This document discusses the concept of "indigenous peoples' rights" and questions whether there should be a universal definition. It notes that while the concept originated based on the situations of Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, applying it globally has proven difficult. In some parts of Asia and Africa, all populations have long-standing ties to the land, making the concept unclear. The document examines how the definition has been stretched in international agreements and debates whether a universal concept of indigenous rights is appropriate or if local, culturally specific concepts are needed.

1. Should We Have a Universal Concept of 'Indigenous Peoples' Rights'?: Ethnicity and
Essentialism in the Twenty-First Century
Author(s): John R. Bowen
Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Aug., 2000), pp. 12-16
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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2. Should we have a universal
concept
of
'indigenous peoples' rights'?
Ethnicity and essentialism in the twenty-first century
JOHN R.
BOWEN
John R. Bowen is the
Dunbar-Van Cleve
Professor of Arts and
Sciences and Chair of the
Program in Social Thought
and Analysis at Washington
University in St. Louis. His
most recent book (with
Roger Petersen) is Critical
comparisons in politics and
culture (Cambridge UP).
He is presently completing
'Entangled commands:
Islam, adat, and equality in
the Indonesian legal field'.
His email is:
jbowen @ artsci. wustl. edu.
Many, if not most anthropologists, myself included, have
spent our professional lives working with people whose
traditions, language, or way of life differ from people in
power. We sometimes use the phrase 'indigenous' to
refer collectively to such people and to contrast them to
the groups who dominate in terms of politics or eco-nomics.
The term 'indigenous' has also become part of
legal discourse, as coalitions working at the United
Nations and elsewhere have made 'indigenous peoples'
rights' a part of international customary law.
I wish to examine here the argument that the most
appropriate legal and (more broadly) normative concept
to characterize struggles for greater autonomy within
nation-states is that certain rights accrue to all, and other
rights accrue only to those peoples who are 'indigenous.'
I underscore that those who make this argument intend
for the idea of 'indigenous peoples' rights' to have uni-versal
applicability and legal force. I focus on the rela-tionship
between the idea of 'indigenous' as it appears in
current legal and political discourse about the rights of
peoples, and the many local ideas of 'indigenousness'
that one finds used in different parts of the world. Does
making universal claims about rights that accrue only to
'the indigenous' have different consequences in different
places? Is this universal valorization of territorial prece-dence
required to achieve certain ends, or can ideas of
self-governance and equality achieve them as well? In
the end, I argue for a two-stage framework combining a
broader universal notion of group-differentiated rights
with multiple, culturally-specific local concepts of
people, place, and state.
I. 'Indigenous peoples' and collective rights
Current discussions of 'indigenous peoples' take place
against the background of three conceptual frameworks
that emerged after World War II: human rights, collective
rights, and the rights of aboriginal peoples.
Most discussions of rights in the first three decades
after World War II were focused on individuals - in part
because talk of minorities and ethnic groups had been tar-nished
by Nazi ideology. The 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and the two International Covenants of
1966 (one on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the
other on Civil and Political Rights) list the rights of indi-viduals
vis-?-vis states. They say little about states' posi-tive
obligations. Current debates within this conceptual
framework concern the legitimacy of religious or other
cultural norms as sources of individual rights or limits on
rights claims, questions of economic as well as political
rights, and claims that the politics of human rights pits the
West against Asia and Africa. '
Arguments for collective rights (the second frame-work)
usually begin by pointing out two major limita-tions
of a solely individual-rights approach, namely, that
certain rights, such as the right to perpetuate a language
or occupy a territory, only make sense when thought out
in terms of a group, and, secondly, that human rights
approaches restrain states but do not compel them to take
positive action to guarantee real social or cultural
equality.2 In contrast to the human rights focus on Asian,
African, and Middle Eastern societies, collective rights
theoretical literature has dealt primarily with North
America and Europe. Theorists in Canada and the U.S.
(e.g. Will Kymlicka (1995), Charles Taylor (1994),
Michael Walzer (1997)) focus on problems of the polit-ical
representation of ethnic groups and the degree of tol-eration
that states ought to afford long-standing societies
existing within the boundaries of the state, with Native
Americans and small religious groups such as the Amish
as prime examples. Many European writers, by contrast
(e.g. Bikhu Parekh (1995), Norbert Rouland (1996),
Michel Wieviorka (1997)), focus on the rights of 'immi-grants',
and in particular on the status to be accorded
Islamic social norms and rules. Current debates within
this framework concern the sort of 'external protections'
(self-governance, specific economic rights, language
protection) necessary to ensure real equality, and the
extent to which one ought to permit social norms that
would not be permitted in the wider society - for
example, those which discriminate against women - to be
enforced within a minority group.
