Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
3.
“They are highly vulnerable and, in most cases, at high risk of extinction. Their ex-
treme vulnerability is worsened by threats and encroachments on their territories,
which directly jeopardize the preservation of their cultures and ways of life.”
A similar definition of isolation has become national law in Peru, Ec-
uador, and Bolivia.
14
The legal government of isolation draws from two
significant precedents. The first is the guarantee to self-determination
as the fundamental Indigenous right. The condition of isolation, jurists
have argued, is “the clearest and most unequivocal form in which they
exercise their right to self-determination.” Thus, legally protecting their
human rights requires “a guarantee of respect for the no-contact prin-
ciple . . . which represents the highest expression of their will.” The sec-
ond precedent is the right to culture. In the UN Human Rights Council
document, the human rights of isolated peoples are linked to their status
as “very vulnerable peoples whose cultures are at permanent risk of dis-
appearing.” Preserving these cultures both preserves “a valuable public
good for humanity,” and “protects the existence” of isolated peoples.
15
The legal case thus presumes that the condition of isolation is the maxi-
mum expression of Native desire or will, and that the validity of this life
is entirely contained within the limits of uncontaminated culture.
In such definitions, isolated life is inseparable from pure nature, as
well as pure culture. Today, isolated people legally resemble endangered
nonhuman elements of nature in their rights to difference. Contrary to
the life-forms that are viable within capitalist modernity, this regime of
life/culture does not disrupt natural ecosystems, but is an integral part of
them. As the NGO director who protested the expedition put it, “With-
out them something would be lacking in the forest, something related
with their vitality and the validity of what we call biodiversity.”
16
In such
ways, isolation is not a human right at all, but a legal slot reserved for the
latest reincarnation of natural man. Therefore, the respected Indigenous
rights group IWGIA (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs)
can describe the concealed Ayoreo-speaking people in all seriousness as
“a single, inseparable unit with their habitat . . . with which they live
together in close communion.”
17
Because it grants rights to a form of
life that it cannot locate, isolation presumes a subject that is intelligible
only in its sovereign absence. Paradoxically, it is a legal subject that must
remain outside of law itself.
This means that isolation may allow for new forms of imperial guard-
ianship, in which various state and transnational institutions compete
to become the legitimate trustees of certain kinds of life. By claiming
the power to authorize itself or third parties to act as guardians
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