Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico,
Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. Scholars have described how
creating a pluralist and ethnically heterogenous state based on respect
for human differences instead of their erasure promises “a radically new
politico-legal order and conception of citizenship” that in effect redefines
the national project in Latin America.
24
The emancipatory potentials of
such reforms reside largely in their promise to decrease inequality by
increasing political connectivity through new forms of citizenship and
rights. Yet, as Jean Jackson and Kay Warren aptly point out, multicultural
reforms remain unevenly spread and deeply contradictory for Indigenous
peoples in Latin America.
25
This is even more complicated in places that
have long been at the very margins of state rule, like the Paraguayan Gran
Chaco.
As Terry Turner argued, multiculturalism transforms a Herderian con-
cept of culture as a distinct worldview into a foundational human right.
26
Thus, article 98 of the 2009 Constitution of Bolivia argues that cultural
diversity “constitutes the essential base of the Communal Plurinational
State. . . . The fundamental responsibility of the state is to preserve, de-
velop, protect and distribute the cultures that exist in the country.” Multi-
cultural citizenship, in other words, presumes a humanity that is defined
by the universal capacity to intentionally produce cultural selves—a pro-
cess that is a function of interdependence with others.
27
The category
of isolation carries multiculturalist logics to such an extreme that they
double back upon themselves. “Isolation as right” is premised on an ap-
peal to a pluralist society built not around tolerance for diversity but
around a state that polices the boundaries of culture as permanent bor-
ders that must be defended. The protection of this imperiled difference is
not meant to insure a society in which everyone participates equally but
one in which segregation is the only possible form of solidarity with iso-
lated subjects—even while their territories are being actively transformed
into the sites of hydrocarbon extraction or industrial agriculture.
While multiculturalist logics may make the state protection of isola-
tion possible to imagine in the first place, the particular fusion of cul-
ture and life implied by the category of isolation stands the legitimating
premises of such protections on end. The key difference lies in how iso-
lation establishes a state policy around protecting a subjectivity that is
incapable of change and self-representation.
28
The culture of the isolated
is imagined to be a sui generis and stable outside to wider relations. Ironi-
cally, this seems to imply that the most valid Indigenous life can only
exist outside of multicultural society! Thus, the state protection of iso-
lation, or nonrelation, is seen within Peruvian Law 28.736 as the only