Proponents of the rights of indigenous peoples (the
third conceptual framework) take great pains to differ-entiate
their claims from those that can be made for all
minorities, arguing that native peoples have a special
cultural and historical tie to their territory and therefore
special claims to self-determination within that territory
(Cortez 1993).3 Discussions of indigenous peoples'
rights arose in the Americas in the context of European
invasions and colonization (when the Spanish and
French cognates of 'indigenous' were coined), and have
occupied an important place in international forums
since the 1940s, when the International Labour
Organization studied problems faced by 'indigenous and
other tribal' societies in South America (Anaya 1996: 9-
58). An early emphasis on problems of integrating
indigenous American peoples into dominant societies
was, by the 1970s, replaced by a call to take action that
would allow them, and other, similar societies else-where,
to maintain cultural and economic difference.4 A
1994 U.N. Draft Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples is one of the many conventions and
declarations that have attempted to proclaim a universal
set of norms and rights regarding 'indigenous peoples',
and that have led the legal scholar James Anaya
(1996:57) to proclaim the emergence of a new 'interna-tional
law of indigenous peoples'.5
The emergence of these international norms, claimed
to have universal applicability, introduces a specific
temporal element into rights discourse. Whereas claims
about collective rights can be, and often are, based on
arguments that real equality requires treating some
groups differently to others (and can apply to a variety
of types of groups), this new set of claims rests on a
1.M orree centFlyr anchea s
beenth et argeotf criticisfmor n ot
complyinwgit hth eE uropean
ConventioonnH umaRni ghtws hen
condemnfeodrh oldinag m an
withouat f airt ria(lL ib?rati8o n
Novemb1e9r 99).
2. A 1968c aseb roughtott he
EuropeCano urotf H umaRni ghts
byF rench-speakreinsigd enotfs t he
Dutch-speakpianrgot fB elgium
underscobreost hp ointTs. hep lain-tiffsc
itedth eE uropeCano nvention
onH umaRni ghtisn a rguintgh atth e
statefa iledto p rovidFer ench-lan-guagsec
hoolbs,u tl osto ng rounds
thatth eC onventidoone sn otg uar-antelei
nguistcico ntinuiatny dd oes
notr equirthe es tateto t akep ositive
steptso p reservlaen guag(esse ed is-cussioinn
B rownl1ie9 88).
3. Childasn dD elgado-(P1.9 99),
ina strongly-worrdeespdo ntsoe
scepticrael marbkysA ndrB?? teille
(1998)c,o rrectelym phasitzhea t
indigenopueso pletsh emselvaerse
creatincgo nceptioonfs th ei ndige-nousA.
si se videnftr omw hafto l-lowsb
elowI, a grewe ithB ?teillien
hisd istinctiobnest weetnh eh istory
oft heA mericans dA ustraloian,
theo neh anda,n dA siao, nt heo ther;
howeveIr w, ouldp ushC hildasn d
Delgado-ePv.e nf urtheinrt heir
emphasoins t her ighotf indigenous
grouptso d efinteh emselvaesn,d a sk
whethedrif ferernetg ionnael tworks
ofn ativpee oplecsa nnofot rmulate
culturadlliys tinctiivdee aos f
'indigenousn-e ossro' thesri milar
concepsths oulodt hecro ncepts
provme orfei ttintgo t hem.
4. Thet itleo f the1 957I LO
reportth, eC onventicoonn cerning
thep rotectioann di ntegratioofn
indigenoaunsd o thetrr ibaaln d
semi-tribpaolp ulatioinnsi n de-pendencto
untriepsr, esentths e
majoars sumptioonft sh ep eriod:
thaitn digenopueso plews erep rima-rily'
tribalt'h; atth eyw eren oty et
welli ntegratiendt ot hel arger
societby uts houlbde ;a ndt hatth ese
werem atterfos rt her espectiivned e-pendencot
untriteost akeu p.B yt he
12 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 16 No 4, August 2000

3. different argument, namely, that certain rights adhere to
groups that were the first to settle a particular territory. It
is this priority of residence that justifies creating a set of
claims about indigenous peoples that are distinct from
claims made about minorities or about peoples subject to
discrimination or oppression.
II. Stretching the category
American 'tribes' and Aboriginal Australians have
served as prototypes for thinking about 'indigenous peo-ples'.
In the Americas, the long temporal gap between
early migrations of today's First Peoples and the con-quest
of the region by Europeans made the use of 'indige-nous',
although not precise (because everyone travelled
to the Americas from somewhere else), at least capable of
picking out a category of people who were the first to
occupy the region. (I leave aside the more specific issues
of tribal claims to grave sites on the basis of very long-term
occupation.) The clear difference in modes of life
and physical appearance between prototypical indige-nous
peoples and dominant populations, along with plau-sible
assumptions that the former generally wished to
preserve their distinctiveness, have made this conceptual
framework broadly accepted, if not always easily appli-cable.
