de las teoras. Tabula Rasa, Revista de Humanidades, Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, Colombia, 6: 55-83.What are the effects of the naturalization in social sciences of the politics of identity in the context of postmodern theory and neoliberal governmentality? Following Brubaker and Cooper she proposes to think the effects of the unproblematized definition of identities as constructed, contrastive, situational, fragmented, fluid and negotiated. She takes as an axis of debate the tension between structure and agency, postulating that subjects constitute as such by articulating their personal and collective identities (for themselves and others), but they do not do it at their wish, as the work of articulation unfolds under circumstances they havent chosen (59). One of the problems of notion of identity is that if we take as a constant the contrastive nature, then identities are always contextual, and always result from its interrelation. Deconstructive works have criticized this point by problematizing the subject and the effects of reticular forms power. The other of any identity becomes always excess that overflows any identity and threatens it. Identity is phantasmagorical, always excluding a part of what it is supposed to represent, and is constituted from difference (not identification). These theories have not just developed within the academy but have also accompanied and participated in the so-called new social movements. All this happens in the context of a normative multiculturalism that make cultural difference hyper-visible. It is not that identity is in trouble, but rather it has always been a problem. The proliferation of analyses of identities have generated some authors to propose to abandon the concept altogether. Hall, proposes to redefine the category while keeping it while Brubacker and Cooper propose the use of intermediate concepts (ie social location). There are two fundamental movements to be made: 1) disaggregate, and think whether we are talking about subject, people, agents; 2) maintain the tensions that constitute the subject as subjection (as effect) and subjectivity (as how people occupy those positions). It is in this context of the discussion that Social Sciences incorporate the concept of performance, as a focus on the practices of signification. Contrarily Butlers subject and act are mutually and variably constituted each time. Her final questions are what is the relation between subjectification and subjectivity, and what mediates between subjectivation and identification. For this she takes the notion of fold: the interiority is only the exterior folded towards an inside that is only a second moment that creates an epistemological dimension not an ontological genesis. There is no essential or pre-given interiority. If this is combined with the notion of machineries what it is folded is the experience available as a result of the operating machineries. Subjectivity is thus the way these positions are inhabited and then made visible as social identities. In this context performativity is the capacity of people to stabilize or generate lines of flight from social identities as they embody them. Agency is limited by structured mobilities that define possibilities of movement, access and empowerment. She criticizes that many studies are implacable evaluators of the limitations defined in regards to desirable notions of subversion. Another problem is to read strategic essentialisms, in what we could understand as essentialist installations, to recognize a more dynamic political field rather than strategies that swallow the subject. To study identities as an us/them division veils the possibilities of understanding different levels and the perforations that are more a regularity resulting from different articulations and the heterogeneity of any collective containing multiple subject positions. Many analyses claim that indigenous identity politics are dangerous as they close possible articulations with other groups. She proposes an alternative question: what are the conditions and contexts making identities to emerge in terms of indigeneity?

1- Briones, Claudia 2007 Experiences of Belonging and Mapuche Formations of Self in Indigenous Experience Today. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn eds. New York and London: Berg and Wenner Gren FoundationBriones argues that identity and its politization is just a starting point on our understanding of much complex processes of individualization and communalization, one in which being Mapuche is differently understood and felt and non the less a convergent force. She discusses how a process of differentiation with the Mapuche movement triggers discussions and actions that reshape the understanding of the political and the very nature of the struggle in which Mapuches are involved. She uses the concept formations of self as an alternative to the notions of individuation in terms of subjectivity and identity. Formations of self emerge from regional geographies of inclusion and exclusion that delineate a series of structured mobilities that foster Mapuches or may eve preclude- the opportunity and desire to come together despite differences (101). Political economy of the production of difference help both to understand the challenges and reinscripton of hegemonic construction of aboriginality in Mapuche self-perception and performances that struggle for a better positioning in regional systems of stratification. Emerging identities with the Mapuche movement are less a result of globalizing identities than trajectories available to the Mapuches today and since colonization. In analyzing shifting youth Mapuche identities self-defined as mapunkies and mapurbes she follows Tsings notion of friction that both question the spaces of identity and disestablish them while provisionally occupying them. She considers diversity in Mapuche movement more as a possibility for political articulation than a restraint, in this the different categories of youth adscription from exclusively Mapuche to the map-urbes. Subjectivity is an unequally distributed universal value (111) and Experiences of the world are produced from particular positions, that although temporary, determine access to knowledge and bring about attachments to places that individuals call home and from which they speak (111). Commonality is created in the sense of being involved in a common lucha (struggle) against forms of exploitation, but it also comes from the diverse experiences that are narrated and become manifestations of a shared past. Both things transform common people into luchadores. Yet a sense that the struggle has just begun also comes from the different positions from which the struggle has been enunciated, so if previous generations focused in land claims and legal recognitions, youth consider that the struggle goes in other direction, such as including the experiences of neighbourhood kids and making a Mapuche appropriation of the city.

