Differential geographies: place, indigenous rights and ‘local’ resources

Noel Castree, School of Geography, Manchester University, Manchester, England, M13 9PL [email protected]

Abstract Over the last decade a number of human geographers have advocated relational perspectives on place. These perspectives are currently influential within and beyond geography. In this essay they are subjected to a constructive critique. Three shibboleths of place are identified and scrutinised. Taking the writings of Michael Watts, Doreen Massey and David Harvey as a focus, it is argued that these shibboleths possess important but nonetheless limited value as explanatory and normative tools. Working within the broad parameters of a relational worldview, the essay proposes a more nuanced approach to place than that offered by Watts, Massey and Harvey. The second half of the essay explores this approach in relation to debates about the global indigenous peoples movement. For some indigenous groups, the right to ‘differential geographies’ is synonymous with the right to erect new border controls around places. This is controversial, not least because non- indigenous groups – locally and translocally – can lay equal claim to occupancy of, or at least a stake in, those places. Rather than criticising such arguments for the geographical apartheid that seemingly underpins them, I argue for a more subtle reading of ‘strong’ indigenous claims to territory, cultural artefacts and informational resources. The result is a plea for left-leaning critics to deploy more supple understandings of place that can accommodate the complexities of variegated real world place-projects. Keywords: place; relational thinking; geographical imaginations; indigenism; Michael Watts; Doreen Massey; David Harvey

1 Differential geographies: place, indigenous rights and ‘local’ resources

I. Introduction “Struggles over representation”, David Harvey (1990: 422) has observed, “are as fundamental to the activities of place construction as bricks and mortar”. In this essay I wish to challenge a set of shibboleths about the representation of place dominant in contemporary human geography (and, for that matter, in several social science disciplines). The shibboleths I examine are the end-result of a decade long attempt to actively reconfigure academic understandings of place – cognitively and normatively. Shibboleths are beliefs that a set of like-minded people take to be axiomatic. In human geography, the shibboleths of place I wish to question are associated with a cohort of ‘critical geographers’ – including Harvey as well as John Agnew, Ash Amin, Cindi Katz, Doreen Massey, Allan Pred, Neil Smith, Erik Swyngedouw and Michael Watts (to name but a few) – who have struggled to make them disciplinary ‘common-sense’.1 Over the last ten years or more, this cohort has expended a lot of intellectual energy in order to bring about a paradigmatic shift in human geographers’ conception of place. This shift has seen the move away from what are variously described as Cartesian (Merrifield, 1993), neo-Kantian (Harvey, 1990) or Newtonian (Massey, 1999a) conceptions of place towards relational ones. These relational conceptions are not all of a piece, of course. To take some examples, there are substantive differences between those rendered in the languages of ‘dialectics’, ‘actor-networks’ and ‘commodity-chains’ respectively. Nonetheless, at a more abstract level, relational imaginaries together contest a view of places as “locations of distinct coherence” (Massey, 1999a: 14). Instead, they depict places as “nodes in relational settings” (Amin, 2002: 391), as “specific yet globalized sites” (Watts, 1991: 10) and as “articulated moments in networks” (Massey, 1994: 5).2 I should say immediately that my critique is a sympathetic one. In both an explanatory and normative sense, I find the relational view of place compelling. My concern is less with its overall logic and more to do with unproblematised beliefs several of its advocates appear to operate with. To use an architectural metaphor, the shibboleths I wish to challenge do not constitute the foundations of this relational view but, rather, elements of its superstructure. Specifically, I question three ideas about place that seem to have become axiomatic for a cohort of critical human geographers. The first is that attempts to put ‘strong’

2 boundaries around places – that is to enclose peoples, resources or knowledges within a ‘local’ domain – are invariably misguided because such boundary acts are always false attempts to shut-out (or at least ameliorate the impacts of) translocal ties that in part constitute those places. They are, in other words, a denial of a fundamental ontological fact of our time: namely, that the global is in the local. Secondly, such denial, it is further argued, typically engenders actions that are politically regressive. Mapping definitions of place onto putatively discrete territories, peoples or cultures can – as the actions of militant Irish republicans, the Khmer Rouge, Basque militants and Tamil rebels have shown – lead to real or potential geographical apartheid. Here ‘purified’ place representations have a performative and exclusionary force by identifying those who supposedly have the right to ‘belong’ to the geographical area those representations depict. The argument, in short, is that these representations support what Amin (2002: 397) calls a ‘politics of place’ rather than a ‘politics in place’. The third shibboleth I wish to question is almost the mirror opposite of the previous two. It is the idea that there is something morally ‘progressive’ about insisting that people on the ground work with, rather than disavow or deflect, the inter-place connections that irrevocably bind them to distant others. Put differently, it is the idea that a geographical politics that proactively weds agendas in one place to those in myriad others – what Katz (2001: 724) calls a “rooted translocalism” – is to be preferred to one that is place-bound.3 It goes without saying that the three shibboleths listed are as constructed as they are political. They are intended to change the world they purport to describe by claiming to possess a certain truth-value. As Rabinow (1996: 56) notes in a different context, they combine “an ethos of macro-interdependencies with an acute consciousness of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, historical trajectories and fate”. So far so good. The three shibboleths I wish to challenge have a good deal of validity – and I will spell-out the reasons why in due course. But it is equally the case that they remain tendentious without careful qualification or further refinement.4 This brings me to this essay’s title. In recent years, many indigenous peoples worldwide have begun to argue for the right to ‘repatriate’ land, resources, knowledge and cultural artefacts. From First Nations in Canada to Maori in New Zealand to the pre-Conquest peoples of Latin America, these ‘communities of descent’ – comprising tens, if not hundreds of millions of individuals – are today agitating to reverse long histories and geographies of dispossession. They are struggling for differential geographies: that is, the right to make their own places, rather than have them made for them. By exploring some of the specificities and complexities of ‘indigenism’, I hope to show why the three shibboleths of place I identified above are insufficiently refined to be of

3 continued usefulness among Left critics. One of the reasons I focus on indigenism is that it is a ‘global social movement’ (Cohen and Rai, 2000). Though comprised of numerous specific indigenous groups with territorially particular histories and aspirations, it is also a ‘community without propinquity’ or what Radcliffe (1999) calls a “non-diasporic transnational collective”. People laying claim to the title ‘indigenous’ have, as Castells (1997) argues, created a ‘resistance identity’ that is avowedly international in compass. It is at once territorially rooted – “attachments”, as sociologist Bryan Turner (2002: 49) observes “need a location” – and yet a prime instance of translocal solidarity. It is thus about ‘roots’ and ‘wings’. What is more, indigenous peoples are using ‘universals’ crafted to benefit all manner of people (like the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights) to advance their geographically differentiated cause. But this is not to say that indigenism is therefore ‘progressive’ in the sense someone like Doreen Massey uses the term, or that it is incompatible with the pursuit of exclusionary localism. Specifically, because many of the areas, environments and cultural artefacts indigenism seeks exclusive control of are considered to be of national and even global importance, the movement must confront a tension between local needs and extra-local wants. Left-leaning researchers across the disciplines have, in the main, been sympathetic to the indigenous cause (a cause that is, though, far from homogenous in either its strategy or goals). But what happens to relational conceptions of place – in both their cognitive and normative dimensions – when confronted with a movement where the local and the translocal are negotiated in ways that challenge the shibboleths highlighted above? The argument proceeds as follows. In the next section I discuss the rise to prominence of relational place conceptions in critical human geography. Following this I summarise the work of Michael Watts, Doreen Massey and David Harvey in order to illustrate and explain the shibboleths of place that, in my view, need to be challenged. I focus on this trio not just because they are especially influential theorists of ‘glocal’ relationships, but also because their conceptions of place have been developed against rather different academic and real world backdrops. Exploring these backdrops reminds us why, the shibboleths I discuss nothwithstanding, relational concepts of place are so analytically and politically valuable at the present time. In the fourth section, I discuss the indigenous peoples’ movement, emphasising its translocal nature while recalling its rootedness in what Raymond Williams (1989) famously called ‘militant particularisms’. Critical human geographers have only recently begun to focus on indigenous peoples’ struggles in earnest (see, for example, Anderson and Jacobs, 1997; Berg and Kearns, 1997; Braun, 1997; Howitt

4 et al., 1996).5 What distinguishes my contribution here is that I focus on the conjoint local and translocal nature of these struggles, rather than any one example/set of examples of indigenous place-making (see also Howitt, 2003: 146-51 and Perreault, 2003).6 This leads me, towards the end of the fourth section, to rehearse an argument that many supporters of the indigenous cause endorse: namely, that indigenous groups be entitled to full control of land, water, artefacts and knowledges that, historically and today, they consider to be theirs. It is a contentious argument because many of the territories and things in question are considered to be of translocal importance such that they should not, in the estimation of many, be sequestered by indigenes. Yet this argument, I show, is compatible both with ‘closed’ place-projects and a form of ‘openness’ to outside relations and constituencies. Though I do not necessarily support this argument in its entirety, it is a compelling one in a number of ways. Within academia, it has largely been made in the discipline of anthropology. Accordingly, I draw heavily upon anthropologists’ arguments in the latter part of the essay. In conclusion, I reflect upon the need for critical geographers to acknowledge the messiness of real or intended place projects. This messiness often cannot be fitted into the diagnostic and evaluative boxes otherwise well-intentioned critics are wont to use in examining it.7

II. Geographical imaginations and imaginative geographies: theorising ‘the local’ When, in Social justice and the city, Harvey (1973: 24) famously defined ‘the geographical imagination’, he could scarcely have anticipated the cacophony of voices that, three decades later, would share his preoccupation with local-translocal relationships. A geographical imagination, Harvey (ibid.) argued, “allows the individual to recognise the role of place and space in [their] … own biography”. Thirty years on, the nature, content and implications of place-space/local-global relationships is the subject of enormous critical attention in both geography and the wider social sciences. There are at least three reasons why. First, in an era of ‘globalisation’, ‘time-space compression’, ‘time-space distanciation’, ‘vagabond capitalism’ and ‘liquid modernity’, the issue of whether place particularity is being eroded is very much on the agenda. One is compelled to ask: can areal differentiation survive in “a seriously scrambled world that does not divide itself cleanly at the joints” (Geertz, in Winkler, 1994: 18)? Secondly, heightened geographical interdependency has also posed an important, related question: namely, to what extent are changes ‘internal’ to places the result

