Savages and Citizens is a work of interdisciplinary collaboration between Latin Americanist anthropologist, Andrew Canessa, who has spent many years studying Aymara-speaking Indigenous peoples in Bolivia and has written extensively on the reforms of the national Movement for Socialism government, and Manuela Lavinas Picq, a political scientist, journalist and Ecuadorian Indigenous rights activist. It is a bold and original book that attempts to relate how Indigenous history and politics have shaped the modern world and to communicate these lessons to a wider audience, especially to non-Indigenous scholars in fields such as international relations, political science and political theory.
Canessa and Picq’s central claim is that the state and Indigeneity are co-constitutive phenomena. Indigeneity is fundamentally a political identity relational to modern states. While there are thousands of peoples who self-identify as Indigenous what unites them is not a set of essential cultural traits but a common condition resulting from colonial processes of state-making. They occupy a political space created by a particular state formation to which they contributed dynamically. Meanwhile, the concept and practice of sovereignty, the social contract and nation state were defined in relation to both real and imagined Indigenous peoples during the rise of European colonialism and the Enlightenment. It is therefore impossible to fully understand the state and modern system of international relations without reference to the history of colonialism and Indigenous political and intellectual struggle which has been rendered invisible to the mainstream of Western academic thought and balkanised within disciplines such as anthropology and Indigenous studies. Moreover, by understanding Indigeneity as a relational political identity it is possible to elucidate many of the contemporary conflicts taking place within postcolonial nations over definitions of law and sovereignty alongside the possibilities and limitations of national projects of decolonisation.
Savages and Citizens sets out its theoretical framework in three broad chapters and then applies this to two case studies which draw on the authors’ research and activism in Bolivia and Ecuador. Chapter 1 describes how colonial states across the globe defined native peoples in distinct ways, while these same groups also deployed such categorisations as political identities formed by resistance to territorial, political, linguistic and other forms of dispossession by the state. It then details how these identities have shifted over time and provides an overview of the emergence of modern international legal definitions of Indigeneity. Chapter 2 then discusses how European enlightenment thinkers defined the concept of the state and sovereignty in opposition to an imagined Indigenous other, which erased the complex political and cultural realities of native societies and played a key role in legitimating colonial violence and ethnocide as ‘civilising’ projects. It also underpinned the conceptual division of natural and social worlds which excludes Indigenous claims about nature from the domain of the political. Meanwhile, Chapter 3 proposes a model for conceptualising the distinct ways Indigeneity is constituted and therefore how Indigenous identities and movements express and challenge state authority. This draws on a comparison between debates in Africanist scholarship on the notion of ‘autochthony’ and the diverse ways Indigeneity is experienced and politically deployed in Bolivia. Canessa and Picq identify five ‘nested pairs’ through which to distinguish between discourses which frame Indigeneity: as representative of a national majority or minority, as ‘territorialised’ or ‘unterritorialised’, making claims on the state or against the state, through ‘symbolic’ or ‘substantive’ expression and as hegemonic or counterhegemonic in their import.
The two final chapters examine a case study of interlegality in Ecuador, or the interpenetration and recombination of legal norms and practices, and the limitations of the Bolivian Movement for Socialism’s project of building a progressive ‘plurinational’ state. Indigenous women in Ecuador, as part of the Chimbazaro rural Kichwa women’s network (REDCH), took a lead in writing the national constitution, drawing on concepts from international human rights law to argue for the recognition and representation of women within Indigenous customary law and practices of justice. Meanwhile, the attempt to create an ‘Indigenous state’ in Bolivia that recognises the diverse ways of life of its multiple Indigenous peoples has resulted in seemingly contradictory contestation of the national revolutionary ‘process of change’ by multiple Indigenous social constituencies and political organisations. Yet this can be elucidated through comprehending the contradictory needs and perspectives of the distinct groups regarded as Indigenous and the limitations of a project of progressive state-building carried out within the apparatuses of a colonial state and premised on the continuation of extractive industry. Both cases, the authors argue, demonstrate the need to profoundly rethink the concept of sovereignty, based on their analysis of how Indigeneity has historically shaped the state and how the sustained political struggles of the world’s Indigenous peoples continue to challenge conventional understandings of national territorial boundaries and the reach of the law.
This is a short but theoretically complex and important book. While many of the details of colonial history, Indigenous identity, plurinationalism and interlegality will be familiar to anthropologists and Indigenous scholars, there is still much in its overall argument they will find novel. While it is a book written by non-Indigenous academics for a broad scholarly audience it brings the work of Indigenous intellectuals directly into conversation with foundational theoretical debates in political theory. It therefore represents a daring work of intellectual synthesis which should be of interest to all readers who seek a nuanced understanding of the modern state and the politics of decolonisation.
