Analyzing the nuances of identity formation in rural Andean culture, Andrew Canessa draws on two decades of ethnographic research in a remote indigenous community in Bolivia's highlands.
Following the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism.
When thinking of indigenous music, many people may imagine acoustic instruments and pastoral settings far removed from the whirl of modern life. But, in contemporary Peru, indigenous chimaycha music has become a wildly popular genre that is even heard in the nightclubs of Lima. In Making Music Indigenous, Joshua Tucker traces the history of this music and its key performers over fifty years to show that there is no single way to “sound indigenous.” The musicians Tucker follows make indigenous culture and identity visible in contemporary society by establishing a cultural and political presence for Peru’s indigenous peoples through activism, artisanship, and performance. This musical representation of indigeneity not only helps shape contemporary culture, it also provides a lens through which to reflect on the country’s past. Tucker argues that by following the musicians that have championed chimaycha music in its many forms, we can trace shifting meanings of indigeneity—and indeed, uncover the ways it is constructed, transformed, and ultimately recreated through music.
This book breaks new ground in understanding urban indigeneity in policy and planning practice. It is the first comprehensive and comparative study that foregrounds the complex interplay of multiple organisations involved in translating indigenous rights to the city in Latin America, focussing on the cities of La Paz and Quito. The book establishes how planning for urban indigeneity looks in practice, even in seemingly progressive settings, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, where indigenous rights to the city are recognised within constitutions. It demonstrates that the translation of indigenous rights to the city is a process involving different actor groups operating within state institutions and indigenous communities, which often hold conflicting interests and needs. The book also establishes a set of theoretical, methodological, and practical foundations for envisaging how urban indigenous planning in Latin America and elsewhere should be understood, studied, and undertaken: As a process which embraces conflict and challenges power relations within indigenous communities and between these communities and the state. This book will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and students working within the fields of urban planning, urban development, and indigenous rights.
This Handbook inverts the lens on development, asking what Indigenous communities across the globe hope and build for themselves. In contrast to earlier writing on development, this volume focuses on Indigenous peoples as inspiring theorists and potent political actors who resist the ongoing destruction of their livelihoods. To foster their own visions of development, they look from the present back to Indigenous pasts and forward to Indigenous futures. Key questions: How do Indigenous theories of justice, sovereignty, and relations between humans and non-humans inform their understandings of development? How have Indigenous people used Rights of Nature, legal pluralism, and global governance systems to push for their visions? How do Indigenous relations with the Earth inform their struggles against natural resource extraction? How have native peoples negotiated the dangers and benefits of capitalism to foster their own life projects? How do Indigenous peoples in diaspora and in cities around the world contribute to Indigenous futures? How can Indigenous intellectuals, artists, and scientists control their intellectual property and knowledge systems and bring into being meaningful collective life projects? The book is intended for Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, communities, scholars, and students. It provides a guide to current thinking across the disciplines that converge in the study of development, including geography, anthropology, environmental studies, development studies, political science, and Indigenous studies.
Exploring indigenous life projects in encounters with extractivism, the present open access volume discusses how current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference and ontological dynamics in the Andes and Amazonia. While studies of extractivism in South America often focus on wider national and international politics, this contribution instead provides ethnographic explorations of indigenous politics, perspectives and worlds, revealing loss and suffering as well as creative strategies to mediate the extralocal. Seeking to avoid conceptual imperialism or the imposition of exogenous categories, the chapters are grounded in the respective authors’ long-standing field research. The authors examine the reactions (from resistance to accommodation), consequences (from anticipation to rubble) and materials (from fossil fuel to water) diversely related to extractivism in rural and urban settings. How can Amerindian strategies to preserve localised communities in extractivist contexts contribute to ways of thinking otherwise?
Increasing numbers of Indigenous peoples are living in cities, yet the vast majority of studies focus solely on rural Indigenous populations. This is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience--not as the exception but as the norm. Dismissing the false idea that indigeneity is only "authentic" when it is practiced in remote rural areas, these wide-ranging essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality.
In this timely collection, the authors examine Indigenous peoples’ negotiations with different cosmologies in a globalized world. Dussart and Poirier outline a sophisticated theory of change that accounts for the complexity of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with Christianity and other cosmologies, their own colonial experiences, as well as their ongoing relationships to place and kin. The contributors offer fine-grained ethnographic studies that highlight the complex and pragmatic ways in which Indigenous peoples enact their cosmologies and articulate their identity as forms of affirmation. This collection is a major contribution to the anthropology of religion, religious studies, and Indigenous studies worldwide. Contributors: Anne-Marie Colpron, Robert R. Crépeau, Françoise Dussart, Ingrid Hall, Laurent Jérôme, Frédéric Laugrand, C. James MacKenzie, Caroline Nepton Hotte, Ksenia Pimenova, Sylvie Poirier, Kathryn Rountree, Antonella Tassinari, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel