Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
for isolated groups, the state prefigures them as wards or dependents.
This also applies to international jurisprudence. The recent precautionary
measures issued by the Inter-American Court to protect isolated groups,
for instance, stem from a process called “third-party petitions,” in which
a third party can submit petitions on behalf of another if the actual in-
jured party is deemed unable to submit a petition for itself.
18
The legal
efficacy of isolation is predicated on such slippages between absence and
agency. It presumes a kind of life that is only sovereign to the degree it
reborders the human/nonhuman—that is, to the degree it is subsumed
entirely into an external sign from which it is simultaneously excluded.
This basic premise is not questioned by those actors and stakeholders,
including Indigenous organizations, that are now competing to represent
isolated groups and manage the resources marshaled on their behalf. This
is the case for the handful of Ayoreo cultural brokers who are increasingly
asserting their right to represent the interests of the concealed Totobi-
egosode in international forums.
19
The legislation of isolation is in part derived from the ways in which
the value of cultural diversity and biodiversity have become quantita-
tively the same within the logics of global capitalism.
20
Those working in
international conservation, development, and human rights regard each
as a global public good, an underprovisioned resource whose benefits
ideally reach across borders, generations, and populations.
21
As Ismail
Serageldin put it in a 1999 UNDP report, “Culture is an end in itself . . .
it contributes to a society's ability to promote self-esteem and empower-
ment for everyone.”
22
Yet whereas this cultural diversity is a value based
on the recognition that “differences in human societies are parts of sys-
tems and relationships,” and thus mutually constitutive effects of poli-
tics, history, and personhood, isolation presumes the inverse.
23
Isolation
is predicated on a kind of cultural difference that exists in opposition to
social relations. It is a radical form of difference that is inevitably con-
taminated by being entangled in wider networks. At the same time, its
value is quantified in the capitalist terms of market exchange.
Isolation and Culturalism
The legislation of isolation presumes and creates contradictions within
national multiculturalist policies as well as international law. The cur-
rent mobilizing around isolation is only possible because of the well-
documented juridical reforms across Latin America in the last two de-
cades, particularly the rise of multiculturalism as an official state policy
