Before I start on my initial thoughts of de la Cadina’s “Indigenous Mestizos”, I want to disclaim that I’ve been needing 9+ hours of sleep recently and have not finished my second coffee.
"Another thing I’m skeptical about is fully rejecting essentialist definitions of Indigeneity, (thanks Glen Coulthard for brainwashing me) in fear that it will end up delegitimizing their claims to land and equating their cultural position as a quirk in the multicultural melting pot"
I found this interesting--strategic essentialism to legitimize land claims. I think that land claims are important and that urban Indigeneity is compatible with them. Even if the legal discourse they have to work within conceives of an essentially rural Indigeneity.
Hi Annie. Really enjoyed reading your thoughts on this one. I honestly don't really think "de-indianization" is empowering either. I think that this replacement of the term "race" in exchange for "culture" or "education" kind of weaponizes language in a way that masks systematic inequalities that are specifically targeted at Indigenous peoples. The guise of it being "cultural differences" sort of gives the illusion of class mobility, but ultimately still disproportionately affects a specific demographic.
"The idea that “de-Indianization” is not assimilation nor integration is something so unintuitive to me."
Indeed, and likewise to de la Cadena. One of the things I like about Indigenous Mestizos (and I see why Daniel raves about it) is that it chronicles the author's own unlearning/relearning from what she calls "grassroots intellectuals," the working-class inhabitants of Cusco: she likewise is shocked and surprised at the very notion of "indigenous mestizo," but she runs with it and tries to understand it.
And yes, she sees the limits and problems with such conceptions, the ways in which they don't fully escape colonial racism (nor notions of "meritocracy and individualism," though I'm not sure that these can be laid at the door of colonialism... which isn't responsible for *everything* that's bad; we need to be specific!), even as they trouble or render fuzzy the clear racial categories that colonialism has tried to lay down ever since... well, ever since the Inquisition, Silverblatt would say. But they allow ordinary people in places like Cusco to maintain and even affirm and strengthen elements of Indigenous culture.
As for essentialism... almost all the texts we're reading are skeptical at best about essentialist analyzes, for reasons that I think are fairly obvious. Degregori, for instance, suggests that essentialism may be at the basis of the massive bloodshed of the Sendero war, or at least that it hindered observers (academic and otherwise) from seeing what was going on for so long. Personally, I don't see any reason why you need essentialism to back up land claims (although the stress on land claims itself is also problematic, partly still a Canadian holdover, partly, as in Hugo Blanco, blinding us to urban Indigeneity, and casting Indigenous people as always rural agriculturalists). But if you want to hang on to some form of essentialism, then check out Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism."
"Another thing I’m skeptical about is fully rejecting essentialist definitions of Indigeneity, (thanks Glen Coulthard for brainwashing me) in fear that it will end up delegitimizing their claims to land and equating their cultural position as a quirk in the multicultural melting pot"
I found this interesting--strategic essentialism to legitimize land claims. I think that land claims are important and that urban Indigeneity is compatible with them. Even if the legal discourse they have to work within conceives of an essentially rural Indigeneity.
Hi Annie. Really enjoyed reading your thoughts on this one. I honestly don't really think "de-indianization" is empowering either. I think that this replacement of the term "race" in exchange for "culture" or "education" kind of weaponizes language in a way that masks systematic inequalities that are specifically targeted at Indigenous peoples. The guise of it being "cultural differences" sort of gives the illusion of class mobility, but ultimately still disproportionately affects a specific demographic.
Ha! I've been invoked...
"The idea that “de-Indianization” is not assimilation nor integration is something so unintuitive to me."
Indeed, and likewise to de la Cadena. One of the things I like about Indigenous Mestizos (and I see why Daniel raves about it) is that it chronicles the author's own unlearning/relearning from what she calls "grassroots intellectuals," the working-class inhabitants of Cusco: she likewise is shocked and surprised at the very notion of "indigenous mestizo," but she runs with it and tries to understand it.
And yes, she sees the limits and problems with such conceptions, the ways in which they don't fully escape colonial racism (nor notions of "meritocracy and individualism," though I'm not sure that these can be laid at the door of colonialism... which isn't responsible for *everything* that's bad; we need to be specific!), even as they trouble or render fuzzy the clear racial categories that colonialism has tried to lay down ever since... well, ever since the Inquisition, Silverblatt would say. But they allow ordinary people in places like Cusco to maintain and even affirm and strengthen elements of Indigenous culture.
As for essentialism... almost all the texts we're reading are skeptical at best about essentialist analyzes, for reasons that I think are fairly obvious. Degregori, for instance, suggests that essentialism may be at the basis of the massive bloodshed of the Sendero war, or at least that it hindered observers (academic and otherwise) from seeing what was going on for so long. Personally, I don't see any reason why you need essentialism to back up land claims (although the stress on land claims itself is also problematic, partly still a Canadian holdover, partly, as in Hugo Blanco, blinding us to urban Indigeneity, and casting Indigenous people as always rural agriculturalists). But if you want to hang on to some form of essentialism, then check out Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism."