Rethinking Indigeneity: Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology

Abstract

The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the sometimes-perilously sharp edge of anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies. This review sets forth from a disciplinary conjuncture of the early 2000s, when anthropology newly engaged with the topic of sovereignty, which had long been the focus of American Indian studies, and when the long-standing anthropological interest in colonialism was reshaped by Indigenous studies attention to the distinctive form labeled settler colonialism. Scholars working at this edge address political relationality as both concept and methodology. Anthropologists, in turn, have contributed to Indigenous studies a commitment to territorially grounded and community-based research and theory building. After outlining the conjuncture and its methodological entailments, the review turns to two directions in scholarship: reinvigorated ethnographic research on environment and on culture and economy. It concludes with reflection on the implications of this conjuncture for anthropological epistemology and disciplinary formation.