SIDSTE PAS DE TROIS I GENÉVE: En dans for tre i FN’s saloner, hvor værten fører

Abstract

Katja Kvaale: Last pas de trois in Geneva:
 a dance for three in the UN saloons
 with the host leading the dance
 The purpose of this article is twofold. Taking
 its point of departure in empirical examples
 from the 1993 Session of the United Nations
 Working Group on Indigenous Populations
 in Geneva, the article attempts partly to analyse
 how indigenous peoples operate in the
 UN system, and partly to examine how this
 touches on classical anthropological notions
 such as peoplehood, nationhood and culture
 as distinet and continuous units. It is argued
 that most of the indigenous inputs at the
 UNWGIP can be heard as persistent reactions
 against the member states’ questioning
 their peoplehood and consequent rights to
 self-determination. However, it is not the
 idea to deconstruct the notion of the modem
 nation State altogether, nor to imply a radical
 cultural relativity, but rather to establish that
 the UN is confronting a global reality somewhat
 more complex than individuals and nation-
 states. In stating that the right to self-determination
 is separate from and prior to international
 law - it has been there since time
 immemorial - the indigenous representatives
 are tuming the legal logic of the UN upside
 down. From their perspective it is thus not
 a matter of being endowed with rights from a
 magnanimous UN, but rather a latecoming
 making up for the wrongdoings of half a millennium.
 Meanwhile, in asserting cultural
 continuity and distinetiveness in their politicized
 self-representation, indigenous peoples
 are catching anthropology off-guard and
 without foothold amidst the debris of its recently
 abandoned paradigms. Ironically, in
 the case of indigenous peoples the discipline
 is seemingly facing the incamation of the
 very notions and concepts just ditched: the
 exotification of the other, the radical us/them
 or West/the Rest distinetions, the Levi-
 Straussian „cold“ timelessness i.e. „conservative"
 rejection of modemity and development,
 culture as partly reified and self-sufficient
 units etc. However, rather than a morally
 based rejecting attitude towards this phenomenon
 the discipline would benefit from
 facing the great theoretical and analytical
 challenge that lies behind it. Although indigenous
 peoples and anthropologists are now
 operating within the same frame of reference
 to a far higher degree than was the case 25
 years ago, it can still prove worthwhile to distinguish
 between the different levels on
 which culture is dealt with at different times.
 Hence, a potential clash between indigenous
 politieized „authentic culture" on the one
 hånd and scientific deconstruction of „true
 culture" on the other can be avoided.