This thesis explores Bolivia’s state project of alternative modernization and, specifically, its instrumentalization of indigenous identity for political gain and capitalist growth. I examine both rural development in the TIPNIS reserve and urban development in the city of El Alto in order to analyze how state and capital interests target the affective life of residents; redirecting the energies of radical movements into projects of market expansion and hailing indigenous entrepreneurial subjects.

This report focuses on the intersections between diaspora and indigeneity in the nation-state of Guyana. To illustrate this conflicting, yet overlapping relationship, I examine the nature of state indigenous governing policies by tracing the colonial genealogy of the current 2006 Amerindian Act. I draw on the analytics of settler-colonialism, specifically the “logic of elimination,” to analyze dominant representations of indigeneity in the legislation, which grants recognition of collective rights and ancestral lands while constructing a narrative of national unity and belonging. Ultimately, this report seeks to sheds new light on an indigenous identification as a rights-bearing subject and ultimately rethinks indigenous/non-indigenous social and political relations. / text

This dissertation investigates the pernicious effects of neoliberalism in postcolonial, ostensibly post-racial Mexico. I analyze and thickly describe the daily negotiations of race in neoliberal Mexico, as they play out between indigenous Totonacs and Mestizos, or dominant, non-indigenous, non-Black identity, in a small town in central Mexico. I focus specifically on the discursive and material life of indigenous “traditions and customs,” or usos y costumbres that reverberate within and around an Indigenous Court in Huehuetla, Puebla. Usos y costumbres is the core concept around which indigenous rights revolve and the legal justification of the indigenous courts. As such it becomes the arena of struggle and a key site to investigate power relations and social transformations. First, I analyze and chart how Mestizo authorities, Indigenous Court officials, and Totonac community members struggle to fix, define, and redefine the meaning of usos y costumbres, and consequently shift local racial sensibilities and perceptions of self and others. Second, I analyze how the success of indigenous mobilizations, crystallized in this case in the courthouse, incites potent decolonial imaginaries, knowledge productions, and practices that in previous moments were likely unimaginable. The central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the multicultural logics of governance and related languages of rights and cultural difference are lived through, incorporated in, and complexly contested in Huehuetlan social life. I will argue that the formative effects of state-sponsored multiculturalism in Huehuetla repositioned the Totonacs as subjects with power, crystallized in the institutionalization of “cultural knowledge” as jurisprudence in the Indigenous Court, that reverberates in daily confrontations with the legacy of hegemonic Mestizaje. / text

Today's globalized world presents challenges for formulating language education policies in multilingual countries, and postcolonial Nigeria presents a dramatic illustration because of ongoing colonial influences as well as neocolonial factors. This study focused on dialectical relations over time among languages in Nigeria's National Policy on Education (NPE), published in 1977, 1981, 1998, 2004, 2013, and 2014. The title of the study harks to Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, which described the disruption of tribal cultures and languages when Europeans brought their culture and language to Nigeria. Attention in this dissertation, which examined Nigerian education policy over four decades, was also on things falling apart, being resolved in some way, and then falling apart again. Four major dialectical tensions can be seen as the NPE went through revisions in language of instruction and language of study. First, relations between English and indigenous languages showed the increasing importance of English despite ostensible attempts to promote indigeneity through language. Particularly important was the influence of globalization, which emphasized neoliberal values and initiatives associated with global English. Second, relations among the various indigenous languages showed three languages—Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba—to be privileged over 522 other languages that were marginalized but retained as "mother tongue" or "language of immediate environment." Third, relations between French, which became the second official language, and English revealed that, although both now have the same "official" status, the two are by no means equal. The addition of French was largely a political move that had little effect on language education policy. Fourth and finally, relations between Arabic and other languages showed Arabic, which had been largely ignored in the policy, gaining some visibility in later versions but remaining in the role of "other." Of particular significance in the policy over time has been English, which was the colonizers' language and is now the world's global language, Dialectical relations between languages of education in Nigeria, including English, can also be seen as tensions between global and local, colonizer and colonized, and privileged and marginalized.