5 of ‘external’ ties? Finally, intensified place-space connections have also been coincident with a proliferation of local particularisms. These particularisms – which include everything from the Basque separatist movement to myriad urban ‘growth coalitions’ to the efforts of the Tamil militias and Kurdish rebels – are often pursued by emphasising distinctions from rather than relations with the wider world. As such, they have attracted a good deal of analytical attention with a view to understanding and, sometimes, challenging their goals. In human geography the current preoccupation with what Massey (1994) called ‘a global sense of the local’ is to be found both in formal considerations of place – as in Massey’s own writing – but also in numerous other debates. These include those on transnational communities (e.g. Mitchell, 1997), the restructuring of local labour markets (e.g. Peck, 1995), the territorial organisation of corporations (e.g. Dicken et al., 2001), the geography of justice (e.g. Smith, 2000), development ethics (e.g. Corbridge, 1998), and the spatial lives of commodities (e.g. Jackson, 2002). In theoretical terms, these debates have been phrased in the diverse idioms of Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism and post- structuralism (to name but a few). In virtually every case, a key theme in all of these considerations of place is how to understand and evaluate ‘otherness’, ‘alterity’ and ‘difference’ in a world where none of these exist sui generis. Outside geography, the recent engagement with place has been similarly vigorous and relational, but phrased variously in terms of the end of autochthonous cultures (in anthropology), the hybridity of identities (in cultural studies), the unboundedness of moral claims (in political theory), and the disembedding of social relations (in sociology). Among the many differences between Harvey’s initial plea for the development of a geographical imaginary and the numerous current attempts to specify place-space relationships two loom large. First, it is now evident that no Archimedean promontory exists from whence local-global ties can be ‘properly’ sited. Critical geographers and their fellow- travellers are now apt to talk about geographical imaginations in the plural. The reasons for this are not hard to fathom: because of recent debates over situated knowledges, reflexivity and positionality, few Left-leaning academics would now want to claim the tainted mantle of ‘objectivity’ when describing their knowledge-productions. Secondly, it follows that geographical imaginations are not simply ‘reflections’ of the worldly phenomena they purport to capture. Since Said’s (1979) landmark book, there has been an awareness among Leftists in geography and related fields that imaginations of local-global ties are fictions: they are actively manufactured and have a constitutive role to play in how we see ourselves and others (and thus how we act in the world).8 To phrase these two points in another way, it

6 is evidently the case that geographical imaginations are also imaginative geographies. They involve a cognitive mapping with political intent and material effectivity. This arguably heightens, rather than reduces, the stakes in their construction, circulation and consumption. “It is necessary”, as legal theorist Rosemary Coombe (2001: 318) observes, “to see our scholarly languages of representation not merely as reflecting a state of things ‘out there’, but as potentially productive…”. Thus, rather than asking whose geographical imaginations are ‘correct’, we need instead to ask: who has the power to construct what geographical imaginations and with what effects? This does not – or should not – lead us into a flabby relativism where each and every geographical imagination has equal validity. Instead, it encourages those whose geographical imaginations are dominant, emergent or subordinate – in academia and beyond – to actively justify the kind of world those imaginations are designed to create. In human geography, as I will illustrate in the next section, a cohort of critical geographers have developed a highly articulated relational perspective on place that is designed to challenge previous disciplinary conceptions and shape ‘real world’ geographical imaginations. Since numerous individuals have helped to fashion this perspective, I focus on just three contributions: namely, those of Watts, Harvey and Massey. Massey’s theorisation of place is perhaps the best-known of the trio, but Harvey and Watts have also made concerted efforts to develop relational local-global imaginaries. To simplify rather, Watts focuses primarily on place identity, Massey on the nature of place difference and interconnection, and Harvey on the geographical scope of agency, loyalties and justice. Together, their works theorise the ‘subjective’ dimensions of place, the ‘objective’ dimensions of place, and the wider geographical scales at which active efforts to defend/enhance/alter places should be organised. I focus on their works for two reasons. First, they have been uncommonly influential, setting agendas for how others in geography and beyond think about place. Secondly, together their work encompasses the range of fundamental issues that fall under the polysemic term ‘place’. As I hope to show, this trio’s writings together encapsulate something of the power – but also the limitations – of critical geographers’ attempts to develop a view of place fit for our times.9 Inevitably, in any summary of other authors’ work, there is the risk of over-simplification and caricature. In what follows I hope I have not unfairly represented Watts’, Massey’s and Harvey’s ideas.

III. Relational places: three theorisations

7 Watts: place identity and the spectre of geographical fetishism In a string of publications (alone and with Allan Pred), Michael Watts has offered a critical analysis of resurgent place identities in the contemporary world (Watts, 1991; 1998; 1999; 2001; Pred and Watts, 1992). Though perhaps better known for his work on ‘natural hazards’ (Watts, 1983), agro-food systems (Goodman and Watts, 1997) and Third world political ecology (Peet and Watts, 1997), Watts has, in fact, developed a consistent and powerful theorisation of the ‘subjective’ consequences of places being wired-in ‘objectively’ to wider spheres of cultural, economic and political influence. The context of this theorisation is two-fold. First, it has been undertaken in critical dialogue with two important 1990s debates in geography, the social sciences and the humanities: namely, those on post- colonialism and those on post-development. In both cases, several commentators have valorised ‘local knowledges’, ‘subaltern identities’ and ‘place-making projects’ as a counter to the (Western) abstractions imposed historically by the powerful on the powerless – such as ‘development’, ‘reason’, and ‘progress’. As Kamat (2001: 39) puts it, here “The local is seen to contain the solutions to its own problems …”. Against this, Watts is very wary of celebrating ‘local difference’ in a quasi-romantic mode, observing that what is really at stake here “is the struggle between intellectuals” (Watts, 1999: 92). What he means by the latter statement is that some academics become cheer-leaders for place-projects, while others take a more internationalist, cosmopolitan view. One of the former, in Watts’ (2000: 29-30) estimation, is Arturo Escobar, who is a key advocate of local, grass-roots alternatives to the blanket application of development practices in the South. Secondly, the academic advocates of geographical difference (like Escobar) have made their arguments in the context of a recent proliferation of localist movements worldwide – as mentioned earlier. This proliferation should come as no surprise. Increased place-connectivity creates new opportunities and new threats for localities. In Cocks’ (2000: 46) words, now that places “cannot be counted on [t]o … remain in tact” they take on a heightened importance for those living in them. What is more, if Jessop (1999) is right, the ‘down-scaling’ of political- economic regulation in many countries has given numerous places greater power to control – and thus take direct responsibility for – their own destinies. However, as Dirlik (1999: 53) notes, the recent ‘resurrection of locality’ has “had politically mixed consequences”. The various geographical imaginations that local actors and institutions have deployed to command their home ‘turf’ have often been chauvinistic, essentialist, and exclusive, as opposed to ecumenical, open and inclusive.

8 Watts focuses on just two efforts to imagine and reappropriate place, both of them occurring in modern Nigeria, West Africa. The first is a set of Muslim millennarian insurrections among the Hausa during the early 1980s, inspired by a self-proclaimed prophet, Alhaji Maitatsine. The second is the more recent struggle of the Ogoni people, led by the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, “to create a space of autonomy and self-determination enshrined in an Ogoni Bill of Rights and in a mass political movement” (Watts, 1999: 86) – MOSOP (the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People). The Ogoni movement, as Watts notes, has often been held up as paragon case of subaltern struggle and post-development practice. The context for both struggles is a history of British colonial control, followed by nation state independence which has been reliant economically on oil exports and remains subject to an oligarchy of Western petroleum companies. In each case, Watts aims to show how two charismatic leaders helped to forge new social identities for their followers that were profoundly geographical in their character. Specifically, he argues that both identities rested upon a “fetishisation of geography” (Watts, ibid. 92) that is deeply paradoxical. Fetishisation occurred because both subordinated identities laid claim to specific territories within Nigeria with a view to appropriating them so that the identities in question could have a space for free expression. The paradox though, as Watts (ibid. 87) notes of the Ogoni movement, is that such identities “were in practice [the effect] of a conversation with national discourses … over federalism, sovereignty [and] citizenship …, [ with] multinational Occidental discourses of indigeneity, … and [with] transnational oppositional discourses of environmental and human rights”. Far from being sui generis, these identities were an outcome of an engagement with supralocal discourses and relations. In theoretical terms, Watts’ reading of these two localist resistance identities is informed by the works of Stuart Hall, Walter Benjamin and Nicos Poulantzas. From Hall (1996), Watts borrows the notion of ‘articulation’. If identities are seen as constructed, not given, as concatenations of subject-positions rather than the outward expression of inner essences, then it becomes necessary to interrogate (i) how people build notionally coherent identities in any give situation and (ii) who promotes what identifications. As Castells (1997: 7) puts it, “It is easy to agree on the fact that … all identities are constructed. The real issue is how, from what, by whom and for what.” The idea of articulation draws analytical attention to how coherence is rendered (however temporarily) and to how the people assuming a given identity are interpellated into political projects. “A collective subject of politics”, in Westwood’s (2001: 250) apt words, must be produced “out of diversity in order to step onto the political stage …”. In order to ground this, Watts adapts Benjamin’s notion

9 of ‘collective wish images’ and Poulantzas’s (1978) argument that communal identities typically rest on a constructed history and a representational geography. Wish images are visions of the past and future that give normative force to a political movement. In the case of marginal groups, they are often conjured up as mythic and utopian reactions against those other groups who are seen to threaten the collective’s integrity and even existence. Relatedly, wish images and the identities they express need a location to call their own. Just as wish images may involve fantastical visions of a group’s past and possible future, so the territorialisation of identities is equally fictive: claims to parcels of space can be legitimated with reference to spurious histories of ‘homelands’, ‘birthrights’, ‘origins’ and the like. As Bauman (2001: 129) sagely notes, “It is only after the border-posts have been dug-in that the myths of their antiquity are spun …”. Thus, however ‘heterotopic’ the Maitatsine and Ogoni movements might have been, Watts (1999: 92) believes that “their subversive potential is compromised by geography”. Despite the constructedness of the identities these movements expressed – and a relational constructedness at that, defined in part against what those identities are not – in both cases, Watts argues, socio-geographic essentialism and boundary-marking are in play. Important ‘internal’ differences among the Ogoni and Maitatsine were, Watts argues, consequently glossed over (cf. Rangan [1996] on the Chipko movement), while the place imaginaries deployed erased complex histories of inter-ethnic movement within and beyond West Africa. As Watts (2000: 32) concludes, “calls to localism can produce Hindu fascism as easily as Andean Indian cooperatives”. Uncritical celebrations of localism, in academia or the wider world, thus risk forgetting that “the ‘local’ is never purely local but … created in part by extralocal linkages and practices over time” (ibid.).

