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“NewAgers”whilenotconsideringthewayinwhichacademicengagementwithNative
peoples often replicates these same New Age logics.
Micaela Di Leonardo (1998) makes the connections between these operations by ex-
ploring how the treatment of Native peoples within the academy does not sharply differ
in its logics from the New Age movement. She critiques the tendency for social scient-
ists to study “exotics” as a means for those in the dominant culture to learn more about
themselves.EitherNativecommunitieshave“ancientwisdom”tobestowuponothersor
theyrepresentthe“savage”whichprovesthesuperiorityofthedominantsociety.“Prim-
itives are ourselves, or our worse or best selves, or our former selves, undressed: human
nature in the buff” (Di Leonardo 1998, 147). She critiques many feminist ethnograph-
ies for portraying cultures disconnected from the global political economy. She notes,
for instance, that Ruth Behar's Translated Woman (1993) tells the story of an indigen-
ouswomaninMexicowithalmostnoreferencetoMexicanhistoryorpoliticaleconomy
(310). Instead, the ethnography becomes the occasion for Behar to authorize her own
identity as an “oppressed” woman of color. Esperanza's story becomes the occasion to
tell Behar's story. “Esperanza challenged me continually to articulate the connections
between who she is as a visibly invisible Indian street peddler and who I am as an aca-
demicwomanwithacertainmeasureofpowerandprivilege…EsperanzaandIwerein
many ways exaggerated, distorted mirrors of each other” (Behar 1993, 302).
Ironically, however, even Di Leonardo's critique replicates some of these same logics
in that her analysis appears to dismiss the possibility that indigenous peoples' may have
any intellectual contributions to make. It is noteworthy that in her critique of the exoti-
cizing practices of anthropologists in their relations with Native peoples, she fails to in-
tellectually engageNative academics (withtheloneexception ofVineDeloria, Jr.),who
have been making similar critiques about anthropology for years. For example, in her
discussion of Frank Boaz and his students, she does not mention Dakota anthropologist
Ella Deloria. The one Native scholar she does cite, Vine Deloria, she dismisses com-
pletely because he does not cite specific anthropologists in his analysis, even though
such a task was completely beyond the scope of his project. She dismisses the efforts of
anyscholarstouncovercontributionsNativepeoplesmightmaketodiscussionsofpolit-
ical economy as simply arguing that Native peoples “are better off” (Di Leonardo 1998,
243). From her perspective, the only thing of importance to say about Native peoples
is that “They simply have less power and fewer resources than their interlocutors …
[they] are engaged on the losing ends of the varying institutions of international polit-
ical economy” (35). Hence, in the end, while critiquing the primitivist stereotypes that
undergird even many feminist anthropological works, she essentially holds on to the
same stereotypes, implicitly claiming that Native peoples are somehow outside of his-
tory and are therefore incapable of contributing to understandings of global historic-
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