Indigenous Urbanization Research Articles

Markets and monarchs: indigenous urbanism in postcolonial Kampala

ABSTRACTAlthough small in number, indigenous urban settlements were of substantial social, cultural and political significance in precolonial Africa. However, many studies of urbanisation on the continent begin with colonisation. As a result, scholars have tended to overemphasise the influence of the colonisers, precluding an analysis of the ability of indigenous populations to resist, reimagine and remake colonial visions of urban life. This paper examines the historical relationship between the Baganda people and the Ugandan capital. Kampala was planned as the commercial centre of British colonial enterprise in Uganda; however, it developed in a region with an indigenous history of urban settlement. The Kibuga – the capital of Buganda and seat of the king – was once the most populous urban agglomeration in the East African interior. Drawing upon a combination of archival research, life history interviews and an ethnographic study of a central marketplace, I argue that while many of the categories and divisions of colonial rule are still visible in Kampala, the Baganda have engaged in collective subjective practices to reimagine and remake urban life, centered on the role of the monarchy. These practices illustrate both the opportunities and limitations of ‘indigenous urbanism’ as a response to the historical subjugation of indigenous populations.

“The Right-To-The-City Question” and Indigenous Urban Populations in Capital Cities in Cameroon

This paper explores the implications of state land tenure modernization and urbanization-promotion initiatives for human rights in Cameroon. The aim is to promote understanding of the implications of these initiatives for the right-to-the-city of indigenous urban residents. It is argued that the implications are more severe in politico-administrative headquarters than elsewhere in the country. Three different cities have served, at some point, as national politico-administrative headquarters in Cameroon, the study’s empirical referent. The designation of any city as a politico-administrative headquarters invariably creates a land scarcity problem in that city. The problem is aggravated for the city’s indigenous population by colonial and post-colonial planning policies. For this reason, the policies are said to be in violation of basic human rights as stipulated by the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights as well as the African Charter.

Resguardo e sexualidade(s): uma antropologia simétrica das sexualidades amazônicas em transformação

O artigo investiga o cruzamento de olhares indígenas e não indígenassobre a sexualidade do outro na Amazônia Peruana. Começa por descrever o regimede consumo sexual dos corpos indígenas imposto pela economia extrativista eo surgimento das cidades a partir do auge da economia da borracha. Em seguida,foca nas concepções indígenas sobre as relações entre sexualidade e resguardo quearticulam os processos cotidianos e rituais de produção de corpos genderizadose seus agenciamentos sociocosmológicos. A partir daí, examina as percepçõesindígenas da sexualidade dos não indígenas habitantes das cidades, associados àfigura do boto do mundo subaquático. Argumenta, então, que o abandono daspráticas de resguardo é um ponto de inflexão da atual urbanização e transformaçãoda população amazônica em mestiça.

Turismo indígena urbano, ¿innovación identitaria?

Indigenous Urban Tourism is a singular phenomenon in Latin America. In this Continent’s experience in cases such as Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Bolivia what ...

Introduction: Indigenous Urbanization in Lowland South America

Introduction to special-themed journal: Indigenous Urbanization: the circulation of peoples between rural and urban Amazonian spaces. This introduction provides an overview of indigenous Urbanisation in Lowland South America

Indigenous Urbanization in Amazonia: Interpretive Challenges and Opportunities

Indigenous Urbanization in Amazonia: Interpretive Challenges and Opportunities

“Urban-Rural” Dynamics and Indigenous Urbanization: The Case of Inuit Language Use in Ottawa