Massey: place and relational difference Doreen Massey’s writings have always had place as their central concern – going back to her classic contributions on ‘the regional problem’ and spatial divisions of labour (Massey, 1979; 1984). However, it was only in the early 1990s that she began to thematise place explicitly in many of her publications (Massey, 1993; 1994; 1995; 1996. 1999a, 1999b; 1999c; 2002). Where Watts focusses mostly on the crucial issue of place identity, Massey is equally interested in the ‘objective’ dimensions of place: that is, those relations, processes and structures that form the context and condition for the ‘subjective’ issues that concern Watts. It is a measure of just how influential Massey’s publications have been that her conception of place is now routinely appropriated in all manner of publications on the local-

10 global nexus.10 Rather than review her place writings in detail, I want instead to examine the arguments presented in Power geometries and the politics of space-time (1999a). This is Massey’s most recent, substantive statement on place and local-translocal relations. It thus incorporates, refines and modifies much of her earlier thinking on these matters. I organise my discussion according to what place-conceptions Massey dissents from, what her own conception looks like, and what its political intent is. Massey’s starting point is that all geographical imaginations – all depictions of place- space relationships – are non-innocent. The analyst’s task is to ask: what are the consequences of these imaginations and who manufactures them? Her response is that, in academia and beyond, two geographical imaginations are currently dominant. The first is a “classically Newtonian, billiard-ball view” (ibid. 36) that sees places as (actually or potentially) discrete until exogenous forces ‘intrude’ into them or are, alternatively, vanquished. Historically, this view has been central to the project of Western colonialism, which, Massey argues, pejoratively essentialised non-Western places in order to justify the domination of those places. Geography, of course, (like anthropology) was complicit in this process. Today, though, this depiction of place is, as Watts’ Nigerian inquiries show, as likely to be deployed by peoples who perceive ‘their’ places to be in need of reclamation from ‘outsiders’. Though these peoples have often suffered histories of domination, Massey (ibid. 40) nonetheless refuses to endorse the “local parochialisms” and “mutual antipathies” they expound. Indeed, she intimates that were academics to affirm these particularisms they would risk reinstating “the essentializing tendencies of which the social sciences have been trying to rid themselves” (Wastell, 2001: 193). By contrast, a second geographical imagination that Massey opposes is relational, one promoted by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and other supporters of free-market globalisation. Despite its relational credentials it is, Massey argues, distinctly ageographical. It imagines a world of “immense, unstructured, free, unbounded space” (ibid. 15) in which places are (or should be) open to flows of commodities, money and people. It is a vision of a world without barriers where those localities not yet fully integrated into the global economy soon will (or should) be. “This vision”, Massey (ibid. 17) argues, “is not so much a description of how the world is, as an image in which the world is being made”. It is a vision constructed by the world’s power- brokers in Washington, Davos, G8 meetings and elsewhere – one designed to further consolidate their power over the lives of billions of people from Belem to Bombay. Ironically, Massey argues, these power-brokers resort to a Newtonian imaginary when it suits them: “In one breath the[y] … assume that ‘free trade’ is … some moral virtue, … in

11 the next they pour venom [on] … asylum seekers” in the name of “defensible places” (ibid. 19). Against both of the geographical imaginations described above, Massey’s agenda is to create one that is ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. As she (ibid. 40) puts it: “I absolutely reject … the claims to local exclusivity and the terms in which they …[a]re being made. On the other hand, I absolutely d[o] … not want to give up on the ability to appreciate local difference (it is one of the reasons I became, and remain, a geographer).” Massey’s “third approach” imagines place “as the sphere of juxtaposition, or co-existence, of distinct narratives, as the product of power-filled social relations … This is place as open, porous, hybrid … where specificity (local uniqueness, a sense of place) derives not from some mythical internal roots nor from a history of relative isolation – now to be disrupted by globalisation – but by the absolute particularity of the mixture of influences found together there” (ibid. 21-22).11 Intellectually, this ‘third way’ has the following advantages over non-relational place imaginaries and relational but ageographical place imaginaries. First, it permits an understanding of areal differentiation as a relational outcome (and cause) of inter-place connections. Local specificity and place uniqueness are not simply ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered but the product of interaction. Secondly, since not all geographical differences are benign, Massey’s conception focuses our attention to the ‘power-geometries’ that actively produce inequality within and among inter-connected places. Thirdly, this conception does not reduce place difference to those geometries and connections. These differences are as often emergent and unexpected as they are planned and anticipated: as Massey avers, “there are always loose ends [in place],… [always] an element of chaos” (ibid. 37). Once created, geographical differences of an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ kind have a “relative autonomy” (ibid. 35) which, for Massey, allows us to see that ‘otherness’ and ‘alterity’ might still existence even in our hyper-integrated world. Finally, all this indicates the futility – for both analysts and place-based actors – of ever supposing that places could or should exist as metaphorical islands. It is simply too late to turn back the hands of time in the name of autarchy. What, to conclude this discussion of Massey’s work, is the political point of seeing places in the way she does? Recalling her (ibid. 17) insistence that all “imaginative geographies legitimise”, Massey’s vision is arguably designed to inculcate the following four ideas. The first is that it is morally wrong and practically misguided to indulge in geographical apartheid. Erecting boundaries, in thought or practice, can simply serve to

12 repress ineluctable connections. The second idea is that place-based projects to defend and preserve specific local ways of living are acceptable so long as they are not place-bound – that is, projects to protect or resurrect “internally generated authenticities” (ibid. 11). Thirdly, it follows from this that for Massey a ‘progressive place politics’ both confronts wider power-geometries while working positively with the myriad non-local constituencies who are also seeking to confront them. This politics is anti-essentialist both in the sense that it recognises that its object – place – is relationally constituted and in the sense that it recognises that place will change. This is what Michel Feher (1994: 276) calls a supra-local politics of “mutual transformation … not a static respect for each other’s integrity”. There is, then, no ontological ‘essence’ to place that can be held stable – either objectively (in terms of the built environment) or subjectively (in terms of local identities). Finally, Massey’s conception of place mandates what she calls “a relational politics” (ibid. 41) whose ultimate target is the cartographies of power through which localities are partly made. As she puts it, “the point of politics [is] … to attack the relations … rather than to keep focussing on the rights of particular identities” (ibid. 75, emphasis added). Such an attack will not do away with all inter-place relations, but it will target those (like capitalist ones) that are adversely affecting all manner of towns, cities and settlements worldwide. It will do so not on the basis of pre-constituted identities, but by strategically deploying identity claims – geographical and social – that are knowingly constructed.

Harvey: militant particularism, translocal solidarities and the geography of justice We turn, finally, to the geographical imagination of David Harvey. Harvey, like Watts and Massey, takes it as axiomatic that “places are more than what they contain” (Amin, 2002: 395). Where he differs, in his more recent writings, is the emphasis he gives to theorising the right to geographical difference, the ‘proper’ geographical scale of actors’ loyalities, and the geographical scope of justice. Rather than focus on all of the dimensions of Harvey’s thinking about place – a job requiring an essay in itself12 – I wish to dwell on these questions of ‘difference’, solidarity and justice. The context here is what Harvey sees as a hypostatisation of place among certain social scientists and ‘real world’ actors. In his view, this has arisen because of heightened place competition during a post-1974 era of global capitalist restructuring. The ‘beggar-thy- neighbour’ logic of post-Fordist, globalised capitalism has, in Harvey’s view, led to aggressive efforts to market places and to anxieties about the vulnerability of localities to uncontrollable ‘external’ forces (Harvey, 1988; 1990, 1993). Though it may seem far-fetched

13 to argue that academic understandings of place are but reflections of this economically- induced turn to localism, Harvey has long maintained that disciplines like geography are part and parcel of the apparatus that helps reproduce capitalism and its inequities (Harvey, 1984).13 This context helps to explain Harvey’s recent arguments for an internationalist place politics that favours neither ‘side’ of the local-global dialectic.14 This is well captured in his well-known essay on Raymond Williams (reprinted twice: Harvey, 1996; 2001) – an essay worth pausing to consider, not least because it uses William’s thesis about militant particularism to reflect upon Harvey’s personal involvement in a localist campaign to save jobs in a Rover automobile plant near Oxford, England. “A new theory of socialism”, Williams (1989: 242) once remarked, “must now centrally involve place”. Harvey agrees, but like Williams argues that it will only thrive on a set of place-based, rather than place- bound, political projects. Detailing his disagreement with Teresa Hayter, co-editor of The factory and the city, Harvey analyses Williams’ novels to show that any project to challenge the socio-geographic ills of a capitalist world cannot afford to draw Maginot lines around places. Though the satisfaction of local needs and wants is manifestly important – hence his qualified support for the campaign to save jobs at Rover – Harvey argues that only translocal solidarity can really satisfy myriad local agendas. As Williams (op. cit., 249; 115) put it, “The unique and extraordinary character of working class self-organization has been … to make real what is at first sight the extraordinary claim that the defence and advancement of certain particular interests, properly brought together, are in fact the general interest”. Despite Williams’ seemingly problematic reference to the ‘working class’ – implying that an anti-capitalist place politics is a purely labourist politics – Harvey’s point is not that an exclusively class identity should be constructed within and among places. By defining class relationally as “positionality in relation to processes of capital accumulation”, Harvey’s (1996: 359) point is that whatever identities place-based actors choose to emphasise – gender, ethnic or religious identities, say – these must necessarily engage in some form of class struggle that transcend the localities in question. To suppose otherwise is to fixate on social and geographical differences as if they were absolute. It is also to play into the hands of a capitalist system that uses socio-geographical differences among workers as a strategy for controlling them. For Harvey, by contrast, difference must be seen as a relational product. For him a focus on class relations within the dynamics of capitalism, allows us to identify “the similarities that can provide the basis for differing groups to understand each other and form alliances” (ibid. 360). As David Held (2001: 400) observes in a similar vein, “what we have in common is as important as some of the things that mark us apart”