6 This distinctiveness has also led to particular
associations of indigenousness with cultural authenticity,
spiritual ties to the land, powerful medicinal knowledge,
and in Brazil, in the form of 'indigenism', a powerful set
of public images about national identity (Ramos 1998).
In Asia and Africa, by contrast, no such long time gap
exists between an initial peopling and a subsequent con-quest.
Populations moved around and some absorbed
others; these differences in demographic history have led
a number of Asian and African scholars and delegates to
international forums to argue that the category 'indige-nous
peoples' should be limited to the Americas and
Australia (Rouland et al. 1996: 427-79; Waehle 1991).
International agencies have responded by identifying as
'indigenous peoples' those groups seen as distinct and
vulnerable (usually nomadic or pastoral in mode of life),
groups labeled locally as 'tribes' (especially in India), or
groups in rebellion against the state. (Thus, the East
Timorese appeared frequently on lists of 'indigenous
peoples', but not the West Timorese, who had not coa-lesced
into a group opposing the Indonesian state.) In
some cases the idea of 'non-dominance' becomes the pri-mary
criterion (Kingsbury 1998:453), leading one to
wonder whether a reversal in political fortunes could
create newly 'indigenous' peoples out of formerly dom-inant
ones.
Consider the strenuous conceptual stretching under-taken
by the editors of a recent book on Asia to apply the
concept of 'indigenous peoples' to that continent, a task
which one of the book's editors declared to be 'extremely
difficult but by no means impossible' (Gray 1995:37).
One author (Kingsbury 1995:29-33) notes that China and
Indonesia have plausibly claimed that all their people
have lived on their lands for a long time, and hence are
equally 'indigenous'. In the way of a solution to the
problem he proposes that we should no longer require
that 'indigenous people' have had a historical continuity
with the land - thus abandoning precisely the original
argument that indigenous peoples were different from
other oppressed minorities.7 In the same volume, writing
about eastern Indonesia, a region of precisely those
small-scale, economically and politically vulnerable
societies generally intended to benefit from being
labelled 'indigenous', the anthropologist Robert Barnes
(1993:322), who prefers to retain some idea of prior
occupation for the concept of 'indigenous', states that
one simply cannot distinguish between indigenous and
other peoples in eastern Indonesia.8 As if in revenge for
his agnosticism, it is the society where Barnes did much
of his fieldwork, the K?dang, which, alone of all eastern
Indonesian societies, appears on a U.N. website map of
'indigenous peoples' !9
As an illustration of this haphazard process of labelling
societies, let me mention the province where I do most of
my own fieldwork, Aceh, on the northwestern tip of
Sumatra. The Acehnese Liberation Front claims that
Aceh was colonized by the Javanese after having been
colonized by the Dutch, never joined Indonesia, and
should now revert to control by the Acehnese bangsa
(people, nation), an idea that deeply troubles the ethnic
minorities within Aceh, whose situation is ignored in the
press. News stories about the Acehnese routinely speak
of them as an indigenous people. And yet the Acehnese
have never thought of themselves as 'indigenous'; the
folk etymology of Aceh is 'Arab, Cina, Eropa, Hindi', to
indicate that the area has been a land of immigration of
people from many corners of the world, whose common
element is Islam. Most Acehnese were also enthusiastic
participants in the Indonesian Revolution; their major
complaints concern Jakarta's appropriation of their oil
and gas resources and brutal military occupation of the
province.
The idea that prior occupation of territory gives to
'indigenous peoples' certain rights and claims not
accruing to other minorities works well enough for the
Americas and Australia, where particular histories of
conquest, and ethnic distinctiveness, have made it rela-tively
easy to conceive of, although not necessarily put
into practice, a set of 'indigenous peoples' rights' -
^?[?igenOUS (indrds/nas), a. [f. late L. inai-
%tn-us boni in a country, native J. indigen-a a
dative : see Indigene) + -ous.]
1, Born or produced naturally in a land or region ;
native or belonging naturally to (the soil, region,
etc). (Used primarily of aboriginal inhabitants or
natural products.)
. 1646Sir T. Browne Pseud. Ep. vi. x. 325 Although.. there
bee.?s w arm5e of Negroes serving under the Spaniard,y et
Ver? they ail transported from Africa, .and are not indice-
"nouosr p ropern ativeso f America. 1697P hil. Trans. XIX.
?07ThisC reaturew as formerlyC ommonw ith usiti Ireland;
Did au Indigenous Animal .. universally met with in all
Wts of the Kingdom. 1791 Newtk Tour En*. <y Scoi. 1S8
J? differentH ighland glens ..where the indigenouss heep
are supposed to remain unmixed. 1794 S. Williams Ver?
M&U 70 A plant indigenous unly to China and Tartary.
?A? Whew ell Hist. Induct, Sc. (i8s7! 1- 212 They liad ..
Ibetn passionately fond of their indigenous poetry. 1868
y?. Hall in Examiner 11 Apr. 228/3 Compositions which
^ll?diouslyr ejecta ll words that are not either Sanskritic or
indigenous. 1881 Westcott & Hort Grk. .V. T. Introd.
? ff 18 Hardly any indigenous Syriac theology older than the
?fourthc enturyh as been preserved. 1885 Kidkk Haggard
KtSohmon's MinesI ntrod.5 The indigenousH oraa nd fauna
-of Kukuanaiand.
b. trans/, ana?g. Inborn, innate, native.
','01864 I. Taylor (Webster), Joy and hope are emotions
j?digenoui to the human mind. 1885 J. Maktinkau Types
Sth. Th. II. 68 The more we appreciate what obligation
means, the more shall we rest in the psychologically indi-genousc
haractero f its conditions.
.v 2. Of, pertaining to, or intended for the natives ;
1n ativ e', vernacular. "
^844 H. H. Wilson Brit. India II. 579 Most of the Mis-ibnary
establishmentas ttempted the formationo f an Eng-jbh
school in connexion with their indigenous schools.
?* Hence Indi/grenously adv., in an indigenous
manner, as a native growth. Indigfenousness,
the quality of being indigenous or native.
*?-?r^^ R0TEG reece1 1.i v. II. 403 The Achaeans.. belonging
femgenously to the peninsula. 1851 G. Blvth Remiti.
Miss. Lije iv. 183 The cotton plant grows indigenously.
|t894 Forum (TJ. S.) Mar. 19 Progress is slow, population in-i/
S**51^ ?Ut *su?h^y*a n<i tnat indigenously. Mod. The
uS^ *Sr ecor(ledfr o? various localities in Scotland, but its
' todigenousnesins the north is doubted.
A new English dictionary on historical principles. Vol 5, Part 2.
Clarendon Press, 1901, p. 213.
1970sa,s similatiaonnd d evelop-menwt
eren ol ongegro also f
reformb,u tr athetrh es ourcoef the
problemTh. eicrl oserre lationshtoip
theiern vironm-e ntht eir's ylvan
cultur(eq' uoteidn T ennant
1994:1-7 )b othp uti ndigenopueso -
plesi nd angearn dg avet hemth e
potentioaflr edeeminhgu manity
fromit sh ighm odernsisint sT. he
critiquoefd evelopmenmtaold ernity
wass oonc oupletdo a critiquoef
politicmal odernitthyr ougthh e
activitioefs i ndigenopueso ple's
organizatioInn1s .9 71th eU .N.
Economainc dS ociaCl ouncil
authorizae Sdt udoyn t hep roblemof
discriminataigoani nsitn digenous
peopleps,u blisheinds eparavteo l-umeisn
t hem id-1980Tsh. es ame
Counccirl eatead W orkinGgr oup
onI ndigenoPuosp ulatioinns 1 982,
which asc ontinuetodm eeat nnu-allya,
ndw hose1 994D raft
Declaratioonnt heR ightosf
IndigenoPueso plehsa sb ecomteh e
standatredx to fr eferenicned iscus-sionso
nt het opicI.n 1 989th eI LO
alsor eviseidts e arliecro nvention,
nowr ecognizitnhgea spiratioonfs
indigenopueso ple'st oe xercisceo n-trool
verth eior wni nstitutiownsa,y s
ofl ifea nde conomdice velopment
andto m aintaainn dd evelotph eir
identitielas,n guagaens dr eligions,
withitnh ef ramewoorfkt h eS tates
inw hichth eyli ve'( Anay1a9 96:
47-49).
5. Ont heq uestioonf precisely
whaits meanbty ' customairnyt er-nationlaalw
'r, eliedon h eavilbyy
Anayas,e eB odansk(1y9 95).
6. Onc ulturiadl eaas ndle gal
claimasb oupt eoplaen dla ndin
Australisae,e L ayto(n1 997a) nd
Povinel(l1i 993)o;n d ifferenciens
indigenoluesg apl olicieisn
Australaian dN ortAh mericBa,a rsh
(1988).
7. Ina similavre ina, reporotf
theI ndependCenotm missioonn
InternatioHnaulm anitarIisasnu es
(Rizv1i 987:6s)t atetsh aitn I ndia
populatimono vemenhtasv em ade
'theq uestioonf a ntecedentcoeo
completxo r esolvea'n dt hatth ere-foref
orA siain g enera'iln digenous'
willb et akento m ean't ribaaln d
semi-tribcaolm munitiperse, sently
threatenwedit hw haits sometimes
called" interncaoll onisatio-n 'a"
redefinitiwonh icha,t l easfto r
anthropologuissetsdt o t hed ifficulty
of 'tribeh',e lpns otv erym uch.