The 1990s were a period of intense socio-economic upheaval in Ecuador, in part due to the numerous protests that would come to be known as the Levantamiento Indígena. Notoriously disenfranchised since the bloody conquest of the Americas, peoples of various Indigenous nationalities that reside within Ecuador fought for the constitutional recognition of the nation as both plurinational and multicultural, in order to secure intercultural public policies that would affect patterns of agrarian distribution, indigenous education, health, and overall representation. The prominence of the Indigenous movement and the revalorization of the Indigenous identity throughout Ecuador became an attractive vehicle for which to leverage for rights with the state by coastal communities that were long considered to be mestizo as opposed to Indigenous. Communities in coastal Ecuador engaged in strategic identity construction in order to capitalize on the prominence of the Indigenous identity. By adopting external markers of indigeneity, mestiza women and men engaged in a process of reindigenization as a deliberate political strategy in order to be able to demand rights from the Ecuadorian state.

This thesis deals with issues of indigeneity, warfare and representation as they relate to the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico between the years of 1994-2003 –a period widely known as a period of low intensity warfare. During this period, militants of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) engaged fiercely in the creation and defence of de facto “indigenous” municipalities and territories, posing a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Mexican “state” and its faculty to govern. The environment of war, accompanied by a prevalent Indianist discourse, highly structured the ways in which Zapatista lives came to be represented by activist and academic writings alike. Generic images of Zapatista militants came to dominate the literature. Within this context, my thesis argues for the importance of moving away from images of Zapatistas as public figures and investigating, instead, everyday Zapatista lives. I argue that a refocus on specific-situated-local-everyday politics necessarily entails engaging with “internal” conflict, division, hierarchies, and power differentials. Framed by an ethnographic approach, the analysis presented here is based on 17 months of fieldwork. My discussion on indigenous autonomy and self-determination, therefore, goes well beyond claims to indigenous rights and engages, instead, historical as well as on-the-ground expressions of what self-determination looked like on an everyday basis. My discussion on warfare, moves beyond condemnations of militarization in the area and pays attention to some of the ways in which warfare worked to structure peoples’ lives and daily perceptions as well as outsiders’ understanding of the conflict. While generally my analysis is confined by the particularities of time and space, a generous examination of an ample literature gives it theoretical depth and political relevance beyond the Zapatista case.

This thesis deals with issues of indigeneity, warfare and representation as they relate to the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico between the years of 1994-2003 –a period widely known as a period of low intensity warfare. During this period, militants of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) engaged fiercely in the creation and defence of de facto “indigenous” municipalities and territories, posing a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Mexican “state” and its faculty to govern. The environment of war, accompanied by a prevalent Indianist discourse, highly structured the ways in which Zapatista lives came to be represented by activist and academic writings alike. Generic images of Zapatista militants came to dominate the literature. Within this context, my thesis argues for the importance of moving away from images of Zapatistas as public figures and investigating, instead, everyday Zapatista lives. I argue that a refocus on specific-situated-local-everyday politics necessarily entails engaging with “internal” conflict, division, hierarchies, and power differentials. Framed by an ethnographic approach, the analysis presented here is based on 17 months of fieldwork. My discussion on indigenous autonomy and self-determination, therefore, goes well beyond claims to indigenous rights and engages, instead, historical as well as on-the-ground expressions of what self-determination looked like on an everyday basis. My discussion on warfare, moves beyond condemnations of militarization in the area and pays attention to some of the ways in which warfare worked to structure peoples’ lives and daily perceptions as well as outsiders’ understanding of the conflict. While generally my analysis is confined by the particularities of time and space, a generous examination of an ample literature gives it theoretical depth and political relevance beyond the Zapatista case.