14 Clearly, Harvey is not recommending any simple-minded internationalism, where myriad place-based groups unite readily to confront the universality of capitalism. But he is arguing that there is nothing more ‘authentic’ or meaningful about face-to-face loyalties than those among distant strangers whose fates are directly, if invisibly, entangled. The circle of the ‘we’ is, in Harvey’s estimation, large indeed today. Nonetheless, problems remain in constructing an extroverted, place-based, oppositional politics. First, as Harvey acknowledges, recognising the transnational qualities of capitalism does not, in itself, diminish the importance of socio-geographical differences among people connected over long distances. What seems to make political sense at the local scale may not make any sense at all when seen from the perspective of a wider, translocal, anti-capitalist constituency (and vice versa). In the otherwise optimistic book Spaces of hope, Harvey is thus careful to recognise the “contradictory politics” (2000a: 93) that all militant particularisms – even those aiming to be internationalist not just reactively localist – must negotiate. Secondly, this means that we have to recognise how social life is structured at, and by, numerous geographical scales (cf. Smith, 1993; Swyngedouw, 1997). These scales actively constrain and enable both identity and action and pose a formidable barrier to the formation of inter- place solidarity. Given these two facts, the ‘banality of geographical evils’ is, in Harvey’s (2000b) view, ever present. Nonetheless, myriad contemporary examples exist of (i) actors in one place agitating on behalf of distant others (witness the consumer boycotts of sweatshop commodities led by UNITE in the USA) and (ii) local political movements that are outward looking in their grammar of expression. In the case of the latter, Harvey (2000a) particularly commends the efforts of the Zapatistas in Mexico. This remarkable attempt to preserve a particular way of life among peasant and indigenous peoples in the Chiapas has, Harvey observes, phrased its critique of the Mexican state, NAFTA and the wider forces of capitalist neo-liberalism in the universal language of human rights and human dignity. That is, a local agenda was pursued dialectically by way of critical reference to the destructive influence of certain translocal forces and with positive reference to an inclusive, universal discourse (see Kamat, 2001). This leads Harvey to reflect upon the contemporary usefulness of the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights for an anti-capitalist, internationalist politics. Though Marxists have tended to avoid too much discussion of rights (and other normative concepts), Harvey sees the Declaration as a pragmatic way to address the common injustices all manner of different people worldwide suffer at the hands of capitalism. To adapt Nancy Fraser’s (1997) arguments, its broad principles can, in Harvey’s view, support a non-sectarian politics but

15 one that still recognises people’s desire for meaningful socio-geographical distinctiveness. One the one side, universal rights discourse can help deliver ‘cultural-geographic justice’: that is, the right to have one’s particular identity and territory recognised by others. As Harvey (2000a: 93) notes, “The right to difference [here] confronts the universality of rights”. On the other side, it can help deliver ‘economic-geographic justice’ because it implies that if cultural and territorial difference is to flourish, a reworking of international economic, trade, and other relations is necessary in favour of the socially and spatially marginalized. This reworking would necessitate many better-off places being willing to redistribute wealth to other parts of the world, not disavowing their implication in others’ well-being (see Bauman, 2001; Smith, 2000).15 And yet (the enormous practical problems of achieving justice aside) one final issue remains: the discourse of human rights, which can bolster both inter-place solidarity and place specificity, can also licence an ‘anything goes’ attitude to socio-geographic difference. Harvey (1996: 350-52) has tackled this issue in the context of a critique of communitarian thinking. Examining Walzer’s (1983) argument that each community is entitled to its own conception of justice, Harvey argues that this would permit fascism or slavery to be considered ‘just’ in certain instances. Likewise, universal rights discourse can, in principle, be appropriated as much by racist South Africans as by the Zapatistas. Harvey’s tack is to argue that the right to socio-geographic difference can only be asserted if the group/s involved recognise their intractable interconnectedness with others. To act locally in ways that harm local or distant ‘outsiders’ – that is, those not invited to take-on the identity of ‘insiders’ – is to ignore the fact that those others help constitute the places the insiders wish to make their own. It is also, therefore, potentially a threat to the rights of these others. Thus, however substantively ‘thin’ it may be, the discourse of human rights is, Harvey implies, potentially ‘thick’ enough to prevent sectarian localisms being given succour by it (for a contrasting view see Bauman, 2001: 141).

The shibboleths of place Let me summarise. A survey of Watts’, Massey’s and Harvey’s writings on place shows what a rich and powerful battery of arguments they offer. In Watt’s work we confront the ‘subjective’ dimensions of place in the form of a critique of essentialised local identities. In Massey’s work questions of identity are linked to the ‘objective’ dimensions of place that form their context and condition. Finally, in Harvey’s work we are invited to appreciate the ‘proper’ scales of loyalty and action that can produce translocal justice and yet allow

16 geographical difference (subjective and objective) to flourish. Though the details of these authors’ arguments vary – often in important ways – what is equally striking are the similarities. First, all three authors argue that place still matters immensely. Far from being subsumed into a ‘space flows’, they agree that “the local level of everyday life [remains] … a crucial relational field …”(Anderson 2000: 387). Secondly, all three are deeply suspicious of inward-looking localist movements that are defined against ‘outsides’ and ‘outsiders’. Though they appreciate why such localisms arise in a world without clear boundaries, they nonetheless detect real dangers in their political agendas. Finally, all three authors affirm a place-based politics where local needs are pursued by constructive engagement with translocal forces and non-local constituencies. Confronted with both the realities of global interdependence and the recrudescence of place-cleansing politics worldwide (see Krishna, 2003), it would be difficult for any self- respecting person on the Left to demur. As I argued in the introduction, the arguments that Watts, Massey, Harvey and others make about place are now disciplinary ‘common-sense’ among critical researchers – and not just in geography. However, it is useful to reflect on what is lost when we are encouraged to see place-bound movements as tendentially ‘regressive’, translocal organising as largely ‘progressive’ (not to mention pragmatically necessary), and an openness to other peoples and places as the mark of a proper (sic) place politics? First, while we might abhor the recent genocides in Rwanda, the Russian invasion of Chechnya, or the tactics of Colombia’s drug cartels, not all attempts to wrest territory from others – to make place in a particular image – attract such clear-cut opprobrium (Krishna, 2003). A case in point are the increasingly well-organised attempts by First Nations Canadians to (re)claim their historic territories. Commentators on the Left have often found it difficult to position themselves morally in relation to such cases because they often pursue a geographical politics of exclusion (potentially ‘regressive’) but for ‘good reason’ (a sorry history of colonial and neo-colonial control by whites). Secondly, it is important to note that a place-based movement might be ‘open’ to the extra-local in some respects but use it for its own, exclusive purposes in other instances. Local movements are not either ‘introverted’ or ‘extroverted’ but can be both simultaneously and with a variety of local and extra-local consequences. In these instances, a dichotomous endorsement or criticism of such movements is, clearly, not viable. Thirdly, it is equally the case that inter- place cooperation among marginalized constituencies can, paradoxically, have exclusionary and non-inclusive goals and outcomes. Herod (2001: ch. 6) demonstrates as much in his analysis of rival international, post-war trade unions. Finally, once we have determined

17 which particular non-local relations or peoples a place-based movement is engaging with, it becomes a contingent question whether or not the term ‘progressive’ is applicable. There is nothing, ipso facto, progressive about making translocal connections, just as there is nothing necessarily regressive about all forms of localism that are defined against a putative exterior. With these comments in mind I want, in the second half of this essay, to challenge the shibboleths of place discussed above with reference to the combined, contemporary efforts of many indigenous peoples worldwide to make their own geography and history. Since these shibboleths cross-cut the key issues that Watts, Massey and Harvey focus upon, I want to structure the second half of this paper as a three-stage engagement with these authors’ work. That is, by looking at the issues of identity, of what counts as (and constitutes) the ‘local’, and of loyalties, I want to show how indigenous struggles over place call into question critical geographers’ shibboleths of place.

IV. Indigenism and the struggle for differential geographies ‘Indigenism’ (the term is Niezen’s, 2000) is a global social movement of increasing prominence and importance. It was presaged in the International Labor Office’s Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention of 1957, but has only really begun to take shape in the last decade or so. Like most social movements it is an oppositional one. It is a translocal attempt to redress the grievances that found such dramatic expression in the 1973 siege at the Wounded Knee reservation in south Dakota, the Maya uprising of 1980 in Guatemala, and the Mohawk insurrection at Oka in Canada. Indigenism is comprised of numerous communities of dissent and descent. ‘Indigenous peoples’ (I shall explain the need for scare- quotes below) are today combining at a number of geographical scales in order to find peaceful means of ensuring “a particular historical [and geographical] trajectory of their own” (Dirlik, 1996: 18). Note that indigenism is not synonymous with indigenous peoples as such. Rather, it describes those indigenous groups who are consciously building translocal solidarities as a means of achieving local aims and ambitions. We can add three things to this minimalist description of indigenism in order to get a better handle on its character. First, unlike most other global social movements (such as the environmental or peace movements), it is defined with reference to a particular constituency of individuals and communities. In other words, it is pursued by and on behalf of people who claim a certain identity (‘indigenous’) for which they seek recognition and which, in turn, can be used as a resource in specific struggles. This identity is not, of course, given in nature.

18 It is, depending on the circumstances, either ascribed or adopted (and I will come to how ‘indigenous’ is defined and to whom the term applies presently). Secondly, unlike most other global social movements, indigenism is, in a fundament sense, about the control of place.16 To simplify, many indigenous peoples are currently seeking to reappropriate three things that, historically, have been taken away from them: namely, parcels of land and water, material artefacts (e.g. ceremonial goods like masks), and knowledges (e.g. designs and medicinal remedies).17 Together, we can call these things physical, cultural and informational resources, ones that are highly valued by indigenous communities in a number of ways (instrumental, symbolic, moral and aesthetic). Though only the first of these three types of resources might, strictly speaking, appear to be place-related, it is arguable that, in many cases, all of them in fact are. For instance, in the eyes of many indigenous groups, certain artefacts – such as Mayan masks or Pueblo ceremonial urns – take-on significance precisely because of where and when they are placed. Likewise, certain indigenous knowledges of plant, insect or animal species – currently the focus of bioprospecting efforts by Western life-science companies – are considered meaningless once disembedded from their territorial and spiritual ‘homeland’ (Nigh, 2002). In short, many artefacts and knowledges are, like land and water, considered by indigenous peoples to be inalienable (in both a proprietorial and geographical sense) or only alienable under certain strict conditions. All this said, what is interesting about indigenism from a geographical perspective is that the project to (re)appropriate certain places is being pursued through a set of translocal initiatives that involve both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and institutions. To return to comments made in the introduction, local agendas are, in this case, being pursued by global means (I will mention how on pages 24-5 below). Finally, it is possible to understand the nature of indigenism by comparing it with so-called ‘ethno-nationalist’ movements (like the Quebec separatist movement). According to Niezen (2000), the latter often rest on volkisch myths of cultural purity, are usually not internationalist in their outlook, and often seek secession from their host nation state. By contrast, indigenism is not composed of myriad different indigenous struggles that bear no relation. Rather, these struggles are being pursued globally in acts of solidarity designed to further the particular place-projects of specific indigenous groupings. It is a contingent question whether these projects aspire to secession or are based on notions of cultural purity (relative to the majority populations of their nation states). Examples exist of where they do and are and, equally, where they do not and are not.