8. Barneasl sou sefullrye minds
ust hatth ec ategori'efso reigna'n d
'indigenouhsa'v eg reasti gnificance
inm ucho f Indonesbiau, to neg iven
bya locapl oliticacul lturAe.s
readerosf t hisjo urnaalr ew ell
awared,u asl tructuroefsa uthority
aref oundin m ucho ft heP acific,
includinmga nyso cietieosf
Indonesiina,w hicha na utochtho-nousp
eoplhe olds pirituaaul thority
anda peoplfer oma crostsh es eas
holdp oliticalu thoriTtyh. ev alueo f
'overseacsa' nt akea ddemd eanings,
asi nI slamisco cietieosf w estern
Indoneswiah erteh er ulerbsr ought
thes piritupaol weorf Middle
EasterInsl am.
9. Fromth eU niteNd ations
Departmeonf Pt ubliIcn formation,
www.who.int/ico/indigenous.html.
10.A msell(e1 996f)i ndso lder
ideaos f a 'waro f ther acesr'e sur-facingin
c urrenFtr encchla imtsh at
theses amen ativens,o wi mmigrants,
arei nassimilatbolF e rencsho ciety;
thatth eya rem erelya,s o neh earisn
bourgeocihs attefrr,a n?adise
papier(s' Frencwhi th[ immigration]
papers'a)s,o pposetdo t hei ndige-noufsr
an?aidse s ouch(e' Frencohf
[olders]t ock').
11.1d on otc onsidehre reth e
importaqnute stioonf whetheinr di-viduarli
ghtosf groump embearrs e
restrictoerdv iolatewd heng roup
normasr eg ivenp recedenocvee r
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 16 No 4, August 2000 13

4. although often in those regions local ideas of people-land
relationships are misrecognized by law. The problem has
been in the attempt to create a universal set of categories
and norms out of those specific experiences.
III. Perils of universality
None of this might matter; we might just conclude that,
once again, bureaucratic categories are often inappro-priate
(although then we should probably, at least as
anthropologists, stop trying to make them fit where they
do not), were it not for the fact that the general claim, one
that many would like to see part of international law, that
being 'indigenous' gives you some extra rights over
being merely a minority, does have local meanings in
various parts of the world, only they are sometimes
meanings other than those intended by the U.N.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, two local
expressions could be translated as 'indigenous peoples'.
The first, orang asli, does indeed refer to small-scale
societies in Malaysia and Sumatra that are 'non-domi-nant'
and perhaps could even be called 'tribal.' They are
linguistically and culturally quite distinct from the domi-nant
Malay culture, and are often vulnerable. So far so
good. The second expression, however, pribumi or burni-putera,
means, roughly, 'sons of the soil', and refers to
Malays or 'indigenous' Indonesians versus Chinese and
other later immigrants. The phrase is the key term in
political programmes aimed at depriving Chinese of what
some Malays/Indonesians consider to be their dominance
of the economic sector.
In other parts of the world, the trope of indigenous/for-eigners
has been invoked to justify violence. Christopher
Taylor (1999) points out that some Rwandan Hutus, in
justifying their violence against Tutsi people, drew on
narratives that depicted the Hutus as Rwanda's 'indige-nous
people' who had been conquered by Tutsis. In sim-ilar
fashion, narratives that portray Muslims as
'conquerors' of the 'indigenous' Hindus are available to
villagers in northern India, alongside alternative narra-tives,
genealogical in form, that, in depicting shared kin-ship
between present-day Muslims and Hindus, describe
processes of conversion to Islam (Gottschalk 2000). The
former narratives are, of course, those picked up and dis-seminated
by Hindu nationalist activists, and they fit into
an available international discourse of 'indigenous peo-ples'.
As one legal scholar has commented (Kingsbury
1998:435): 'Once indigenousness or "sons of the soil"
becomes the basis of legitimation for a politically or mil-itarily
dominant group, restraints on abuses of power can
be difficult to maintain.'
The trope of indigenous versus foreign has resonances
in Europe as well, ones that we might wish to avoid.
Bettina Arnold (1990) has traced the role of archaeology
in supporting Nazi claims to be the autochthonous people
of Europe. Nazi ideological requirements of racial purity
did not allow a finding that Germans had migrated from
somewhere else. Germans had to be indigenous people,
or as nearly so as archaeology could make them by iden-tifying
a continuity of material assemblages over the ter-ritory
then inhabited by Germans. (Nazis also claimed to
be 'non-dominant' in the economic world.)
Nazi claims may seem to have little to do with the cur-rent
politics of identifying the indigenous peoples in
former colonies, but the linking of legal and racial dis-tinctions
generally underlay European policy in those
colonies. The French differentiated among indigenous
and immigrant peoples within their colonies: in North
Africa, for example, between authentic Arabs and their
Mamluk or Ottoman oppressors (Amselle 1996). The
legal regime for natives was called the indigenati so
pejorative was the sense of this term and the cognate
indig?ne that in current French discourse it has been
replaced with the more neutral autochtone (Rouland et
al. 1996: 428-29).10
IV. Alternatives?
Distinguishing between the 'indigenous' and the others
within a society or state may, it seems, have wide-ranging
political consequences, depending on the colonial and
post-colonial experience of the country in question.