2- Slavsky, Leonor. 1992 .Los indgenas y la sociedad nacional. Apuntes sobre poltica indigenista en la Argentina La problemtica indgena. Estudios antropolgicos sobre pueblos indgenas de la Argentina. Bs. As. CEAL.The author traces the general lines in indigenists policies in what is now the Argentinean territory. The Spanish colonization in what is now contemporary Argentina was a process many centuries long. In the northeast there was a rapid creolization of indigenous and Spanish, the north east region was organized in connection to the silver production in the highland Peru. Both regions were the first ones to receive the missioners presence, who adopted the two general languages for their work: Quechua and Guarani, a step towards the making of mestizo cultures. Towards the beginning of the 19th century there were two indigenous regions not yet subjected to the state: the Chaco and Patagonia. Both regions had a war commercial relation with the white society. Thus in the colonial time it was considered that indigenous population had to maintain cultural integrity while subjected to the dominant society. This was reflected in the legal system that considered indigenous subordinated societies: and as such they were vasallos of the Spanish crown, thus had to pay tribute and received the benefits of true civilization and religion. Republican indigenism resulted form the transformation of the national revolution, that considers indigenous as groups that have to integrate the nation. In this period there was no longer a recognition of indigenous specificity, and the national constitution is written in that spirit. In Argentina, the negation of indigenous was absolute something that allowed violent policies of extermination, while the immigrant policies attempted to constitute the country as white. There was not a clear policy in Argentina of what to do with the actually surviving indigenous, thus in Patagonia after being evicted from their lands they were incorporated to the army, sent to work in the sugar plantations, while women and children were distributed in religious institutions. Meanwhile the Chaco was being invaded in 1912 the president Roque Saenz Pea releases the order to occupy the region. The invasion follows a similar strategy than in the south, only that in the Chaco their is an interest not only in the land but also in preserving the indigenous population as labour force. After this campaign the dominant discourse of Argentina as a white country is consolidated. A discourse that legitimates the poverty and marginalization of the indigenous as a result of their backwards cultures rather than as military invasion. The indigenous issue is not assumed by any given state agency, but shifts from the Ministry of war, to the M. of the interior, the secretary of labour, the Migrations Division. During the 1980 the first legal transformations. The meeting by the interamerican institute of indigenous affairs, provoke the state to take some position over indigenous issues. The main points are: recognition, participating and ethnodevelopment (the upcoming indigenous intellectuals and professionals claim that indigenous development should be in their hand). The main focus become the land claims understood as the active dimension of the indigenous reparation.

