Using ethnographic case studies, these "In Focus" articles explore the indigenous rights movements in two regions, Africa and the Americas, where the histories, agendas, and dynamics of the movements are at once similar and different. They consider a range of relevant questions about the politics of representation, recognition, resources, and rights as these movements engage shifting political and economic landscapes; transnational discourses, alliances, and organizations; and the complicated cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion invoked by the term indigenous. As such, they offer a critical, comparative perspective on the issues of culture, power, representation, and difference inherent in the complicated alliances, articulations, and tensions that have produced and transformed the transnational indigenous rights movement. This introduction provides a brief history of the movement, highlights some major themes in previous anthropological work, reviews the insights of the section articles, and explores some of the ways in which anthropologists have engaged with the movement. [
Recent work has celebrated the political potential of 'counter-mapping', that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter-mapping literature, and compares four counter-mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community-based initiatives led by a church-based NGO, ecotourism companies, the Tanzanian National Parks Authority, and grassroots pastoralist rights advocacy groups, illustrate the broad range of activities grouped under the heading of counter-mapping. They also present a series of political dilemmas that are typical of many counter-mapping efforts: conflicts inherent in conservation efforts involving territorialization, privatization, integration and indigenization; problems associated with the theory and practice of 'community-level' political engagement; the need to combine mapping efforts with broader legal and political strategies; and critical questions involving the agency of 'external' actors such as conservation and development donors, the state and private business interests.
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DESPITE the substantial and significant body of scholarly work on changing gender relations among African peoples who are (or were) primarily cultivators, the gender relations of predominantly pastoralist peoples have been, with a few notable exceptions, curiously excluded from historical examination. Instead, despite work which has shown the complexities of trying to determine the ‘status’ of East African pastoralist women, pastoralist gender relations seem to exist outside of history and be immune to change. Earlier anthropological studies that addressed pastoral gender relations applied a synchronic model, analyzing them in terms of either the pastoral mode of production or pastoralist ideology. Harold Schneider, for example, contended that among East African pastoralists, men's control of livestock gave them control of women, who were ‘usually thoroughly subordinated to men and thus unable to establish independent identity as a production force’. In his rich ethnography of Matapato Maasai, Paul Spencer claimed that both male and female Maasai believe in ‘the undisputed right of men to own women as “possessions” ’. Marriage, in his view, was therefore ‘the transfer of a woman as a possession from her father who reared her to her husband who rules her’. Melissa Llewelyn-Davies' study of Loita Maasai women in Kenya corroborated Spencer's findings. Loita Maasai women perceived themselves, and were perceived, as ‘property’, to be bought and sold by men with bridewealth. Llewelyn-Davis argued that ‘elder patriarchs’ used their control of property rights in women, children and livestock to control the production and reproduction of both livestock and human beings. Similarly, in his symbolic analysis of pastoral Maasai ideology, John Galaty contended that Maasai men were the ‘real’ pastoralists, while Maasai women were negatively equated with lower status hunters, providing an ideological explanation for their lower status. Thus, whether they attributed their findings to material or ideological sources (or some combination of the two), few anthropologists questioned the ‘undisputed right’ of contemporary male pastoralists ‘to own women as possessions’.
Since 1990, over one hundred indigenous nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have emerged in predominantly Maasai areas in Tanzania, attempting to organize people around diverse claims of a common "indigenous" identity based on ethnicity, mode of production, and a long history of political and economic disenfranchisement. Despite attempts to foster unity and promote common political agendas, the indigenous rights movement has been fractured by sometimes quite hostile disagreements over priorities, competition over resources, and tensions over membership and representation. This article explores the complicated causes and consequences of these tensions by focusing on the discussions, disagreements, and silences that occurred during a recent attempt to reconcile indigenous groups in Tanzania. The workshop offers a unique window on the cultural, political, and historical dynamics of the indigenous rights movement in northern Tanzania, the principles and practices of inclusion and exclusion that have defined and shaped the movement, and the internal and external stresses that have made alliances within and among the INGOs, donors, and the government precarious, at best. [
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