The politicization of ethnic diversity has long been regarded as perilous to ethnic peace and national unity, its detrimental impact memorably illustrated in Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia or Rwanda. The process of indigenous mobilization followed by regional mobilizations in Bolivia over the past decade has hence been seen with some concern by observers in policy and academia alike. Yet these assessments are based on assumptions as to the nature of the causal mechanisms between politicization and ethnic tensions; few studies have examined them directly. This thesis systematically analyzes the impact of ethnic mobilizations in Bolivia: to what extent did they affect ethnic identification, ethnic relations, and national unity? I answer this question through a time-series analysis of indigenous and regional identification in political discourse and citizens’ attitudes in Bolivia and its department of Santa Cruz from 2000 to 2010. Bringing together literature on ethnicity from across the social sciences, my thesis first develops a framework for the analysis of ethnic change, arguing that changes in the attributes, meanings, and actions associated with an ethnic category need to be analyzed separately, as do changes in dynamics within an in-group and towards an out-group and supra-group, the nation. Based on this framework, it examines the development of the two discourses through a qualitative analysis of anthropological accounts, news reports, and expert interviews. In both discourses, the unity of the respective in-group is increasingly stressed, before diverging conceptions become ever more prominent. Finally, my thesis quantitatively examines changes in in-group identification, out-group perception, and national unity, using survey data collected by the Latin American Public Opinion Project over the decade. It finds changes in identification that can be clearly linked to political mobilization. More citizens identify as indigenous and Cruceño, respectively, and do so more strongly than before. Yet identification then decreases again, concomitant with the growing divisions in discourse. Moreover, the rise in identification is not associated with a rise in out-group antagonism or a drop in national unity. On the contrary, the latter has increased steadily among all Bolivians. Besides shedding light on ethnic relations in Bolivia, this analysis thus also contributes to the wider debate on the effects of ethnic politics. It shows that identifications do indeed change in response to mobilizations, that they do so more quickly than expected and not necessarily in the manner as expected, demonstrating that it is necessary to carefully distinguish different elements of ethnicity.

While Taiwanese Aboriginal culture has become essential for Taiwanese to construct a new national identity, this report examines the uses, makings, and transmissions of Taiwanese Aboriginal music in contemporary society, illuminating power dynamics of how Aboriginal music has been presented and perceived among different groups. The shifting Taiwanese identity within the contemporary political context opens up the discourses of indigeneity that have interpreted the Aboriginal culture as a site either for forming the new Taiwanese identity or claiming indigenous rights and subjectivity. Through the analysis of these discourses, I deconstruct how Taiwanese Aboriginal music has been exoticized and folklorized as Other by the Han-centric perspective. Further, by examining Aboriginal song-and-dance at intra-village rituals, at a Pan-Aboriginal festival, and at international cultural performances, I seek to argue that Aborigines are neither simply implementing the “otherness” imposed by the Han majority nor are they completely in conflict with it. By using Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third space that resists the binary of the dominant ideology and counter-hegemonic discourses of a minority, I particularly consider the Aboriginal vocable singing as a site within which Aborigines strategically adopt different identities depending upon the performative context. Through this theoretical perspective, I argue that the multiplicity of identity and the interconnectedness of Aboriginal musical practices across different groups and regions challenge the rhetoric of multiculturalism and diversity of cultures in the sense of neo-liberal ideology. / text

This thesis explores the engagement of a group of Mapuche-Pewenche communities with tourism in southern Chile. I argue that Trekaleyin, their tourism initiative, is part of a broader and long history of resistance and struggles for autonomy, territory and decolonisation, in which identity, development, agency and relations with other beings are negotiated, revitalised and re-produced. From my experience working as a development practitioner with these communities in the beginnings of Trekaleyin, I became interested in understanding the ways in which, as a collective experience, it is embedded in and articulated with political concerns and contestation with regards to neoliberalism and multiculturalism. I also became interested in how the communities are incorporating and reactivating diverse and solidarity economies in their work on tourism, while at the same time reworking their relations with and the market economy itself. I suggest that through Trekaleyin, the communities are also re-producing a relational and open sense of place and connectivity, mobilising particular ways of knowing, being and relating to territory and more-than-human beings in a context of global neoliberalism, reshaping scales and their possibilities. With this thesis I aim to explore how, through their engagement in tourism, community members are disrupting, expanding and hybridising discourses and practices around development, the economy, nature and cross-cultural relations, reworking them so as to craft a better position from where they can participate in them, but the consequences of which extend beyond the “local”, affecting us all, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Therefore, from an ethnographic site and poststructural, post-human and decolonising geographic approaches, this thesis brings new perspectives to the study of development, tourism and the environment, particularly among indigenous peoples, in which autonomy, hybridity, diversity and relational ontologies are articulated.