Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of legitimacies in which bounded, ahistorical, and antirelational differ-
ence is privileged over and above the kinds of difference asserted within
local sensibilities or those taken as the product of unequal relations and
imperial histories. What is new about this framework for moral action,
uncritically assumed by a wide range of stakeholders (including a not
insignificant number of Indigenous rights activists), is that it extends
the ways in which such uneven cultural legitimacies become perceived
as biological legitimacies, and vice versa. Through mobilizing around
isolation, these distinct ways of interpreting cultural difference blur into
the ranking of Indigenous forms of life. Cultural legitimacy becomes in-
distinguishable from bioinequality.
This entails more than the simple naturalization of difference. Rather,
it also marks a shift in the kind of Indigenous life that global politics
is interested in. This shift—from a Native subject who is encapsulated
by imperial power but ideally self-determining to one who can only ex-
ist outside of social relations and representation in general
—
refracts the
similar shift from “the life of the refugee” to the “life of the sick” that
Didier Fassin uses to explain biolegitimacy as a mode of contemporary
governance. For Fassin, these changes are fundamentally about the fluid
stakes “with respect to the sort of life which is defended today and which
can enter at some point this state of humanitarian exception.”
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What is
distinct about isolated life is not its unique eligibility for inclusion into
already existing exceptional states, but rather, that it is a form of life cre-
ated by such stagings of humanitarian exception and the transnational
government of emergency. Here, the state of exception produces the
only Indigenous subject that is capable of fully fitting within its pregiven
boundaries.
Questions remain: What relational worlds might these politics of iso-
lation also imply for a critical public anthropology of indigeneity? Is it
enough to find relations where there appear to be none, or to put ethnog-
raphy at the service of more effectively policing the borders of isolated
life from the many who would otherwise seek to dispossess or extinguish
it by brute violence? Does political anthropology require playing by al-
ready given rules? I don't believe so.
To be clear, what I am arguing is that there is an urgent need to imag-
ine a subset of exceptional rights based on an ethical engagement with
the lived experiences of actual Ayoreo people instead of the imagined
dilemmas posed by a neocolonial fantasy with universalizing preten-
sions. Many failed attempts at cultural activism have convinced me that
such a framework can only begin by fostering broad Ayoreo protagonism
