Indigenous Articulations

Neither private nor new: unpacking narratives of 'ocean privatisation'

Joining others who call attention to the ways in which the ocean, its spaces, and its resources are being commodified, enclosed, and extracted in ways that benefit some at the expense of others, this paper offers a synthesis and review, echoing and extending the cautions being posited around ocean privatisation discourses and their tendencies toward simplistic conceptualisations and presentist thinking that all too often limit critical analysis. Therefore, this paper synthesises and analyses existing literature on the institutions and processes through which the 'privatisation' of the ocean has been, and is being, implemented, leading to two important points. First, it is showed how privatisation processes are often more complex than the word suggests. Privatisation is anything but 'private'. The enclosure, appropriation, and rationalisation of space, resources, knowledge, and governance in the marine domain are occurring in institutional matrices where private actors operate in an array of relationships with the state (in its many, multiple guises), as well as non-governmental, and inter-governmental actors. Secondly, when viewing privatisation with a sensitivity to the array of institutions and actors involved, it is vital to recognise that what passes for a more recent capitalist tendency in the ocean realm rather continues long-standing, historical trajectories of violent extraction (which are equally complex in configuration). Expanding on these critiques, this paper turns to longstanding traditions that offer ways of thinking beyond privatisation and that engage the ocean not as a space of enclosure and extraction but as a space of relationality and livelihoods.

"There's so much more to that sinking island!"-Restorying migration from Kiribati and Tuvalu to Aotearoa New Zealand

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Many Pacific people are considering cross-border mobility in response to the climate crisis, despite exclusion from international protection frameworks. The 'Migration with dignity' concept facilitates immigration within existing laws but without host government support. Through the metaphor of Pacific navigation, we explore the role of dignity in the lives of I-Kiribati and Tuvaluans in Aotearoa New Zealand.

METHODS

Combining talanoa (pacific research method) with I-Kiribati and Tuvaluan community members, alongside critical community psychology and thematic analysis, we depict climate mobility as a wa or vaka moana (ocean-going canoes) journey.

ANALYSIS

Participants are expert navigators, navigating immigration obstacles to (re)grow their roots in Aotearoa New Zealand before charting a course for future generations to thrive. They draw strength from culture and community to overcome the adversity of precarious living and visa non-recognition.

CONCLUSION

Reconceptualising climate mobility through a Pacific lens imagines both dignity and cultural preservation as possible, despite the indignities and limitations of socio-political systems and protections for climate migrants.

FILMES FEITOS PARA “GUARDAR” OU OS DOIS “CAMINHOS” DO CINEMA KUIKURO

Resumo Mobilizados pelo risco da “perda cultural” diante da crescente influência não indígena em suas aldeias, os índios Kuikuro do Alto Xingu se envolveram em um amplo Projeto de Documentação de seu complexo ritual, cuja face mais conhecida é o cinema produzido por ou em parceria com os chamados “realizadores indígenas”. Neste artigo, analiso a especificidade dessa produção fílmica, realizada com o objetivo principal de “guardar a cultura” para que ela não desapareça. Veremos como essa ideia central atravessa os dois “caminhos” tomados pelos realizadores kuikuro e seus parceiros, a saber: os chamados “filmes de rituais” e os filmes voltados para a audiência não indígena. Em ambos os casos destaca-se uma abordagem original do ritual, seja ela orientada pela ideia de reter a totalidade desse conhecimento específico, seja pelo esforço em performar para os espectadores de fora das aldeias as complexas relações que estão em jogo nos rituais kuikuro.

Racial i(nter)dentification: The racialization of maternal health through the Oportunidades program and in government clinics in México

Using an ethnographic approach, this article examines the role of racialization in health-disease-care processes specifically within the realm of maternal health. It considers the experiences of health care administrators and providers, indigenous midwives and mothers, and recipients of conditional cash transfers through the Oportunidades program in Mexico. By detailing the delivery of trainings of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) [Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social] for indigenous midwives and Oportunidades workshops to indigenous stipend recipients, the article critiques the deployment of "interculturality" in ways that inadvertently re-inscribe inequality. The concept of racial i(nter)dentification is offered as a way of understanding processes of racialization that reinforce discrimination without explicitly referencing race. Racial i(nter)dentification is a tool for analyzing the multiple variables contributing to the immediate mental calculus that occurs during quotidian encounters of difference, which in turn structures how individuals interact during medical encounters. The article demonstrates how unequal sociohistorical and political conditions and differential access to economic resources become determinants of health.

In the ruins of representation: Identity, individuality, subjectification

This paper explores a threefold shift in our understanding of identity formation and self-relationality: from an essentialist understanding of identity, to discursive and constructivist approaches, to, finally, the notion of embodied subjectification. The main target of this paper is to historicize these ideas and to localize them in the current social and political conditions of North-Atlantic societies. The core argument is that these three steps in reformulating the concept of identity correspond to an emerging form of subjectivity, affirmative subjectivity, which is bound to the proliferation of the post-Fordist reorganization of the social and political realm. The three theoretical shifts and their social situatedness will be illustrated through a rereading of some ideas from Lev S. Vygotsky's late theory, Michel Foucault's account of government and Jacques Rancière's political philosophy.

Activist Materialism

This paper explores a form of activism that operates with and within matter. For more than 150 years materialism has informed activist practice through materialist conceptions of history and modes of production. The paper discusses the ambivalences of these previous configurations of activism and materialism and explores possibilities for enacting activist interventions in conditions where politics is not only performed as a politics of history but as the fundamental capacity to remake and transform processes of matter and life. What is activism when politics is increasingly performed as a politics of matter? What is activism when it comes to a materialist understanding of matter itself?

Indigenous People and Environmental Politics

Modernity has helped to popularize, and at the same time threaten, indigeneity. Anthropologists question both the validity of the concept of indigeneity and the wisdom of employing it as a political tool, but they are reluctant to deny it to local communities, whose use of the concept has become subject to study. The concept of indigenous knowledge is similarly faulted in favor of the hybrid products of modernity, and the idea of indigenous environmental knowledge and conservation is heatedly contested. Possibilities for alternate environmentalisms, and the combining of conservation and development goals, are being debated and tested in integrated conservation and development projects and extractive reserves. Anthropological understanding of both state and community agency is being rethought, and new approaches to the study of collaboration, indigenous rights movements, and violence are being developed. These and other current topics of interest involving indigenous peoples challenge anthropological theory as well as ethics and suggest the importance of analyzing the contradictions inherent in the coevolution of science, society, and environment.