3- Tamagno, Liliana. 2001 Nam Qom Hueta' a Los tobas en la casa del hombre blanco. Ediciones Al Margen. La Plata. Tamagno analyzes the recreation of Toba identity in the city of La Plata, through recreating cultural practices. She questions how is identity maintained in spite of assimilationist, proletarization processes. Identity is redefined by recreating territoriality as a discontinuous urban and rural extension. This experience of migration is thus reconstructed through a series of significant points during migration, as are the intermediate points in between places of origin and the final destination in the city. In spite of the spatial discontinuity among these places there is a symbolic unity, recreated by history and by the trips to the rural areas. There is a strong emphasis among the Tobas to get a place in the city where "they could live all together". The toba presence in the city starts in the 1960s. In spite the first settlements were connected with other settlements in cities and with the rural communities, the question whether the people were aboriginal outside the Chaco is a paradox to recognition. Should government apply indigenist policy with them? The Chaco appears as a unifying and reference point in the historical narratives about migration and coming to the city. If initially the group was located in Quilmes, then a part of it moves to La Plata. Others come form Ciudadela Norte, they move form Ciudadela and Quilmes to either La Plata or Derqui, however some families remain in those locations. In La Plata they get land and the possibility of building houses, a work that started in 1992, through the governmental plan. The particularity is that the indigenous specificity is not recognized, they are given the houses as urban poor, the lands remain fiscal. The group is not included as legitimate demanders of historic reparation measures as they are not settling in their traditional lands. However, in 1999 the city mayor recognizes its presence as a community represented by the Toba Association. The association, even with no legal recognition, was created in 1991 and was a unifying entity negotiating with the government. Community is not only a level of political organization but also a life style manifested in the spatial organization of the houses and the use of common areas (where all children play together and all adults watch them over). The church, La Iglesia Unida, is also a significant institution bringing people together, organizing communal activities and keeping links with the Chaco. Kinship is significant; it connects people in the city as well as maintains ties with the rural communities that they visit with frequency. She observes that women travel the most many times the purpose of the trip is to take care of an ill relative (197). The places they are most in contact with are Quitilipi, Pampa, and Bo. Toba Resistencia. The women political participation in the neighborhood is secondary and regarded as "help" to the men. She concludes that there is not a single identity being produced in the city but a complex subject position in relation to ethnicity, class, and religion. Thus the city is a locus with which the tobas relate but not a space with a rigid socializing structure that is imposed over them. Her work is intended to be a contribution of the condition of internal migrants who have gone to the city and forced to keep indigenous adscription aside.

8- Grant, Bruce 1995. In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton University Press. The author presents the effects of the Soviet State attempts of incorporation and cultural transformation of the Nivkhi people of Sakhalin island, an out of the way (my introduction of Tsings concept) location in Siberia. He focuses on the multiple waves of colonization, and the effects of the soviet collapse. Grant points to the contradictions of the different policies over the small people (a category referring to small demographic number, pointing them as internal others and somehow taking the place of western notions of indigeneity), always considered in need of development. The policies come one after the other regardless of the tensions between them, creating time frames and defining a difference between a traditional past, and a modern present, a present that fades again with the soviet collapse. From the creation of towns, going through World War II, the relocations and abandonment of towns generated with the post-war crisis, to the perestroika and the final collapse, all these periods were marked by different ways of external attempts to incorporate and transform the Nivikhi people. One of the initial salient contradictions between Nivkhi and state was that of whether to celebrate their difference attributing to them a romantic primitive communism and preserve this difference, or to motorize a homogeneous pan-Soviet identity. Discourses of progress prevailed (as the continuous action of education of local intellectuals show) generating a strong pressure for incorporating to the socialist state through assimilating to hegemonic meanings of Siberian peoples. A point of interest is that education policies during the soviet rule included the formation of indigenous Siberians intellectuals in Leningrad, something that was considered as a valuable possibility by the communities that were willing to confront the efforts to send a few students per year to the city (88). The maintenance of links and strong positive memories about the city after the return to the communities was not just a personal experience but part of the collective representations about the city. These trips thus contributed to shape other type of relation between these marginal spaces and one centre, by opening participation in the cultural capital of the city. The author shows the contradiction between Nivhki marginality within the soviet state recreated through different forms of exclusion, and the nostalgic memory of the soviet times after the collapse. This contradiction can be probably understood in the contrast of the economic benefits and the imagined political participation in a strong state and the unfilled spaces left after its decline. This work shows an interesting contrast of the relation between indigenous and state, that in its contradictions present an entity against which Nivkhi can define themselves as group

LA

Kay Warren The authors consider the problems of studying indigenous movements in Latin America as a tension between academic work, advocacy and positioning in the politics of representation. They point to the parallel emergence of indigenous activism and the need to turn from class base analysis to identity politics, which recognize ethnicity as a particular dimension. This perspective has articulated with discourses emphasising positive and common aspects of an indigenous condition, these forms of essentialism that anthropologists have contributed to shaping have been articulated in struggles with the nation-state. However, essentialism is also a limiting force when imposed as a norm that erases heterogeneities. They claim that there is no sense to making a value over these constructions but rather to understand their complexities and take into account the particular historical contexts and the contingencies in which identities are constituted. If the importance of the roles of the states in the processes of this conformation is something general across different Latin American countries, the form of this interaction is never homogeneous. The role of international agencies and economy has to be considered as shaping the differential outcomes, as these agencies have their particular agendas and approaches to the topic, for instance by considering ethnicity as a problem and a right of the individual. Neoliberal policies of reducing state intervention in some cases perversely coincide with indigenous claims, however it does also be a force that further marginalizes and limits the groups possibilities of autonomy [multiculturalism is not discussed very much here]. Thus the processes of identification can be better understood in its conjuncture, as movements combining achievements of self-determination and of state subordination.

