1st Edition
Countering Modernity Communal and Cooperative Models from Indigenous Peoples
This volume highlights and examines how Indigenous Peoples continue to inhabit the world in counter-modern ways. It illustrates how communalist practices and cooperative priorities of many Indigenous communities are simultaneously key to their cultural survival while being most vulnerable to post-colonial erasure. Chapters contributed by community collectives, elders, lawyers, scholars, multi-generational collaboratives, and others are brought together to highlight the communal and cooperative strategies that counter the modernizing tropes of capitalist, industrialist, and representational hegemonies. Furthermore, the authors of the book explicitly interrogate the roles of witness, collaborator, advocate, and community leader as they consider ethical relations in contexts of financialized global markets, ongoing land grabbing and displacement, epistemic violence, and post-colonial erasures.
Lucid and topical, the book will be indispensable for students and scholars of anthropology, modernity, capitalism, history, sociology, human rights, minority studies, indigenous studies, Asian studies, and Latin American studies.
List of Figures
Author Biographies
Introduction: Relational communities and their entanglements with modernity: On co-laboring with Indigenous voices.
César Abadía-Barrero and Carolyn Smith-Morris
PART I: Communalism as Ancestral Knowledge and Balance across Many Beings
1. Trig metawe: Restoring the tears of dispossession for küme mongen
Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta and Francisco Huichaqueo-Pérez
2. The multiplication of the multiple, communalism and Indigenous Tensions in Brazil
Valdelice Veron Kaiowá and Sílvia Guimarães
3. Relating to the Forest: Possibilities and Limitations of Collaborative Research and Community Media Production
Georgia Ennis, Gissela Yumbo, María Antonia Shiguango, Ofelia Salazar, and Olga Chongo
4. Intercultural Communalism: Intercultural and intergenerational work around medicinal plants in a village in southern Colombia
Uitoto, Korevaju, and Muinane Peoples: Raúl Perdomo (Uitoto), Pedro Valencia (Korevaju), Emilio Fiagama (Uitoto), Miriam Perdomo (Muinane), Lucélida Perdomo (Muinane), Alfonso García (Uitoto), Ismael Calderón (Uitoto), Adolfo Carvajal (Uitoto), Estelio Barbosa (Uitoto), Maria Celina Arango (Uitoto), Diego Andrés Diaz (Uitoto), Rosalba Manzanilla (Inga), Edwar Samir Perdomo (Uitoto), Susana López (Korevaju), Shellany Valencia (Korevaju), Stefany Ramos (Uitoto), Javier Aldana, Vanesa Giraldo and César Abadía-Barrero
PART II: Communalist Entanglements with Modernity
5. Autonomy, Land Stewardship, and Indigenous Emancipatory Praxis through Legislative Activism in Costa Rica and Multilateral Institutions
Steven P. Black, Carolina Bolaños Palmieri, Cassandra Eng, Carlos Faerron Guzmán, Yanet Fundora, Leila Garro Valverde, and Jose Carlos Morales Morales
6. Akubadaura: Resistance and organization. The struggle of Colombian indigenous women for the conquest of their rights and the defense of their communities and territories
Akubadaura Community of Jurists and Fabiola León Posada
7. Countering Modernity through the Purko Maasai Olpul healing retreat
Kristin Hedges and Joseph Ole Kipila
8. Who “Communitize” Whom? The Countercommunal Models of the Forager Nayaka and Modern India
Nurit Bird-David
9. Between conformity and nonconformity: challenges for weaving community life among the Nasa del Cauca Indigenous People, Colombia
Yaid Ferley Bolaños Díaz
PART III: Contending with Scale: Communalism across Different Audience
10. Levels of Communalism in the Ecuadorian Amazon: Combatting Modernity with the Help of Indigenous Radio
Nicholas Simpson, Andrés Tapia, Carolyn Smith-Morris
11. Politics of Representations: Making Indigenous paintings for sale in Central Australia
Françoise Dussart
12. Rights, Repatriation and Return: The Sámi
Jocelyn Bell
13. “Nation” v. “Rom”: Yolŋu articulations of communal identity in northeast Arnhem Land, Australia
Frances Morphy
Index
Biography
Carolyn Smith-Morris is a medical anthropologist and professor at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, O’Donnell School of Public Health. Her research documents the experience of chronic disease, particularly diabetes, among Indigenous and Mexican immigrant communities and contributes to theories of chronicity and decolonization of healthcare. Her books include two monographs (Diabetes Among the Pima: Stories of Survival and Indigenous Communalism: Belonging, Healthy Communities, and Decolonizing the Collective) and two edited volumes on medical anthropology. She is also a contributing researcher and author with Cultural Survival in support of Indigenous rights.
César Abadia is a Colombian activist and scholar. He is an associate professor of anthropology and human rights at the University of Connecticut. He integrates different critical perspectives in the study of how for-profit interests transform access, continuity, and quality of health care. He has conducted activist-oriented research in Brazil and Colombia, focusing on health care policies and programs, human rights judicialization and advocacy, and social movements in health. His current collaborative research supports community-based proposals in health and wellbeing after Colombia’s 2016 peace accord. He is the author and editor of several books including I Have AIDS but I am Happy: Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil and Health in Ruins: the Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital.