19 With these preliminary comments in mind, this section proceeds in three stages. In each stage I make critical reference to the arguments of Watts, Massey and Harvey respectively as a critical (and ‘symmetrical’) counterpoint to the first three sub-sections of the last one. First, I discuss how ‘indigeneity’ is defined. This is more than just a semantic issue of signifiers and signifieds. It is also an issue of how identities are claimed or made, of how ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ are created through the identification process, and of how real place-projects are pursued in the name of these identities. In this sub-section I question some of Watts claims about the socio-geographical ‘suturing’ of identity and show why such local suturing can be defensible and, paradoxically, part of an internationalist agenda. Secondly, the major translocal institutions, agreements and initiatives that currently underpin and inspire indigenism are described. In this sub-section I question some of Massey’s arguments about the difference between ‘introverted’ and ‘extroverted’ place-projects. Specifically, I suggest that many indigenous groups’ place projects cross-cut and therefore defy Massey’s distinction. Finally, I present the argument that indigenous peoples are sometimes justified in pursuing exclusionary place projects, even though these may have deleterious consequences for non-indigenous peoples worldwide. In this sub-section I question some of Harvey’s arguments about the need to extend local loyalties to distant strangers.

Defining indigenous peoples The term ‘indigenous’, Niezen (2000: 120) observes, “is not a category of antiquity”. Though the various peoples who lay claim to the label can often trace their lineage back a very long way indeed, the term itself is a distinctly post-war creation, emerging out of bodies like the United Nations (UN) and the International Labour Office (ILO) during the 1950s and 60s. Indeed, the term would arguably not exist but for the fact that the peoples who now fall under its description have had to reckon with the influence of ‘non-indigenous’ peoples past and present. As anthropologists Cleveland and Murray (1997: 479) argue, “indigenous peoples must be understood in terms of their interaction with the modern world”. Categories, of course, do not simply re-present. The term indigenous, in effect, it interpellates hundreds of millions of individuals and groups worldwide, from Torres Strait Islanders to native Aleuts – or, rather, invites them to be interpellated under the term’s description. ‘Indigenous’ is a portmanteau category that gathers together all manner of different peoples with distinct geographies and histories: it establishes commonality among manifest differences. The term has thereby created – or has attempted to create – a new world-historical subject of sorts. People who have hitherto described themselves as, say, Maasai or Guarani, might now also

20 consider themselves part of a more generic, global constituency of ‘indigenous peoples’. This is why Niezen (2000: 120) bluntly states that “‘being indigenous’ is a product of the last several decades only …”. The term’s post-war emergence and increasing efficacy thus confirms what Watts, Hall and others have long argued: that identities are made not given, that naming is a key component of identity-construction, and that such naming can be a resource in socio-geographic struggles. Of course, this still begs the question of quite what the term ‘indigenous’ means (and therefore to/by whom it can reasonably be applied/claimed). Since reference is conventional not natural – as one commentator wryly observes, there is no such thing as a ‘bona fide native’ or Certified Indigenous Person (Brown, 1998: 202) – we can only address this question by looking at the definitions that have gained a certain legitimacy within the indigenous peoples’ movement. Though a number have been proposed (see Axt et al., 1993; Churchill, 1996; Ramos, 1998), perhaps the most influential – and certainly the most well- known – are those of the UN’s Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (est. 1985), and the ILO 169 Convention (revised 1991). The former, in the words of its Special Rapporteur, defines indigenous peoples as “those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, cultural patterns [and] … institutions …” (Cobo, 1987: 48). The ILO definition resonates with this. In Article 1.1, it describes indigenes as “descent … populations which inhabited the country at the time of conquest [and] … who regardless of their legal status, retain some or all of their own … institutions”. In both cases, indigenous peoples are defined as ‘original’ populations who have had their needs and rights ignored or compromised by immigrant populations who have appropriated ‘their’ resources. In each case too, indigenous peoples are defined as those who are seeking, at long last, to become the subjects of history and geography not its objects. Finally, though they do not indicate the fact in their wording, in both cases the UN has preferred to let individuals and groups use these definitions in order to identify themselves as ‘indigenous’, rather than try to apply the designation by fiat. Indeed, in its Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the UN’s Working Group on Indigenous Populations (est. 1982) refrains from defining indigenous peoples altogether. For practical reasons alone, this makes a lot of sense. Yet in many instances ‘self-identification’ is not, of course, straightforwardly voluntary since

21 indigenous peoples have been marked out (often pejoratively) as a separate group by the state and the populace of their ‘host’ countries. Australian aboriginals are a prime example. In these instances, affiliating with a global ‘indigenous peoples’ movement is, in part, a means for minority populations to revalorise a stigmatised identity. Whatever the circumstance, it is estimated that some 300 million people worldwide can be classed as indigenous using the UN designations.18 While these and other concerns about the category ‘indigenous’ are understandable, the fact remains that any definition of the term will be guilty of what Havemann (2000: 29) calls “essentialising tendencies”. As Kearney (1996: 63) puts it, all social descriptors “contain … multiple identities within [a] … unitary category”, thereby “effectively constitut[ing] that which [they] essentialise” (Kamat, 2001: 34). Indeed, some pro- indigenous activists are at pains to ‘fix’ the core meaning of indigeneity in sharp distinction to its ‘constitutive outside’: that is, non-indigenous peoples (e.g. Fourmile, 1999). An interesting process unfolds here whereby the generic category ‘indigenous’ both includes, and encourages the expression of, more specific indigenous identities on the ground (Wichi, Udege, Ogiek, Nuba etc.). Essentialisation thus works, iteratively, at two levels: the generic and the particular. Here, then, ‘local’ identities are partly crafted out of an emergent translocal one. Anthropologist Shannon Speed (2002) offers a graphic example. She explains how recent international initiatives around indigenism (initiatives to be discussed in the next sub-section) have led some Mexican communities to rapidly move away from describing themselves as campesinos towards identifying themselves as specific types of pre- Columbian natives. As she says of the populace of Nicolas Ruiz in Chiapas, “The shift in self-identification from non-indigenous in 1997 to ex-indigenous in 1999, and then to potentially future Tzeltales (or even ‘truly Tzeltales’) in 2000 [was] … dramatic”. A rather rigid suturing of global and local indigenous identities plays-well with those in academia and wider public spheres who prefer, in romantic mode, to see native peoples as ‘noble’/‘organic’ minorities reacting to generations of outside oppression. As they would have it, the subaltern, at long last, gets the opportunity to speak. Equally, the celebration of ‘authentic’ socio-geographical identities tends to alarm Watts (and other critics), for reasons explained earlier in this essay. Yet while sympathetic to Watts’ arguments, it seems to me that the recent emergence of ‘indigenous peoples’ on the national and global political stage confounds them in a number of ways. First, as argued above, insistently ‘local’ indigenous identities are today fashioned in dialogic interaction with broader representations of indigenous persons emerging out of global institutions like the UN. These identities are

22 either revalorisations of existing local attachments (as in the case of, say, Cree Indians in Canada) or reclamations of ‘lost’ senses of self and community (as in Nicolas Ruiz). Watts might retort that these relationally constituted local identities nonetheless risk forgetting that they are constructions not essences – hence his critique of the Maitatsine and Ogoni movements in Nigeria.19 At best, he might argue, they should be seen as acts of ‘strategic essentialism’. But this leads to a second point about place-identities, one made by Speed. As she astutely observes (2002: 222), “If we understand identity … as a constant process of construction and reconstruction, strategic versus authentic is simply not a relevant distinction. Both are part of the same process, one in which no identity is more or less legitimate than others”. Thirdly, the real issue then becomes exactly who is included/excluded in identity claims and what specific resources (physical and immaterial) are sought after by those adopting the valorised identity. The stakes in defining identities are, clearly, very high indeed in cases like indigenism. This is why definitions ‘matter’ in both senses of that word. Only identity claims phrased in the most abstract, universal terms – like the identity ‘human’ (as used in human rights discourse) – can avoid the risk of excluding somebody somewhere. By contrast, local identity projects – even when framed by transnational signifiers like ‘indigenous peoples’ – necessarily rest on an ‘insider’/‘outsider’ distinction if they are to have any meaningful purchase in everyday life. There is, arguably, no way to avoid this situation. However relationally constituted and hybrid identities may be, at some point they must ‘deny’ this relationality and hybridity. Fourthly, this said, the essentialisation that is endemic to all identity claims can be a force for inclusion and empowerment as much as for boundary-marking. For example, now that certain rights and privileges (however limited) attach to the possession of an indigenous identity in many former settler colonies, more individuals and communities are identifying themselves this way in these countries. Finally, even critics like Watts must surely acknowledge that ‘strong’ versions of the us/them, insider/outsider distinction sometimes deserve to be endorsed by even the most cosmopolitan of commentators. Indigenous peoples are a case in point here. Given the sometimes appalling histories they have suffered at the hands of majoritarian populations, it is understandable (and pragmatically useful) that they might, in certain cases, wish to underpin claims to territory, artefacts and knowledges with plenary statements about ‘their’ identity and difference. Such statements can provide a platform for indigenes to interact with named ‘outsiders’ on their own terms. It is therefore interesting that Left-wing academics in geography and the social sciences have called into question traditional concepts of place,

23 culture and identity at the very moment when marginal populations worldwide need them more than ever. As Coombe (1997: 93) notes, these concepts and the practices they license might “be the last legitimate ground for political autonomy and self-determination” for indigenous peoples. None of these five arguments are intended to romance the indigenous stone. This much should be clear. I am not affirming indigenous identities as if they are a overdue ‘return of the repressed’. Obviously, I do not regard them as primordial essences that are rightfully seeking to reclaim their socio-geographic ‘purity’ from histories of violence and miscegenation. Rather, I agree with Watts that all identities are provisional and mutable (within limits). But it seems to me that strong claims to ‘indigenousness’ are, in principle at least, defensible on intellectual and moral grounds. As I will now go on to explain with further reference to indigenism, exclusionary place-projects founded on full-blooded identity claims are not to be dismissed as necessarily ‘regressive’. Indeed, I will suggest that the kind of ‘both/and’ approach to place that Massey advocates is not, in fact, inconsistent with highly localist place projects.

