Collection
Indigeneity, Land and Labour: Indigenous Responses to Local and Global Threats
This collection will combine analytical categories normally considered separately, that is, labour and land-based relations on the one hand, and the production and reinforcement of ethnic and spatial differences on the other. More specifically, we will examine how ethnicity has been used to subjugate and destroy indigenous groups, but also mobilised to enrich actions/reactions and inform socio-spatial practices. The evolution of land-based disputes involving indigenous peoples around the world and the growing exploitation of their labour have both been pervaded by the social construction of ethnicity. Racism in particular, just as much as sexism, is a blunt instrument that upholds the divisions and hierarchies required to maintain capital’s combined exploitation of labour and nature. The affirmation and contestation of ethnic differences were instrumental in the regular conversion into endogenous refugees (pariahs in their own ancestral land) and also in the emerging mobilisation for political recognition and land recovery. These socio-spatial processes have resulted in a political economy of indigeneity, in which land, labour and ethnicity need to be considered as interconnected categories, intersecting with wider socio-political transformations. Rejecting the concept of the ‘idealised Indian’ and the stereotyped proletarian or peasant, the recognition of the centrality of ethnicity in political economy means that the subjectification of the indigenous person disrupts the prevailing narrative of progress and development. Subjectification means resistance, as much as resisting demands that indigenous people be seen as subjects of their own lives and spaces. Being and resisting are non-dissociable, but potentialize each other. There is a cross-scale interdependence between structure and subject, but the singularity of the subject makes it incompatible with and prone to try to reconfigure an iniquitous structure. Those processes not only take place in particular socio-spatial settings, but are forces challenging and producing space anew.
Keywords: Indigenous studies; late globalisation; socio-ecological knowledge; land-grabbing; environmental justice; indigenous knowledge; resources; identity; social movements; indigenous geography
Editors
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Antonio A. R. Ioris
Antonio A. R. Ioris, reader in human geography and director of the M.Sc. in Environment and Development at the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, UK He is associate editor of Progress in Development Studies, and author of books Agribusiness and the Neoliberal Food System in Brazil: Frontiers and Fissures of Agro-neoliberalism, Frontier Making in the Amazon: Economic, Political and Socioecological Conversion, Kaiowcide: Living through the Guarani-Kaiowa Genocide, etc. He edited Agriculture, Environment and Development: International Perspectives on Water, Land and Politics (2016, 2022).
