Emergence Of Indigenous Movements Research Articles

Health reform and Indigenous health policy in Brazil: contexts, actors and discourses.

Given the challenges related to reducing socio-economic and health inequalities, building specific health system approaches for Indigenous peoples is critical. In Brazil, following constitutional reforms that led to the universalization of health care in the late 1980s, a specific health subsystem was created for Indigenous peoples in 1999. In this paper, we use a historical perspective to contextualize the creation of the Indigenous Health Subsystem in Brazil. This study is based on data from interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjects and document-based analysis. In the 1980s, during the post-dictatorship period in Brazil, the emergence of Indigenous movements in the country and the support for pro-Indigenous organizations helped establish a political agenda that emphasized a broad range of issues, including the right to a specific health policy. Indigenous leaders established alliances with participants of the Brazilian health reform movement, which resulted in broad debates about the specificities of Indigenous peoples, and the need for a specific health subsystem. We highlight three main points in our analysis: (1) the centrality of a holistic health perspective; (2) the emphasis on social participation; (3) the need for the reorganization of health care. These points proved to be convergent with the development of the Brazilian health reform and were expressed in documents of the Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI) and the Union of Indigenous Nations (UNI). They were also consolidated in the final report of the First National Conference on the Protection of Indigenous Health in 1986, becoming the cornerstone of the national Indigenous health policy declared in 1999. Our analysis reveals that Indigenous people and pro-Indigenous groups were key players in the development of the Indigenous Health Subsystem in Brazil.

Public relations, indigeneity and colonization: Indigenous resistance as dialogic anchor

Cultural communication has been put forth in the context of globalization and the emergence of Indigenous movements as a framework for dialogue to be carried out by organizations (Love & Tilley, 2014). Concepts of Māori communication for instance have been foregrounded in the public relations literature to anchor strategies of effective engagement through dialogue, leading to the building of trust in Indigenous communities (Love & Tilley, 2014). Similarly, Indigenous engagement has been foregrounded as a key resource in achieving global sustainable development (Dutta, 2013, 2019). This turn to Indigenous cultural communication is broadly situated in the framing of indigeneity as a category to be developed within frameworks of dialogue and engagement, constituted within the structures of transnational capitalism (Dutta, 2019).Drawing from Dutta’s (2008) theorizing of the cultural sensitivity and culture-centered approaches to communication, we critically interrogate the hegemony of Indigenous dialogue as a strategy deployed by dominant organizations. Whereas cultural sensitivity incorporates cultural characteristics to serve organizational goals, cultural-centering serves as an anchor for collaborating with cultural communities at the margins in building “communicative infrastructures” for voice. Arguing that superficial markers of culture incorporated into engagement is a communicative inversion that serves the colonizing tools of transnational capital, we attend to culturally centered communication strategies of engagement that are grounded in resistance and emerge from within the voices of Indigenous movements that are increasingly threatened by ever-expanding colonial missions of globalization.Comparing across two case studies, one about the struggle of the Dongria Kondh in the Odisha state of Eastern India against mining capitalism, and the other a critical review of the use of Māori cultural knowledge in the public relations literature, we articulate indigeneity as a site of resistance within the meta-theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (Dutta, 2008, 2011). In conceptualizing Indigenous resistance as an agonistic anchor to communication, we attend to the impossibilities of dialogue, and simultaneously to the role of communicative infrastructures in inverting neoliberal hegemony. Dialogue is radically transformed, not in generating consensus but rather in its capacity to disrupt the neoliberal status quo through the presence of Indigenous voices. Indigenous resistance “renders impure” the ontological category of dialogue, on one hand, attending to the limits of dialogue, and on the other hand, turns dialogic tools into the hands of Indigenous social movements. Dialogue as a communication infrastructure located materially within Indigenous resistance movements turns the power of communication into the hands of Indigenous communities.

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.