Indigenism as a local/global project It is virtually impossible to make generalisations about the precise political aspirations of those who are active members of the global indigenous movement. The above mentioned quest for autonomy, founded on exclusivist identity-claims, lies at one end of a spectrum of political possibilities. As Michael Brown (1998: 205) rightly argues, specific cases of indigenism must be approached with a “situational pragmatism”. Nonetheless, the various indigenous struggles for differential geographies do have some striking things in common. On the one hand, the impetus for indigenism is precisely the kind of local-translocal relationships that have, pace Watts, Massey, Harvey and others, rendered older notions of place, culture and identity obsolete. These are the already mentioned relationships of colonisation, domination and control imposed by non-indigenous majorities. On the other hand, as also emphasised in the preceding pages, indigenism is distinctively internationalist: local agendas are pursued through formal translocal networks and institutions. Put differently, indigenism is both a reaction to and an embrace of translocal connectivity (or ‘globalisation’ as it is now commonly termed). As such, the movement seems, at first glance, to be very much in tune with Massey’s arguments about place, geographical difference and geographical interdependency. Massey, recall, criticises the kind of ‘forced’ openness to ‘outside’ forces that is currently being

24 promulgated by global power-brokers in the WTO, the IMF and elsewhere. Likewise, indigenous peoples are critical of (i) the appropriation of their historical territories by others and (ii) the removal of artefacts and knowledges from these territories, both yesterday and today. But given Massey’s other argument that not all inter-place relationships are equal – they are not always domineering and intrusive – we can, it seems, equally interpret indigenism as ‘progressive’ because of its supra-local commitments. These commitments have, in the main, taken the form of a plethora of new resolutions and organisations created by indigenous peoples themselves, as well as indigenous support for the ongoing efforts of sympathetic non-indigenous institutions (like the UN). Let us briefly examine each arm of indigenism in turn. Since the late 1980s, indigenous peoples have come together at the national, continental and global scales to issue sets of declarations about their needs, wants and rights. These declarations have been intended as normative provocations to national governments and supra-national state bodies. These various statements have been issued either at key-note events (like the UN Earth Summit in Rio) or by permanent indigenous organisations (like Survival International and the Indigenous Peoples Survival Foundation). They range from the Charter for the Indigenous Peoples of the Tropical Forest (1992) to the Phoenix Declaration of Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere Regarding the Human Genome Diversity Project (1995).20 As their titles suggest, the declarations refer to a wide range of indigenous concerns. However, indigenism does not simply consist of the actions of indigenous peoples alone. As already noted, organisations like the UN have had an important role to play, as have non-governmental organisations such as the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) and Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN). These organisations have spear-headed initiatives that are either about indigenous peoples per se – such as the UN’s aforementioned Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which continues to agitate for a formal UN declaration of indigenous peoples’ rights – or which directly impinge on the interests of these peoples.21 Whatver resolutions and organisations are (or are not) involved in any given indigenous initiative, it is important to acknowledge the extended geographical infrastructure now in place at a number of geographical scales to support indigenism. This infrastructure ranges from informal networks of cooperation to more long term representation on governmental and other bodies.22 Despite the now impressive number of pro-indigenous declarations and organisations existing worldwide, as well as the above mentioned infrastructure, indigenism has, as yet, achieved very few of its members’ aims. This is because the declarations generally have no

25 legal standing, while the organisations in question lack the power to enforce their wishes that, say, national governments possess. Even so, indigenism’s apparently cosmopolitan character seems to align it with just the kind of place-politics that Massey commends: one that embraces place interdependency while defending local specificities. Here, though, is the rub. Not all indigenous place-projects are (or should be) ‘open’ in quite the way Massey advocates. This does not, though, imply that they are simply ‘closed’ and parochial. Rather, it is perfectly possible – and, arguably, perfectly legitimate – for some indigenous groups to use the translocal infrastructure of institutions and declarations listed above to claim exclusive control over territories, artefacts and knowledges. Here, then, a ‘global sense of the local’ is used to underpin a ‘non-global defence of the local’. In other words, an appreciation of the relational constitution of place is made to dovetail with efforts to erect new border controls on what ‘enters’ or ‘leaves’ the places in question. This peculiar conjugation of ‘extroverted’ and ‘introverted’ senses place is, given the context for the rise of indigenism, an understandable one. Many indigenous peoples today face an invidious choice (Havemann, 2000). Given the power-geometries that have rendered them marginal within various nation states worldwide, passivity is simply not an option. If indigenous peoples were not now fighting to assert their agency, they would simply perpetuate what Held (1995: 163) calls their historical ‘nautonomy’ – that is, their long- standing political marginality. However, if indigenous peoples become too willing to accommodate the wants of non-indigenous peoples (near and far) they risk further assimilation into national and global publics. Thus indigenous place-projects that are overly ecumenical might, in fact, inhibit the kind of control of territorial, cultural and intellectual resources that is the raison d’etre for these projects in the first place. For these reasons, it is understandable that some indigenous peoples “are now encouraged to reconstitute themselves as closed societies” (Hiatt, 1998: 209). They often favour what at first sight seems utopian and counter-productive: that is, a new reservation system that ring-fences them and their resources from unwanted outside interference. For its advocates, this would not be the socio-geographic separation of old, wherein indigenous peoples were robbed of an ability to pursue their definition of the good life. Rather, it would be a qualified form of place autarchy where indigenous peoples have meaningful control over both the kind and the degree of interaction with non-indigenous peoples. Lest all this seem over-stated, it is worth remembering that even today many indigenous groups are experiencing a mixture of neo- colonialism, bio-piracy and cultural dispossession. For instance, in recent months the Gani and Gwi bushmen have been seeking global support for their efforts to prevent the Botswana

26 government (and the De Beers mining conglomerate) removing them from their ancestral lands (The Observer, 2002). Meanwhile, indigenous groups from the south Pacific to the Arctic circle are being ‘mined’ by transnational companies for potentially marketable tangible and intangible resources with little or no compensation offered in return (Parry, 2002). In this context, one can argue that Massey’s reservations about exclusionary place- projects need very careful qualification depending on the cases in question. Just as I argued earlier that Watts’ critique of place identities is too one-sided, I likewise want to suggest that Massey’s argument proceeds via heuristically usefully but ultimately unsustainable dichotomies. An analysis of indigenism demonstrates that the binaries ‘progressive’/‘regressive’ and ‘extroverted’/‘introverted’ are not mutually exclusive. The arguments and actions of some indigenous peoples confound these dichotomies. They can express inter-place solidarity and cooperation as well as aspirations for geographical separation and segregation. How, then, should Left-wing social scientists judge them? The answer, surely, lies in a reevaluation of the usefulness of the analytical and normative polarities Massey and others are wont to use. Critical geographers and other researchers can find good reasons to support a politics of (as against in) place, without reverting to Cartesian, neo-Kantian or Newtonian imaginaries.

A question of loyalties: indigenism and the conflict over ‘local’ resources In the last two sub-sections we have questioned the three place shibboleths current among geographical Leftists by presenting two dimensions of indigenism that call into question Watts’ assessment of local identity politics and Massey’s of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ place projects. We are now in a position to turn, finally, to the several substantive arguments for indigenous rights to differential geographies. These arguments, like them or not, suggest that local and translocal needs may be fundamentally irreconcilable such that loyalties and justice at once scale may have to be served at the expense of those at another. Though Harvey’s call for multi-scalar solidarities is appealing, circumstances may dictate that it is not, in fact, an appropriate one to heed. Let me elaborate. In recent years, a number of indigenous populations in various parts of the world have used the transnational apparatuses of indigenism to make the case for ‘strong’ localisms. That is, they have argued for non-trivial rights to their territorial, cultural and informational resources. I use the normative concept of rights deliberately (as opposed to, say, the concepts of duties or responsibilities), because indigenous claims to place have

27 typically been phrased in this idiom. Thus the various declarations and charters mentioned earlier often invoke the notion of indigenous rights,23 while the kind of universal rights discourses that Harvey discusses with qualified approval have also been of service to the indigenous cause. At the same time, one specific set of rights claims – namely, those surrounding property rights – have frequently supplanted all others in indigenous struggles for differential geographies. The reason, of course, is that local efforts to ‘reclaim’ resources have often involved indigenous peoples challenging the proprietary claims of state bodies, firms and other non-indigenous actors. The right to command place is, in many cases, a struggle over who has the legal right to dispose of resources that in some sense ‘belong’ to indigenous peoples. To simplify, these are variously struggles over landed property (territory), cultural property (artefacts) and intellectual property (ideas/knowledge). In each case, though individual property claims can be made, it is common for indigenous groups to make ‘cultural property’ claims about collective, inter-generational resources that are seen to have an organic link with any given group’s past and future identity and livelihood.24 Though property rights are by no means the only vehicle indigenous groups can use to reappropriate places, they have two signal virtues. First, to borrow Richard Handler’s (1991) image, they speak a language that power understands. That is, they confront those non-indigenous actors with claims to indigenous land, artefacts and knowledges with a powerful counter-claim: a claim of proprietary control. Secondly, property rights are among the most legally secure and materially effective rights that individuals and groups can possess. These rights promise to be an important tool for those indigenous groups seeking to exert strong forms of place control. They can help these groups redress both economic and cultural injustices. For these reasons, property rights claims are among the most threatening to those non-indigenous groups who have an economic stake in the resources being claimed. As Hale (2002) notes of Latin America, national governments have been broadly accepting of indigenous groups’ right to recognition as distinct peoples. What they have been resistant to, however, is those groups’ rights to redistribution of economically valuable resources and assets. Proprietary demands are at the extreme end of the spectrum of claims that indigenous peoples can and do make about themselves and their aspirations. In the remainder of this last section of the essay I rehearse some of the arguments that have been made in favour of indigenous proprietary reappropriation of ‘their’ resources. These arguments have already found legal expression in certain parts of the world, as with the USA’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation ct of 1990. As I proceed, the key thing to bear in mind is

