Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
frictions between the diverse global projects that appeared to coalesce via
their shared investments in isolated life. In such ways, the nonsensical
logics of isolation echoed and reproduced the disordered logics of colo-
nial violence. In order to understand how the politics of isolation was
related to the ambiguous being of Ayoreo-speaking people, I set out to
track this overlap between violence, culture, and life. It was a journey that
took me from the grit of Ayoreo camps to the seemingly distinct domains
in which their lives were objectified—international human rights law,
multiculturalist state policies, humanitarian NGO practices, and genetic
science—and back to the human tragedy unfolding in the Gran Chaco.
The Human Right to Isolation
The legislation of isolation as an international human rights issue began
as a response to a particular problem—that is, through intense mobiliz-
ing by Indigenous organizations and NGOs in Peru and Brazil against
the disastrous effects of multilateral development projects for certain In-
digenous populations.
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These largely successful mobilizations prompted
a series of meetings funded by the Inter-American Development Bank
(IDB) and the UN in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010 to establish an
effective international lobby around isolation as a basic human right and
domain of expert knowledge.
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In the last six years, the UN, the OAS Hu-
man Rights Commission, and a series of precautionary measures issued
by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have begun to legislate
isolation as an exceptional collective right, defined by a general state of
vulnerability. The legislation of isolation, in other words, offers an appar-
ently universal solution to a particular set of problems.
The clearest formulation of isolation as a shared existential state is
found in the 2009 “Draft Guidelines on the Protection of Indigenous
Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact,” by the UN Human
Rights Council. This document uses three criteria to define isolated
peoples:
1.
“They are highly integrated into the ecosystems which they inhabit and of which
they are a part, maintaining a closely interdependent relationship with the environ-
ment in which they live their lives and develop their culture . . . ;
“They are unfamiliar with the ways in which mainstream society functions, and
are thus defenseless and extremely vulnerable in relation to the various actors that
attempt to approach them or to observe their process of developing relations with
the rest of society, as in the case of peoples in initial contact;
2.