Some of these consequences would doubtless strike most
anthropologists as salutary, but others, I suspect, would
not. Many states have what I submit are quite legitimate
grounds for emphasizing the characteristics, interests,
and rights shared by all citizens, rather than dividing
them into indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.
Furthermore, groups striving for autonomy may wish to
emphasize regional unity rather than internal distinctions
into peoples. Promoting a universal, legal distinction
based on the relative priority of some genealogically-based
groups over others will run counter to these polit-ical
projects.
The hard issue is precisely how to articulate local
ideas of peoplehood, on the one hand, with regional or
nationwide ideas about citizenship, on the other - and
without playing into local rivalries and enmities. For
some Africans, distinguishing between natives and
others may be redolent of that logic of internal minori-ties
that was foundational to the apartheid policies of
South Africa. Some states (for example, Botswana)
have used categories such as economic marginality in
order to target certain groups for assistance without
stigmatizing them as different in kind, in part in order to
avoid the 'primitive museum' approach to ethnic differ-ence.
A similar insistence on equal citizenship status,
but for all Africans, is part of the justification for
humanitarian interventions across state borders, such as
those undertaken by the Organization of African
Unity.11
Let us situate ourselves for the moment in the world of
political theory. Rather: we are always so situated; let us
be explicit about our assumptions. What would be lost if
we replaced the claim that being first always grants legal
rights everywhere with a two-stage normative framework
for collective rights, one that made no such blanket claim,
but that could support culturally-specific claims about
residential precedence made in certain parts of the world?
Let me turn to the recent discussion of collective rights
by Will Kymlicka (1995: 107-20). Despite its weak-nesses
(principally, in the argument that group-differen-tiated
rights can be justified on the grounds that they are
required to produce sufficiently liberal individuals), I
find it to be clear and particularly useful for anthropolog-ical
discussion (ironically so, given its origins in Euro-
American liberal political theory).
Kymlicka proposes two major arguments in support of
claims for special legal or political rights for groups of
people living in a distinct territory and who have exer-cised
long-term self-government.12 The first justification
is on the basis of equality considerations: collective
rights may be necessary to provide political or economic
equality in cases where members of minorities are disad-vantaged
with respect to a particular resource, whether
land, language, or political representation, and where
such a group-differentiated right, such as protection for
languages, reservation of hunting or fishing lands, or
mechanisms to ensure electoral representation, would
rectify the inequality.13 This type of argument is often
cited by courts in Canada and the United States as the
basis for their decisions (Kingsbury 1998:438).
legapl rotectioonfsfe retdo o thecri ti-zensi
nt hee ncompasssintagt ee,. g.
whenN ativAe mericacnasn not
appeafrl oma tribaclo uncdile cision
tot heU .S.S upremCeo urTt.h is
issueis discusseindm anpy lacesb,u t
seeK ymlick(1a9 95)a,n df,o ra n
illuminaticnags es tudyS, ierra
(1995o) nN ahuaM, exico.
12.K ymlickalas od ealws itha
differetnytp eo fc ategortyh,a ot f
immigrawntisth outht esete rritorial
andp oliticcahl aracteristthicissp; a rt
oft hea rgumeins nt otr elevanhte re.
13.O nt hes pecifiics sueo fp oli-ticarl
epresentatsieoenP ,h illips
(1995).
14.A nay(a1 996a) rguetsh at,
fromth es tandpooinfi tn ternational
lawc, laimfso rs overeignatrye
strongiefr t heya reb asedon i nequal-itieso,
rb asich umarni ghtsth, anif
theya reb asedo nh istoricaagl ree-mentsb,
e causoef t hei nternational
lawd octrinthe act urrenlatw a pplies
toc asesn, otl awse xistinagt t het ime
oft her elevanevt entsH. owever,
Tully(1 994a) rguetsh atth e
common-lhaiwst oroyf t reatieasn d
negotiatioinnN s ortAh mericdao es
providweh awt em ighcta llm, odi-fyingR
awlsa,n O verlapppinrgo ce-duraclo
nsensubse' tweeNna tive
American dA nglo-Amerilceagnal
conceptioonfsp ropertayn, dt hatth is
historoyf a greeinpge, rhaptosb e
distinguishfreodm sp ecifihci storical
agreemenptrso, videas s oundb asis
forr eturnilnagn dtso n ativger oups.