4- Nelson, Diane 1999. A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press. To analyze the body politic in contemporary Guatemala, Nelson uses the image of an injured body with a finger deepening the wound. Her analysis advances from the body politic to the politics of individual bodies which has as effects the production of subjects with differential class, gender, race and ethnic positions. The body politics of Guatemala has no unified subject as its effect but rather fragmented ones. Fluidarity is the conjunctural alliance of social groups, in simultaneous dimensions. Identity is always incomplete, never fixed, vulnerable, partial and porous. Fluid connections link social identities and even escape orthopedic actions. Orthopedic is power directed to the bodies acting over them and their connection in order to produce a particular body politic. Orthopedic force recreates the state as an object detached from the social relations that produce it while veiling this production (state fetishism). The state is ruined, corrupted and yet still an arena of struggle, an idea condensed in the image of the piata: if you hit the government you may get some sweets. State fetishism is simultaneously challenged in the total recognition of its corruption. Bodies that splatter, describes the contradictory racialized categories organizing Guatemalan society. The indigenous claims are feared as a finger in a profound non-healing wound. She examines how the indigenous are rejected not so much by whites but by ladinos who recognize their embodied connection to them. Indigeneity is then defined in relation to tradition and the understanding of biological relation (i.e. the son of an indigenous woman and a white man is regarded as indigenous). In this sense two contradictory logics coexist: one that considers a racial unity in ladinoness that has homogenized the population, another that considers the implications of mestizage as the conjunction of differential races where indigenous claims insist on the fact that there are differential races. Ladinos, even disregarding racism, fear a race war resulting form the unavoidable emergence of indigeneity. The indigenous as a race is categorized in the process of incorporation where the indigenous are simultaneously an other but also the core of the national identity as a representation of a glorious past appropriated by the society as a whole. While indigenous are recognized as the condition of possibility of a ladino Guatemalan identity, their contemporary claims are understood as a fragmentation of the Guatemalan body. If any body politic can be fixed, the injuries that represent the indigenous identity can be repaired by the control over bodies. Society can then be remade not by a homogenizing effect but by the creation of controlled threads linking the fragments. Nelson leads us to a body politic having the shape of a Frankenstein creation. A society of control where heterogeneity is feared yet accepted if it has been corrected and put into place. However, this body politic is inevitably fluid and thus cannot be totally normalized and immobilized. Thus the splattering of Frankenstein is always a possibility.