The Emergence of Indigenous Movements in Latin America and Their Impact on the Latin American Political Scene

The past two decades have seen the emergence of various political actors in Latin America for whom indigenousness is their basic social identity. The appearance of indigenous movements at this time can be attributed to a change in the structure of political opportunities in response to globalization, which has created a situation in which policy making is no longer controlled by governments but increasingly the result of the interaction of a wide variety of actors. Indigenous peoples have been empowered by alliances with actors that have provided them greater capacity for applying pressure through relationships, including churches, anthropologists, and international advocacy networks. The emergence of indigenous movements has created an international regime on the rights of indigenous peoples, the adoption of a new jurisprudence with regard to indigenous peoples, and the creation of autonomous territories, though there is still no agreement on the best way to articulate these territories. Some of these movements have been more successful than others; the indigenous peoples of the lowlands have benefited from the greater participation of their movements in the international environment, but their triumphs tend to be local. While progress is tangible, the events of the past two decades indicate the limits of the permeability of Latin American polyarchies.

O INDIGENISMO NA ERA DA INFORMAÇÃO

O objetivo deste documento é apresentar o papel do indigenismo, fundamentalmente uma política governamental que procurou a assimilação e controle das populações indígenas na sociedade, mas agora em relação às políticas de informação, isto é, o seu papel na recuperação, organização, criação e difusão de informações dos povos indígenas. A metodologia empregada consistiu numa revisão de literatura sobre o indigenismo, incluindo os principais números da revista América Indígena, ícone do indigenismo latino-americano procurando identificar o interesse desde então na criação de um sistema interamericano de informação indígena, procurando caracterizar a sua orientação atual (indigenismo dialógico), na sua preocupação com temas como o controle, organização e difusão de informação relativa aos indígenas. Dentre as conclusões obtidas: o indigenismo não assumiu desde começo a recuperação, resgate e promoção das informações criadas pelos indígenas, procurou a imposição de uma Ciência eurocêntrica, tentando eliminar os rasgos daqui. Contudo a papel do indigenismo cientifico foi chave para o estudo do produzido aqui. Só após o surgimento dos movimentos indígenas e da preocupação por segmentos profissionais do campo da Ciência da Informação, diversos serviços/produtos de informação para indígenas são uma realidade em diversos países do mundo.

Introduction: Current Trends in Latin American Social Movements

For many scholars, the period from the 1980s into the early 1990s was a golden age for the study of Latin American social movements. At that time theory and real-world events converged to create an extremely creative moment for researchers who followed political change. Much of the scholarship during preceding decades focused on the political participation of labor, peasants, and the often clientelist urban politics of the poor (see, for example Cornelius 1975, Perlman 1976; Borja 1975; Rey 1969; Migdal 1974). The 1980s brought struggles as diverse as revolutions, efforts to overthrow dictatorships, urban movements seeking housing and adequate services, as well as the emergence of indigenous movements, women’s movements, and anti-austerity protest across the continent (Jaquette 1989; Jelin 1990; Paige 1997; Walton 1989; Oxhorn 1995; Black 1981; Gay 1994; Stokes 1995; Ramirez Saiz 1986). Despite the disparate constituencies these movements represented, the scholarly community often interpreted them through the lens of New Social Movement (NSM) theory. Developed in a postmodern Europe, NSM theorists responded to the vast array of political and cultural changes by moving away from much of the Marxist-oriented, materialist tools of analysis that had been used to explain much of European mobilization (Touraine 1985; Melucci 1985; Offe 1985; Castells 1983; Slater 1985). The NSM perspective argued that cultural difference, not class, drove mobilization; community, not alienation, supplied much of the motivation; and informal power over communication was often the goal of mobilization, as opposed to gaining formal power over the state. Indeed, much of the new politics, we were told, was not best thought of as political. Many scholars of Latin American movements focused on the novelty of the contention and the subsequent need to use new analytical tools to analyze it. Despite the questionable capability of a post-industrial theory to explain events in a region that was still industrializing, many of the theory’s proponents enjoyed their newfound celebrity, ignored their own initial explicit warnings, and toured Latin America spreading the new gospel. Other social movement analysis continued to be published (Eckstein 1989; Chalmers et. al. 1997; Slater 1994a, 1994b) yet the new model proved tenacious (Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998). Indeed, there is a deep irony in the ascendance of NSM-based analysis and the concurrent damage by neoliberal policies in Latin America. This current special issue, along with other work (Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley 2003; Rothman and Oliver 1999), suggests several changes have occurred in Latin American movements and how they are analyzed. We continue to search for new theoretical tools, as Davis and Rosan’s power of distance model demonstrates, and as Borland’s discussion of