28 that the indigenous resources in question are actually or potentially of national and transnational importance. Here we confront the scalar dilemma that so preoccupies Harvey. But want I want to argue is that there might be prima facie case for some indigenous groups to ignore wider claims on their resources (however ‘progressive’) in the interests of a resilient localism. Yet, apropos my discussion of Massey above, this is a localism borne out of a partial embrace of translocal connectivity not atavistic autarchy. Let us turn, then, to some of the arguments for the rights of indigenous peoples to make their own places rather than have them made for them. Because these arguments have been made in the various contexts of landed, cultural and informational resources I am inevitably going to simplify rather complex, nuanced positions.25 First, many indigenous groups have been dispossessed – either by force or by duplicity – of their territorial, cultural and intellectual resources. This dispossession has usually occurred with little compensation or redress from the wider societies in which indigenous peoples now find themselves. Secondly, one of the several reasons why indigenous peoples are often economically marginal minorities within various nation states is precisely because they lack proprietary control of their own tangible and intangible resources. If they had such control then, potentially at least, they could profit financially. In other words, the argument here is that indigenous peoples should have the right to benefit financially from their own lands, their own material cultures and their own knowledge productions. Thirdly, this relates to a critique of the idea that many indigenous resources (like native landraces) are ‘public domain’ resources. This idea – namely, that nobody has proprietary rights to certain of the natural and manufactured resources that historically and today are bound into native ways of life – has, clearly, been used to the economic advantage of non-indigenous groups. The classic example here is one mentioned earlier: namely, biodiversity prospectors gathering genetic resources from native lands in the tropics and sub-tropics and turning these putative ‘common resources’ into lucrative products. Fourth, economic issues aside, it is clear that many indigenous groups regard certain resources as inalienable. For instance, as Brown (1998: 198) notes of Pueblo religious knowledge, “the primary motivation for closing [it] … to outsiders and objecting to … the permanent storage of this information by non-Pueblos is to prevent it from cycling back to Pueblo individuals who are not authorized to possess it”. Fifthly, what this means is that many indigenous groups regard the appropriation of their resources as an act of cultural violence: that is, a spiritual assault as much as a brute act of physical expropriation. Arguments for the full restitution of lands, artefacts etc. to indigenous peoples are thus as much about respecting cultural integrity as they are about

29 economic welfare (Puri, 1995). In the sixth place, it follows that granting indigenous peoples exclusive rights over myriad natural and cultural resources is an important means for them to keep certain of those resources out of the hands of non-indigenous peoples (Strathern, 1998: 112). Finally, there is the argument that proprietary restitution for native peoples is especially urgent because in many countries their way of life is now close to extinction. The economic and cultural damage caused by histories and geographies of dispossession can only be stemmed, so the argument goes, by rapid actions among national states and global organisations (like the UN) to grant native peoples exclusive control over a wide range of resources. These arguments are only a selection of those that have been used by academics and activists sympathetic to the indigenous cause. On grounds of principle and of practical viability they have come in for heavy criticism (see, for example, Brown, 1998). Though I do not want to underestimate the power of these criticisms, in the present context I wish to focus on the implications of the ‘strong indigenous localism’ stance for Harvey’s arguments about the extended geographical scope of loyalties. It seems to me that Harvey’s response to the case for proprietary resource control among myriad local indigenous constituencies would go something as follows. First, he might argue that many of the resources that indigenous groups are now laying claim to are of serious actual or potential benefit for non- indigenous peoples. For instance, medicines of global importance might not be developed if continued and relatively unfettered access to indigenous lands were not granted by native peoples. Given this, Harvey might object to absolute indigenous control of certain resources on the grounds that while this might be just at one spatial scale (the local) it is certainly not at other scales. Secondly, he might argue that while laying claim to the identity ‘indigenous’ is politically important for the people so identified, there are other important identities that need to be recalled here. For instance, to the extent that many indigenous peoples sell their labour power they are members of a wider class community organised at multiple geographical scales. At the same time, the fact that indigenous localisms are being pursued, in part, through universal human rights discourses indicates that non-indigenous peoples also have rights that might be infringed if proprietorial resource control by native groups is ever seriously achieved. Finally, like Watts and Massey, Harvey might argue that it is, in any case, too late for strong indigenous localisms. Because of generations of ‘outside’ influence, indigenous places can never be made ‘properly’ indigenous again. For Harvey, then, the sheer fact that indigenous resources are no longer (for better or worse) theirs anymore might be one argument for resisting attempts to turn back the hands of time.

30 These three arguments are powerful ones. Though I have, as it were, put words in Harvey’s mouth, I have done so in a way consistent with Harvey’s broader arguments about the need to avoid fixating on local rights at the expense of translocal ones. Yet it seems to me that in the case of indigenism Harvey’s arguments might not withstand scrutiny. As already explained, indigenism is a global movement many of whose members understand the practical and strategic necessity of locally ring-fencing territorial, cultural and informatic resources. Though Harvey is right to point to the need to weigh local agendas against the wider good/harm these agendas do, for many indigenous peoples there is a prima facie case for place-projects that are pursued at the expense of wider non-indigenous groupings within and beyond national borders. As argued above, this is not necessarily the politics of geographical hate. Rather, it is, plausibly, a politics wherein geographical difference cannot flourish unless bold attempts are made to control the traffic to and from those places indigenous groups seek control over. Contra Harvey (and Raymond Williams), indigenism indicates that certain militant particularisms should, quite rightly, pay relatively little heed to the ‘general interest’.

V. Conclusion Taking the case of indigenism I have sought to question some shibboleths of place that, in my view, are today shared by several analysts on the geographical Left. The arguments of Watts, Massey and Harvey have been examined in order to expose both the strengths and the weaknesses of these shibboleths. As I hope I have showed, critical analysts of place need more supple explanatory and evaluative vocabularies if they are to reckon with the diversity of place projects current in the world. Firstly, I have argued real world projects to erect ‘strong’ boundaries around places – in both the imagination and practice – should not necessarily be deemed acts of geographical folly by those on the geographical left. They need not be seen as a futile or misguided attempt to erect borders in a borderless world. Secondly, projects of what Escobar (2001: 149) calls “defensive localisation” should not, I have further suggested, necessarily be seen as ‘regressive’. Many contemporary efforts to defend territories, resources, knowledges, communities and cultural artefacts are not assimilable to the xenophobic particularisms found in, say, the former Yugoslavia. But neither are they open, ecumenical and inclusive. How, then, I have asked, should the academic left judge them? Finally, I have argued that it is perfectly possible for inward looking localisms to be founded on an explicit and conscious engagement with extra-local

31 forces. That is, the translocal can be strategically harnessed for purely local needs (as captured in the following reversal of a hackneyed phrase ‘think locally, act globally’) and this is not at all paradoxical. In sum, in certain situations it may be necessary for critical analysts to commend ‘open’ localisms, while at the same time refusing to see more ‘closed’ place projects as tendentially ‘regressive’. This kind of situational pragmatism, it seems to me, is a preferable alternative to viewing place through the sophisticated but nonetheless prescriptive schemas offered by Watts, Massey, Harvey and others. Geographical imaginations matter. This is precisely why we need constantly to interrogate their presuppositions, as well as the kind of world they aim to engender.

Acknowledgents I wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version. David Slater’s editorial interventions were also much appreciated. The usual disclaimers apply.

