Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
as the
indirect
manager of constantly shifting borders of life and death,
human and nonhuman, embodied frontiers increasingly mediated by
the polysemous category of culture. Second, it implies that imbuing a
categorical feedback loop with the appearance of an intrinsic structural
antagonism between the rational neoliberal and the cultural Indigenous
is precisely what allows governance and violence to coalesce around a ro-
bust set of cultural rights and the increasingly thorough dispossession of
certain stigmatized Indigenous populations at the same time. Reformed
institutions do concede rights to a cultural citizenship, but in doing so,
they gain new authority to enforce the boundaries of what does not count
as legitimate or moral Indigenous life. Moreover, it calls attention to the
fundamental incoherence and terror at the center of legal order.
The fact that structural inequalities and familiar exclusions are not
disappearing but deepening for stigmatized populations is predictable if
neoliberalism is approached not as the successful dismantling but as the
strategic re-engineering of government, terror and violence and the forms
of hierarchy and difference they require, in which the tenets of liberal
citizenship remain the exclusive purview of a privileged few and become
the terms of social death for many. In Latin America, this means that neo-
liberalism appears as a political reconfiguration of the moral value and
practical limits of a kind of Indigenous life it both creates and consumes.
What makes post-multicultural indigeneity a distinct formation of late
liberalism is how this redistribution of the value and meaning of life does
not primarily gain traction through the figure of market rationalities in-
ternalized by individuals but through their enshrinement in a politically
retooled notion of culture. Culture here figures as a disjunctive matrix of
subjection and dismemberment that is coproduced simultaneously by
the state, nonstate political actors, and a transnational moral economy
in which the cultural life of Indigenous subjects is indistinguishable from
the legitimacy of that life.
This culturalization of legitimate Indigenous life occupies an entire
global industry. It is consolidated through its outsourcing to what can be
described as a global “culturalist humanitarianism,” organized by NGO
networks, funded by charity, and concerned with preserving the sanctity
of cultural life. Cultural life, however, exists only as a collective and not
as an individual life. Thus, cultural loss is given a greater moral weight
than physical death; the sanctity of culture is privileged over the sanctity
of bodily life. Structural violence against those considered to be insuf-
ficiently cultural is then glossed as an Indigenous failure to resist or an
inability to fully comprehend their own origins. That is, the sociological
conditions of violent dispossession are mistaken for ontological degrada-
