Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
rights to a symbolic cultural citizenship. Social movements aimed at se-
curing cultural citizenship while not contesting these limits paradoxi-
cally strengthen the denial of the humanity of those collective Native
subjects deemed “deculturated.”
The result is that Latin American indigeneity today is a particularly
disjunctive field, comprised of minimally four, causally linked and si-
multaneous elements, including: a government of biolegitimacy realized
through a malleable category of culture that is increasingly robust but
applied with ever-narrrowing precision; the invigorated political agency
of those globally networked Indigenous populations able to successfully
claim culture by conforming in part to externally imposed definitions
thereof; the transnational hypervisibility of “isolated,” “unconquered,”
or “traditional” primitive life; and the sociospatial relegation of sup-
posedly “deculturated” ex-primitives to devastated hinterlands and the
margins of civic space, where the stigma of culture death is added to the
already trebled stigmas of race, place, and class.
This suggests that the widespread empowerment of authorized In-
digenous subjects is now predicated on the
hypermarginality
of others:
those who do not fit within the increasingly policed matrix of cultural
life while also remaining at the very bottom of local socioeconomic class
hierarchies. Hypermarginality can be defined as a novel regime of social
depersonalization and structural violence deriving from the instrumental
conflation of politically authorized culture and Indigenous biolegitimacy
across distinct political domains. This amplification manifests the kinds
of politics emerging when a limited schema of cultural difference stands
in for the sanctity of life as a core moral value within secular democracy.
This redistributes bioinequality and the material techniques for dispos-
sessing certain stigmatized groups, while co-opting those who benefit
into universalizing discourses of empowerment and putting all at the
service of refashioned regimes of governance.
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Indigenous hypermarginality occurs in the context of proliferating
regimes of sociospatial or scientific isolation and in the growing forces
of an exterritorializing containment around the world.
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Such spread-
ing forms of exclusionary closure contradict the common notion that
the present is best defined as the “Network Age,” or as a rising epoch of
techno-political possibilities facilitated through horizontal attachments
and the democratizing breakdown of barriers of all kinds, from state to
species. Rather, we confront an increasingly polarized world. Here, the
idea that the present is defined by horizontal networks may well appear
as the fetish or emblem of the liberalism of a privileged few even as the
durable denial of association defines the lives of most. In this case, culture
