The complex relationship between indigeneity and class in South East Asia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In South East Asia, the relationship between ethnicity and class has been long, complex and at times contradictory. Throughout much of the twentieth century and especially from the 1940s to the 1980s, militant communist revolutionary movements sought to include upland ethnic minorities, citing vicitimization as racialized minorities, poor economic conditions, remote abodes and perceived egalitarian worldviews as the main reasons for targeting them. Mountain-dwelling minorities often made strong guerilla soldiers, and were attracted to the equality across races and ethnicities promised to them by communist cadres. By the late twentieth century, this had broken down, with new ethnicity-based and globalized concepts of indigeneity beginning to circulate, take hold and hybridize. While Indigenous peoples’ movements often have important class-based roots, with both Indigenous and leftist movements having similar emancipatory aspirations, Indigenous movements organize primarily based on ethnicity rather than class. Here, I consider the complex relationships between class and ethnicity/indigeneity as they play out in relation to Free and Prior Informed Consent associated with REDD+ and communal land titling in Laos. Shifts towards increasingly classifying people based on indigeneity are reorienting society, including nature–society relations, but there are also efforts underway to reclassify based on class.