5- De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000 Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. Durham: Duke University Press. Marisol De La Cadena makes a historical analysis of the discourses on indigeneity in Cuzco during most of the 20th century. The categorization that define what is indigenous, what is partly indigenous and what is not, are blurry and have changed many times. The changes are explained in relation the production of power in Cuzco, but also in its relation with the country, and with the capital city of Lima. The category indigenous mestizos, which combines the production of a racial ideology along with the relevance of cultural markers of ethnicity, demonstrates that race culture and ethnicity were mutually constituted. Even when the discourses on racial determination have been strongly denied, culturalist perspectives reproduced images of ethnic primordiality, what she calls a culturalist definition of race. She analyzes the genealogy of silent forms of racism (p 40) in the dominant discourses. She first presents the elaborations made by the 1920s elite indigenistas, who developed a reification of the indigenous as a glorious past and the present indigenous as degenerated representatives. The indigenous were valued as long as they kept a cultural habit considered appropriate. Liberal indigenists encouraged the incorporation of the indigenous to the national project by promoting their progress. The indigenous in this period are assigned a subaltern place, regarded as peasants. The neoindianistas welcomed cholos, and the sexual openness that permitted mestizage, as a path to improvement of the race. In the 1960s leftist movement overtook an important critique of racial categories while promoting class struggle. In the 1980s the discourse on class was left behind, being the arena dominated by academic and political discussions. De La Cadena points out the importance of places shaping subjectivities, as indigenous migrants to the city are automatically considered indigenous mestizos. In this way each category has a spatial correlation. Indigenous location is the rural highlands and indigenous mestizos acquire this category by education and life in the city, whereas mestizos constitute the general urban population having lost its ties with indigenous cultural markers. Whites are city dwellers, particularly (but not only) from the coast, and members of elites with high levels of education. In this regard the processes of migration have been variably understood as degeneration first, and as progress and integration latter. Indigenistas generated a moral economy, in which to be a proper human was called decencia. The decent indigenous were those who kept their culture alive and controlled their sexuality; but also: educated white men, who could have indigenous lovers without affecting their reputation, and white women who controlled their sexuality. In contestation to this morality, cholos of the urban market develop a new category: respeto. With it they defended economical independence, access to education, and defied disciplining actions. Respeto challenges the negative stigmas directed towards mestizas, however, it reproduces the hegemonic terms that classify people according to economic position and formal education. It reproduces marginality by recombining gender, sex, ethnicity, race and geographical position in different terms.Comment by Rafael Wainer: No se entiende la oracion

6- Albo, Xavier 2006. El Alto Vorgine de Una Ciudad. Journal of Latin American Anthropology Nov, 11 ( 2): 329350.Albo explores the sense in which Bolivia indigenousness is re-emerging in the site of the Alto, the satellite city to La Paz and the fastest growing city in the southern Americas. He considers this city simultaneously as a hinge, in-between the rural Aymara world and the urban European oriented La Paz. The Alto is not a different place from La Paz, as both together form a unity in which La Paz has central infrastructure in El Alto, it needs its population, that is a constantly present-silent other. El Alto cannot be considered as separated from the rural communities as the majority of inhabitants are rural immigrants Aymara that at different stages have migrated because of the crisis in the rural areas. But also they have been attracted by a better life in the city. In this, Albo points that there are multiple families doing a dual use of space having homes both in the communities and the city or living in one and going back to the other for festivals, meetings, family reasons. The Alto is also a voragine (vortex): it is a space in the limit of two worlds that distrust the other and in such field a creative force take place. It is a place that reinstalls the indigenous presence in Bolivian nationhood. The "new" Aymaras from the Alto are presenting new forms than before, many young people were mostly born in the city, do not speak the language and yet they are proud of and self identify as Aymaras. He does see this youth, who were very actively engaged in the revolt of 2003 and 2005 as part of a new political force of the city, as a type of coming of age of a city. The other forces Albo analyzes are the Juntas Vecinales, that keep some continuity with forms of organization in the rural areas even while reproducing some patron-client relations with the state in some instances. Finally, the political organization refers to the general response of the totality of El Alto population and their demands to the representatives to take a position and mobilize during the conflict. It is the maturity of a consciousness based on the colonial experience, a cultural tradition, and an awareness of the use of natural resources what he sees as a trigger of El Alto organization and full mobilization during these conflicts. This creative force is what ended in the election of Evo Morales and is now conducting Bolivia.