15.1t akeK ingsbur'yc'os nstruc-tivista'
pproatcoht h ei ssuea sm oti-vatedb
yc oncernsism ilatro t hose
expressheder eH. owevears,a j urist,
Kingsbuarryg uefso rt hec ontinued
necessiotyft het erm'uss ea sa
heuristwich, ereaass,a na nthropolo-gistI,
wouldar gufeo rr eplacement
frameworfokrsa nalysicso, mbined
withs trateguics eso ft het ermin
advocacryo les.
16.T heE nglisvhe rsioonf the
eventa,s r eportebdyA gencFe rance-
Press(e2 2-3-199t9r)a nslated
masyarakaadta ta s' indigenopueso -
ples'r, eplacinthge s pecifisce nseo f
adatw, ithit sn otionosf s patiadli s-tinctiveneasnsd
le gally-binding
normws, ithth ei nternatioNnGalO
term'i ndigenouws'i,t hit sp articular
connotatioonf tse mporparl ioriatyn d
small-scasloec ietieHs. owevetrh, e
translatioofnt h eI LOp hras'ein dige-nousp
eoplesin' S uara, newsletter
oft heN ationCalo mmissioonn
HumaRni ghtsis,p enduduaskl i dan
masyarakparitb umi.
17.T hef ormegrr ouips the
Bad?Kn esejahterMaaans yarakat
AdaDt eli( DelAi daCt ommunity
WelfarBeo dy)t;h el atterth, eM ajelis
AdaBt udayMa elayIun donesia
(IndonesiCanou ncoilf M alaAy dat
[andC] ulture).
18.T hei nstitutiounnald erpin-ningo
ft hisc ommunicatisio env en
morceo mplicatPedA:C Tas ks
regionoafl ficeos f majoIrn donesian
NGO(sm osot fteno fficeos ft he
environmenNtGalO W, ALHtIo)
sponsocro ffees hopd iscussioonfs
majoirs suesw, hicha ret hentr an-scribeadn
ds ent ot hew ebsite
editor.
19.O fc oursea,s m entioned
abovea,n thropologmisitgsh atl so
studtyh eu sesm adbe yl ocaal ctors,
legailn stitutioanns,d t ransnational
organizatioofnt sh ep utativuen i-versacla
tegoroyf 'indigenous',
takinagc counbto tho f itsa cceler-atingv
elocitiyn t hei nternational
political-lesgpahl erae,n dt he
processoesft ranslatioand,a ptation,
andp ositionitnhga pt recedites u se
inp articullaorc alesL; i( forth-comingis)
a particulasrulyc cessful
instancoef thiss orot f analysis.
14 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 16 No 4, August 2000

5. Kymlicka's second argument is on the basis of the his-torical
agreements that may have been made either
between pre-existing groups and encompassing states, or
between groups that agreed to federate, as in the case of
Qu?bec vis-?-vis the rest of Canada, or that of the
provinces of Indonesia. Kymlicka contends that such
agreements have normative force and can become the
justifications for contemporary political demands by
minorities.14 One can broaden Kymlicka's concept of
'historical agreements' to include conquests and colonial
or neo-colonial processes of domination that may or may
not have involved 'agreements', but clearly did involve
the imposition of authority by one group over another.
The key idea is that a group exercised self-governance
prior to being incorporated into the current political
structure under which it is governed.
This modification of Kymlicka's formulation provides
a political-theoretical foundation for groups within a state
to advance claims as to their rights to autonomy with
respect to particular resources. It supports arguments that
considerations of political or economic equality may
demand the granting of group-differentiated rights, and
that a history of self-governance provides a normative
foundation for demands for self-determination. These
arguments do not require a finding that present-day pop-ulations
are genealogically descended from the earliest
inhabitants of a territory, and thus would allow claims to
be made on the basis of other types of relationships to
land. They allow the term 'indigenous' to retain its orig-inal
meaning without being stretched to cover all regions
and all situations. Vulnerable groups of all sorts - not
only 'peoples' but also groups characterized by religious
or cultural distinctiveness - can be granted such rights in
accord with these general criteria. The argument contains
temporal elements in that it accords normative value to a
long experience of self-government, but it does not
require claims that one group has existed as a people prior
to settlement by the currently dominant group. In other
words, it requires a lower threshold of proof, and allows
for a broader array of types of groups and types of polit-ical
histories.
I called this approach 'two-stage' because it first sets
out general reasons for granting self-government rights to
groups, and then argues that different types of group self-definition
will appropriately arise in different regions.