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36 1The use of labels like ‘critical geography’ is always hazardous since their meanings are not at all clear. I use the term in a loose sense to encompass a range of left-leaning ‘isms’ in geography (Marxism, feminism, anti-racism etc.). I do not include the work of humanistic geographers here, though I do wish to acknowledge the overlap between their work on place and that of the authors whose writings I discuss in this essay (see, for example, Adams et al., 2001). 2 Cynics and pessimists might query both the causes and the consequences of this shift in place imaginaries. On the one side, the florescence of relational concepts of place in human geography could be considered symptomatic of the mundane struggle for academic recognition in an increasingly professionalised academy (Castree, 2000). New ideas are the currency that buys success in the academic marketplace; intellectual innovation, some would say, is primarily a means for career advancement. On the other side, it might be argued that, whatever the reasons for their recent rise to disciplinary ascendancy, relational notions of place are unlikely to make much of a difference to thought and action in the wider world. Written in arcane language and entombed within books and journals, these ideas, it could be claimed, lack the means to ‘leak out’ from the sites of their production: the universities. Despite some validity, both arguments are surely overstated. The rationale for, and impacts of, intellectual work are underdetermined by the imperatives of the academic labour process. In critical human geography, recent debates about ‘activism and the academy’ (Blomley, 1994) and ‘social relevance’ (Martin, 2001; Massey, 2001, Dorling and Shaw, 2002) indicate as much. Whatever the impediments to ‘making a difference’ out there, much is being done by those on the geographical Left to inform ‘real world’ struggles. In any case, there is a lot that can be achieved ‘in here’ (Castree, 2002). Universities are not just talking shops where academics discourse polysyllabilically with one another. It is easy to forget that they are major institutions of social reproduction, not least because they educate the next generation of leaders in business, politics and civil society. Accordingly, the kinds of geographical knowledges students are presented with – be they knowledges of place, landscape, nature or any other major disciplinary concept – will have a material bearing on their worldly conduct. In light of this, scrutinising the new critical geographic orthodoxy about place is more than simply an academic exercise. If, as Stephen Greenblatt (1991: 6) argues, representations “are not only products but producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being” then challenging critical geographers’ place shibboleths might, in some small way, help to change the world rather than merely help understand it (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999). 3These beliefs are not exclusive to human geographers. To the extent that place serves as a metaphor for culture, identity, community and society (and vice versa), several anthropologists, cultural critics, political theorists and sociologists have also advocated the need for a ‘global sense of place’ (Hannerz, 1996; Lash and Featherstone, 2002; O’Neill, 2000; Urry, 2000). It is, it seems, currently de rigeur in critical social science to code translocal solidarities positively while seeing localisms that define themselves against a putative ‘outside’ as either parochial, ill-conceived or downright reactionary. ‘Extroverted’ place-making projects meet with approval because they are regarded as genuinely ‘glocal’: that is, they evidently grapple with the tensions between the needs and rights of locals and non-locals. The connective imperative being established here between conceptualisation and evaluation is all too apparent: because places in the modern world are undeniably ‘open’ – Arturo Escobar (2001: 162) simply calls them “meshworks” – it follows for relational thinkers that a proper (sic) place politics cannot be inward looking or exclusionary. 4To anticipate my argument somewhat, we might ask: is reaching out across space to serve resolutely particular interests to be deemed ‘progressive’ when these interests are satisfied at the expense of invisible strangers? If this question seems blunt it is partly because Massey’s (1994) use of the deliberately overdrawn distinction between a ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ sense of place has, perhaps, rendered critical geographers’ normative vocabulary insufficiently subtle. It is too simplistic to assume that the world’s myriad place-based struggles line-up such that their relative openness or closedness can be evaluated according to a progressive/regressive polarity. As Castells (1997: 8) helpfully observes, “no [place] identity has, per se, progressive or regressive value outside its [specific] … context” This said, there is much to commend about critical geographers’ advocacy of a relational imaginary. As I will show, these geographers are guilty of neither romanticism nor pessimism in their representations of place. They neither celebrate supposedly ‘authentic’ place projects nor do they depict what Sheppard (2002: 319) calls a “post-geographical world” where place no longer matters. Instead, they prefer to highlight the difficulties and dilemmas that emerge from the insertion of myriad places within translocal flows, processes and relations. If this can be called a realist perspective – a deliberate conceit given my comment above about the constructedness of all representations of place – then my aim is add even greater realism to it (cf. Wolfe, 1996). 5This contrasts with a long-standing interest in indigenous peoples among historical geographers and ‘old’ cultural geographers – especially in North America (think, for example, of Canadian Cole Harris’s germinal work on first nations in British Columbia). 6To my knowledge few, if any, critical geographers have focussed in-depth on the broader, international context for specific indigenous struggles 7Before I begin, a brief word on terminology. The precise meanings of ‘place’, like the related term ‘region’, are nowadays numerous. To borrow Cresswell’s (1999: 226) understatement, we can say that the term place “eludes easy definition”. Since the purpose of this essay is to question some of the core ideas supporting one broad conception of place – rather than any of the term’s precise referents – I do not intend to unpack its myriad meanings here (on this see Staehli, 2003). Accordingly, in this essay the term place refers to no particular geographical scale. Rather, it refers to any area that derives its character, in part, from its willing or unwilling engagement with something ‘bigger’ or ‘wider’ than itself: variously, the ‘national’, the ‘transnational’ or the ‘global’. After all, as relational theorists of place insist, there are few places today that have, as it were, bootstrapped themselves into existence. In the main, contemporary localities must reckon with the consequences of wider interdependencies – consequences that “are no longer a matter of choice” (Bauman, 2001: 147) and bind them into a shared collective future. 8Indeed, some of the best recent work by historians of geography (e.g. Driver, 2000), post-colonial geographers (e.g. Gregory, 2004) and political geographers (e.g. Tuathail, 1996) have been precisely about these constructed and consequential imaginaries. 9My argument, in this paper, is true to the spirit but not the letter of Escobar’s (2001) recent intervention on place. Escobar, drawing on the example of indigenous struggles is South America, endorses subaltern struggles to reclaim places but he avoids discussing the ‘extreme’ end of indigenous peoples movement. By contrast, I argue that left-wing analysts can neither label extreme place-projects as tendentially reactionary and unrealistic, nor glibly describe them as ‘progressive’ because they draw upon wider networks and scales. 10Two recent examples of this will suffice. Eric Sheppard (2002), in an essay on what he calls ‘wormhole geographies’, borrows Massey’s (1994: 5) conception of places as “articulated moments in networks” in order to theorise the rugged terrain of ‘positionality’. Positionality, for Sheppard, describes the profoundly variable relations that individuals and institutions have to wider webs of connection – and how these relations condition their actions. Similarly, in a critique of ‘scalar’ conceptions of globalisation, Ash Amin (2002) draws on the idea of “place as meeting-place” (Massey, 1999a: 22) to argue the case for a more fibrous, complex notion of how localities are wired-in to the wider world. 11In theoretical terms, this view of place owes much to Massey’s engagement with Marxism (in the 1970s and 80s) strained (in the 90s) through the insights of non-essentialist feminism, post-colonial theory and the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (see Massey, 1999c). 12As the earlier reference to Social justice and the city indicates, Harvey’s conceptual and political interests in place are long-standing. Though not always the core thematic of his work, place constantly appears in his writings throughout the 1970s and 80s – be it in relation to geographical competition (as in the final part of The limits to capital), to the formation of place-coalitions (in parts of The urbanisation of capital), to ‘internal’ struggles over place (as in the Paris essays of Consciousness and the urban experience) or to the fight to defend a particular locality (Cowley) from disinvestment (as in the co-edited book The factory and the city). Taking Marx and Bertell Ollman as his inspiration, Harvey’s pre-1990s writings theorised places as physical instanciations of circulating capital. Places, and the communications networks linking them, were thus conceptualised as the arteries through which capital flows. In this dialectical view, places are depicted both as the necessary material form that ‘global capitalism’ takes and as active moments in the reproduction of that capitalist ‘totality’ (see Merrifield, 1993). As Brenner (1998) explains so lucidly, the dialectic of fixity and motion that Harvey describes reveals a geographical universe in which translocal processes serve to restlessly unify and differentiate places worldwide (see also Smith, 1984). In this sense, Harvey’s pre-90s thinking about place was informed by a closed, holistic logic that both Watts and Massey eschew. Since the late 1980s, though, Harvey’s writings on place have arguably changed in four respects. First, Harvey has become increasingly concerned with the ‘subjective’ dimensions of place existence – as opposed to his earlier ‘structural’ readings of place (his Paris essays notwithstanding) within the dynamics of capitalist accumulation (see Harvey, 1993; 1995; 1997). Secondly, this has been linked to an increasing interest in the politics of place: that is, in efforts to actively defend, enhance or alter the physical form and the ‘structure of feeling’ of towns, cities and settlements. One of Harvey’s major preoccupations here, as will be seen momentarily, is the ‘proper’ geographical scale at which place politics should be pursued and who wins or loses in the process. Thirdly, all this has been woven into a concern for socio-geographic difference. As is well known, The condition of postmodernity (1989) was criticised for reducing ‘otherness’ and ‘alterity’ to either the cultural clothing of late capitalism or else ciphers for class (see, for example, Morris, 1992). Accordingly, Harvey’s recent writings have offered a more refined take on the problematic of difference, including arguments – presented most fully in Justice, nature and the geography of difference (1996) – for the ‘right to geographical difference’. Finally, all of Harvey’s recent writings about place are shot through with a concern for social and spatial justice – marking his return to a theme first broached three decades ago in Social justice. 13Thus, in a late 1980s essay on the geographical imagination (Harvey, 1990), he argued that humanistic geographers’ preoccupation with everyday place experience risked implicitly endorsing the geographical divide-and-rule that is part of the logic of capitalism. Likewise, though in a more qualified vein, Harvey’s (1992) response to the 1990s rise of post-modernism and post-structuralism in the Anglophone social sciences was to worry that they risked (ironically) essentialising social identities and losing sight of their relational constitution across space and through time. 14These arguments begin, in earnest, in The factory and the city (Harvey and Hayter, 1993), building through Justice, nature and the geography of difference to the recent Spaces of hope (2000a). They have also found expression in several essays – for instance on cosmopolitanism (2000b), on the relationships between class and non-class axes of difference (1999), on the body (1998), and on the work of Raymond Williams (1995). 15All this said, Harvey is aware that a ‘universal’ like the Declaration is merely a globalised local: that is, a Western discourse that claims to have a general applicability but which inevitably reflects the values of the culture from which it originates. Nonetheless, its signal virtue is, to quote Rorty (1989: 192), that it allows us “to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us”. Also, it remains the case that “just because certain ideas have particular origins in certain locales … (could it be otherwise?) doesn’t invalidate them” (Held, 2001: 437; cf. Pollis and Schwab, 1980). 16When I use the term ‘control’ I do so to indicate a spectrum of possible scenarios, from exclusive proprietorial control to non-propertied indigenous rights to place. 17More recently, a fourth thing has been the focus of reappropriation efforts: the biological material of indigenous peoples themselves, which has been collected by researchers on the Human Genome Diversity Project, among others. 18Notwithstanding the clarity of the definitions presented above, the meaning of ‘indigenous’ remains contentious. On the one side, these definitions (and others not mentioned here) are flexible enough to include all manner of peoples in all manner of places in a new ecumene. As Cleveland and Murray (1997: 480) observe, the term ‘indigenous’ has become a “useful heuristic” that allows “the people who appropriate it to do so on an ad hoc basis that contrasts themselves with others”. On the other hand, even very loose definitions risk excluding peoples who might stand to benefit from a global social movement like indigenism (see Kamat, 2001). For instance, are Europe’s Romani to be considered indigenous? Cannot indigenous peoples also be described as ‘peasants’ or ‘cultural minorities’ and do not these alternative designations create a wider basis for territorial and other claims (as has, apparently, happened in the Zapatista case)? Finally, critics in Asia and the Middle East have complained that too many definitions of indigeneity reflect the experience of settler societies with their historical-geographies of ethnocide, forced assimilation, and socio- spatial exclusion (as in ‘reservation systems’ in North America)Maybury-Lewis (1997) tries to tackle these definitional problems be proposing a continuum, ranging from tribal/indigenous peoples to indigenous (but not tribal) peoples to peoples stigmatised as tribal to ethnic minorities and so on. 19It’s an open question whether these movements should be described as indigenous, religious or ethno-nationalist. 20Other notable ones are the Indigenous Peoples Earth Charter (1992), the Charter of the Indigenous Tribal Peoples of Malaysia (1992), the Kari-Oca Declaration (1992), the Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property (1993), the Treaty for a Lifeforms Patent-Free Pacific (1995), and The ‘Heart of the Peoples’ Declaration (1997). 21Examples of the latter are numerous. For instance, much of UNESCO’s support for the cultural integrity of minority groups is of obvious relevance to the indigenous cause. Likewise, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Code of Conduct for Plant Germplasm Collecting and Transfer insists that communities donating or selling bio-resources do so under conditions of prior informed consent. In principle, the Code can thus serve to counter what Shiva (1997) calls the ‘bio-piracy’ that indigenous peoples have suffered at the hands of Northern agro-chemical firms. 22Richard Howitt’s various writings on indigenous peoples offer a set of insightful metaphors for thinking about how ‘local’ and ‘translocal’ links can be made to further these peoples’ agendas. 23For instance, the UN’s Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples asserted in 1993 that “indigenous peoples are entitled to … full ownership … of their cultural and intellectual property”. 24Cultural property claims van be made about the three categories of resources identified earlier (physical, cultural and informational) rather than the second alone. 25Specifically, even among advocates of ‘property rights for indigenous peoples’ there are important disagreements on the exact nature and implications of the rights in question – not least because ‘property’ is a complex, multi-faceted concept (see Honore, 1961). What is more, there are many and varied ways that property rights can be recognised and enforced – in the case of intellectual property, for example, there are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets (among others). These complexities aside, the arguments I now rehearse relate to the following scenario: one where indigenous peoples have exclusive proprietorial control over certain resources and may be unwilling in future to permit a wider national, international or global constituency access to those resources (whether gratis, for money or for some non-monetary compensation). These arguments are, in my view, compelling (though hardly uncontroversial). Within the academy, they have made with especial force by a set of anthropologists, notably Stephen Brush, Tom Greaves and the recently deceased Darrell Posey.