7- Sundberg, J., 2004. Identities-in-the-Making: Conservation, Gender, and Race in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala. Gender, Place and Culture 11(1): 44-66.Guatemala. Gender, Place and Culture 11(1): 44-66.Sundberg analyzes how indigenous women, ngo and researchers identities are made in the process of knowledge production and not before the action starts action and discourse is thus taken as productive of this identities and the relations. Gender is thus reproduced in the repetition of performance, in which gender is not produced I isolation but in its interconnection with race, ethnicity in contradictory configurations. By analyzing two meetings of a group of women starting a project of collecting medicinal plants, she sees how initially there is a reproduction of gendered hierarchies within, as it is a masculine figure who has a leading positing as a consultant of the women. In a second meeting she brings to analysis there is a stronger demarcation as the identities defined I this performance are that of masculine, NGO consultants, ladino, women, ignorant, indigenous. In this second meeting the ngo positions as having a knowledge that the women lack. The discourse of lack intersects the systems that define racially distinct whites from indigenous, and the modern form the traditional. In the interactions she is observing all the participants are performing identities and interpelating the others, as the ladinos perfom modernity, the women ask for help in order to establish alliances and start their business. She examines how her research and her position as researcher have influenced in this process, in which the women went for relying on male councelling to relying on her (the researcher) to finally relying more on internal problem solving mechanism. In one of her returns the association had split between one of the founding figures and the man in the community and directing a conservation project that had initially helped them to conform. She interprets this as a division caused by gendered tension in which this man wanted to keep control over the association. The association changes in itself the balance of womens housework and there is a demand for labor reorganization.

8- Svampa, M. 2003. Entre la ruta y el barrio. La experiencia de las organizaciones piqueteras, Buenos Aires:. Biblos. In the context of Latin American survival networks being more effective than state mechanisms of integration to deal with poverty piquetero movement (movement of unemployed) is a singularity. Argentina shifted form beginning of the 20th century as a "waged" society to the disarticulation of unions, organization of popular sector, the increase of individual informal economic activities, desincorporation of youth form labor market, a change in the role of women in popular groups. She sees the origin of the piquetero movement, an heterogeneous "movement of movements", in two sites: places where state employment was the structure of social life that had a sudden collapse, the territorial movements on suburbs holding a pauperized working class that had a longer experience of exclusion and had a continuous neighbourhood organization. The first to block the roads as a protest mechanism are the formerly employed by the state, but the territorial movements immediately recognize this as part of a common struggle. Basing her analysis in the heterogeneity of the piquetero movement and on these two converging lines she sees that there were particular claims made to the state generating a new form of political actions (from the workers strikes to the street and road blocking). The people who organized this initial picket to the national roads "had no other resource to gain visibility other than their own bodies exposed in the roads" (28). This reconfigures the articulations between unions, the left, unemployed, and popular sectors. The movement creates a collective dignity in being unemployed, something that initially was reserved as a privite stigma. If initially the state was still being recognized as a legitimate interlocutor, latter some of the sections of the movement have strong claims for autonomy (Solano). The youth has no connection to the world of unions, no expectation to access to labor and thus will integrate the "forces of security", confronting with the police during repression and demonstrating that the thing to offer in struggle is physical confrontation. This constitutes a new form of connection of politics and violence in an association of protest and police struggling to control the street. The territorial movements then made a shift form the basic demands of state services, land and housing towards including the unemployed as a problematic and adopting this new form of protest, and a link to the piqueteros of the provinces. The neignbourhoos the movement constitutes as a parallel structure to the Peronist patron-client relations and the Peronist networks (cfr. Auyero). Even though the interconnection of Peronist and piquetero movements is inevitable, there is also a turning point in the monopoly of Peronist organization in the popular neighborhood. If the surviving groups have been the ones that were able to accept the sate aid and build from them spaces of relative autonomy through the administration of social programs, the responsibility of negotiating with the different levels of state administration also contributed to defer the initial demands in order to attend some immediate urgencies.