The establishment of cities in Canada has played a pivotal role in the displacement, dispossession, and marginalization of Indigenous peoples. Yet, more than half of the Indigenous population now resides in cities, and urbanization continues to increase. This paper addresses a specific aspect of Inuit mobility—namely, migration and the dynamic use of Inuit language and knowledge in the city of Ottawa. Drawing on community-based participatory research in collaboration with an Ottawa Inuit literacy centre, we investigate a range of Inuit-led educational practices that emerged from collaborative work with a group of Inuit women. Suggested activities drew on semiotic resources—including objects and language—that involved retracing the migrational trajectories of Inuit between cities and between nonurban communities, particularly those in their Arctic “homelands.” Such practices appear to cut across the “urban-rural divide,” particularly since cities were rarely mentioned, a fact that seems to signal the irrelevance of this dichotomy for urban Inuit. In this context, the exploration of artifactual literacies—more specifically, speaker interactions that unfold around culturally meaningful objects—led to the following conclusions: (1) multilingual oracy is key to complex transcontextual meaning making; (2) spatiotemporal reference is anchored both in individual experience and in connectivity with members of a newly constituted community; and (3) there is a sharing of cross-generational horizontal knowledge, which includes the abstention from any enforcement of a linguistic norm.

Indigenous Urban School Leadership: A Critical Cross-Cultural Comparative Analysis of Educational Leaders in New Zealand and the United States

This qualitative inquiry compares the practice of one Māori primary school leader of urban education for indigenous multicultural multilingual learners in New Zealand (NZ), to research on the practices of nine educational leaders of colour in the United States (US). This study identifies and compares leadership practices for leaders struggling with ways to positively impact learner outcomes in similar settings (e.g., UK, Canada). From a critical comparative perspective, this school principal shares her leadership practice and lessons learned to inform leadership practice in similarly multifaceted urban settings. This research is undertaken by a collaborative cross-cultural team of educational leaders and scholars from the US and NZ, from the local university and urban primary school. The research team comprises multiple perspectives, the basis for global comparative discourse on school leadership. This contribution offers a cross-cultural model, framework, and way of doing educational research to increase understanding of leadership in different societies.

Bangkok's Two Centers: Status, Space, and Consumption in a Millennial Southeast Asian City

AbstractDespite Bangkok's current incarnation as a globalized city of shopping malls and skyscrapers, indigenous concepts of power and space emphasizing center and hierarchy continue to pervade status differentiation in everyday social life. This is evident in tensions in the spatial‐symbolic relations between Bangkok's politico‐religious “old city” in Rattanakosin and the newer downtown consumption hub which emerged around the locales of Siam and Ratchaprasong, and highlights how urban and social transformations engendered by neoliberal market forces and embodied in downtown Bangkok's modern, consumerist milieu have mapped onto and exacerbated cultural logics of hierarchy drawn from much older notions of urban power and privilege in Southeast Asia. This produced modes of inscribing socio‐economic inequality into space and a striking culture of status display uniquely shaped by the intersection of modern capitalism and Bangkok's distinctive culture and history of indigenous urbanism and suggests that understandings of space, power, and consumption in today's cities may benefit from a less Western‐centric and more regionally sensitive conceptual framework.

Indigenous People and Urbanization

Indigenous People and Urbanization

Excavations at Jenne-Jeno, Hambarketolo, and Kaniana (Inland Niger Delta, Mali), the 1981 Season

Since the first scientific excavations were conducted at Jenne-jeno in 1977, this huge Iron Age occupation mound located in the floodplain of the Inland Niger Delta has produced a classic archaeological sequence spanning 1500 years. Jenne-jeno is widely recognized as one of the most carefully documented cases demonstrating the rise of indigenous urbanism in Africa, and its archaeology has contributed significantly to a major paradigm shift in explanations for the rise of complex societies in sub-Saharan Africa. This monograph presents the results of the excavations conducted in 1980-81 at this site and at two others within the extensive mound complex of which Jenne-jeno is a part.

Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in Southeast Asia

While Southeast Asia revolves around its cities, scholarship spins off into disciplines that ignore this fact. In a region that has known cities for two millennia, where even remote peoples have shaped themselves to or against urban rule, research goes on as if the city were an alien entity, easily factored out and best forgotten. So village studies represent these city-centred nations, and few wonder if the entrepreneurs and middle class who now explain so much might themselves be explained as urban. Our disciplines divide so deeply that no one addresses how the city organizes society and shapes the region.