9- Auyero, Javier 2001. - Poor Peoples Politics. Peronist Networks and the Legacy of Evita. Duke University Press. Auyero offers an alternative analysis to political clientelism that regards it as of political and ideological submission, as a rational exchange of goods for votes or as a political strategy for dividing the field of the popular. He examines the problem solving networks between problem holders and solvers (brokers) as a means of creation of an alternative for the subsistence in the socially slums of Greater Buenos Aires in the 1990s. In a context of structural division of the labor market and of both economic neoliberalism and state abandonment, the peronist networks offer the only alternative for accessing necessary services and goods. Problem solving networks recreate the bases of political party organization. Brokerage is not something fixed but a pattern of coherent articulate conduct that occupies the available social spaces and reenacts the past and therefore it reinscribes it. He also offers a reading on the gendered dimension on politics in which the constitution of a feminine field is not only an opening of a sphere for womens participation, but rather contributes to reinforce forms of subordination. If the shantytown was first a location of peronist policies and upward mobility, the1990s were the moments in which the neighborhood stopped being a place of upward and transformed into a permanent place of survival for the socially and economically excluded. In this context, an everyday type of internal violence emerged as a result of the recourse to criminality and drug-traffiquing, and of development of forms of stigma against the immigrants within the neighborhood, what is linked with a strong and violent presence of police in the everyday life (73-77). To understand the way networks function he unpacks the practices of political brokers and in particular the women that function as the coordinators of state social programs made effective through the party structure. He claims that is not enough to understand the structural position of brokers but also the specific performance they unfold. The brokers function as gatekeepers to the benefit of programs and of general help, but they present as disinterest coordinators totally committed to social solidarity. These brokers are mostly women. Auyero claims that they create relations with their followers by presenting themselves as incarnations of Evita, by performing her image as the mother of the poor. Thus they work disinterestly as maternal caregivers for their unprotected children something assumed as a natural feminine condition, and that operates in a realm different from politics. Men brokers and political leaders present themselves as mobile by which they creates a territoriality of it dominium. By moving, they get in touch with the people by physically getting to them, transversing the neighborhood, entering the intricate shantytown pathways. In regards to this collapse of politics and kinship the actualization, the constant recreation of the practice and image of Evita as mother, is done through incessant brokers performativity. In it they produce their circle of followers as a family. Women brokers have to work within this parameter: women comply what men decide. According to Auyero these women perform Evita not only out of affinity and admiration for Eva, but also because, as Eva Pern herself found out there are few good roles for women in the public arena. (145). By constituting social work as a duty they occupy a space of relative autonomy opened to them. Through this embodied aesthetic, discursive practice women enter the field of politics but they also construct it.10- Guano, Emanuela 2004. "The Denial of Citizenship: 'Barbaric' Buenos Aires and the Middle-Class Imaginary", City and Society,.16(1): 69-97.Emanulea Guano in her ethnography of the porteo middle class points to the production of meaning around the legitimate terms of being porteo in the face of the economic and political transformations effected by the 1990s neoliberal policies. The transformation of the economy that resulted in the increasing unemployment and the impoverishment of the middle classes had as effects the increased perception of fear, loss and intruition among this sector. Fear of loosing their property and social capital, of being a white europeanized middle class, loss of the property but also of a city expected to be modern and European like. This generated a need of redifining and reinforcing separation from the "intruders", the urban poor whose population raised steadily. This need of differentiation was not made just on the basis of class, but there was a growing claim that the poor invading the city as immigrants of neighbouring countries and also racialized as non white. Even though the long tradition of the Peronism of reclaiming the site of the "dark" "poor" shanty town dwellers as an important part of "the people", and the centre of a national identity, the middle class representations seem to be more linked with the discourses and desire of modernization, of becoming "real first world". Guano associates this with neoliberalism and calls it "to see modernity from the looking glass", while embracing the project to be in modernity becomes more and more distant. Thus the middle class along with some of the dominant discourse of the government and the press, construct a sense of disappearing middle class, along with an invasion of immigrants. It is for her a reactualization of the civilization/barbarism discourse. In which the middle class recognizes as the inheritors of a European city only to see its cluster of slumnines in the cirujas [indigent], the squatter and the insecurity. In these contexts only the granting of security, more than only possession can guarantee the remaining in the middle class, thus the proliferation of location of exclusion, or the self enclosing of the public space in the mall, and the formation of gated communities. It is in the desparete definition of the other that middle class attempts to avoid the fact that is very close or with no clear distinction than this other.