Within the general framework, groups formulate,
demand, and have recognized their culturally specific
and long-standing modes of relating to land and of gov-erning
themselves. These two elements - the special rela-tions
of people to land, and their long-term experience of
self-government - are two central features of claims
made in the name of indigenous people's rights. These
claims take different forms in different regions and call
for particular legal and political solutions. They are not
necessarily based on an unbroken set of genealogical
claims but on other, locally and historically specific ideas
of resources, places, and claims, as in narratives about
land use and movement presented by Australian
Aboriginal peoples (Povinelli 1993). Indeed, it may be
that the very effort to construct a universal legal idea of
'being indigenous', with its Western sense of unbroken
genealogical descent, has made it more difficult to
advance culturally distinct claims about people and place
than would have been the case under a more flexible
notion of self-determination.15
V. The anthropology of self-governance
For anthropologists, this framework would allow us both
to question the suitability of initial residence as a uni-versal
normative horizon, and yet also to support the
demands made in the name of locally-appropriate ideas
of people and place, and study local ways in which
groups and individuals make use of concepts of locality,
community, and indigenousness. The availability and
appeal of transnational rhetorics of 'indigenous peoples'
rights' has made this and other, related terms ideal cul-tural
operators in local contexts of debates about land
rights, political representation, and cultural recognition
(Li, forthcoming).
Let me return to Indonesia for an example of debates
that both draw on the normative and rhetorical value of
locality and self-governance, and yet do so in a way that
points up the weaknesses of 'indigenous peoples' as a
universal analytical framework. In different parts of
Indonesia, groups have begun to assert claims to repre-sent
a specific masyarakat adat, a phrase that means
'adat community' but more exactly 'people who live
according to adat local social norms and legal
processes. A recently created Aliansi Masyarakat Adat
Nusantara (Alliance of Adat Communities in the
Archipelago) is lobbying the national parliament for
greater self-determination by such adat communities.
One delegate put the alliance's claims in terms resem-bling
those used by Kymlicka: 'Long before the state
existed, adat communities in the archipelago already had
succeeded in creating a way of life; the state must respect
the sovereignty of the adat communities' (Kompas, 22
March 1999).16
The concept of 'adat community' has provided a
source of legitimacy for groups seeking to act in the name
of society against the state. Their claims may amount to
a recall petition, as when in West Kalimantan three such
organizations, claiming to represent Malays, Dayaks, and
Chinese, 'the majority of residents' in the province, sent
a petition to the regional parliament asking for the dis-missal
of the Governor. The three groups said they acted
in the name of 'the people of West Kalimantan' and
called their statement a 'no-confidence motion' (mosi tak
percaya), in other words, as if they were a shadow par-liament
(Kompas, 14 June 2000).
The legitimacy claimed by these and other groups is
based on the ongoing regulation of their social life by
adat norms. The norms in question might concern mar-riage
and family life, resolving disputes, or regulating the
use of natural resources. Different ideas of community
are highlighted in particular contexts, and they often
involve quite complex mixes of ethnicity, land, and
social norms. For example, in northern and eastern
Sumatra, rival groups claim to represent ethnic Malays in
land disputes. One group defines itself as the 'adat com-munity
of Deli', referring to a place rather than to eth-nicity:
in this case, the region defined by the Malay
sultanate of Deli. The group's spokesman recently pro-claimed
that 'anyone, as long as he/she lives on Deli soil,
is included in the Deli adat community', and indeed the
group has Javanese, Bataks, and Malays on its rosters
(Forum Keadilan, 18 June 2000). Its major struggle is to
regain control of communal (hak ulayat) land currently
controlled by a private company, and its broad self-defi-nition
and focus on residence fits its project. Another
group seeks to position itself as the representative of a
broader collection of Malay communities, with the
impending devolution of power to the regions (and its
own potential political role) in mind. This group's
spokesman defines its wider scope in terms of 'Malay
adat and culture' throughout eastern and northern
Sumatra, but also highlights the fashion in which Malays
have married with other groups and yet preserved Malay
norms, allowing for a definition of adat community that
AmselleJ,. -L.1 996.V ersu n
multiculturalifsrmane ?ais.
ParisA: ubier.
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ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 16 No 4, August 2000 15

6. could also take in people of other ethnic origin (Kompas,
13June2000).17
Questions of group self-definition are also raised with
respect to debates about representation of groups in the
broader political community. In 1999, for example, the
Majelis Adat Dayak Kalimantan Barat (Dayak Adat
Council of West Kalimantan) proposed that one of its
leaders, Drs A.R. Mecer, be selected as a representative
of the Dayaks to the national 'superparliament,' the
MPR, in the category of 'group delegate' from an ethnic
minority. But this very idea of an 'ethnic minority' grated
on others' ears: two other Dayak leaders - one a Council
officer, the other described as an 'informal leader' (tokoh
masyarakat) argued that Dayaks should not be repre-sented
as 'ethnic minorities', both because they are the
majority in Kalimantan, and because they should focus
on controlling local resources and not serving in national
forums (Kompas, 9 August 1999).
Representation in another sense, that of who speaks for
whom, is also raised by these public discussions. Local
discussions often originate in forums hosted by
Indonesian NGOs, who subsequently make it possible for
the statements of a particular individual to circulate
worldwide as representative opinions of an ethnic group.
For example, the Drs A.R. Mecer mentioned above wrote
an on-line article in November 1999 to the effect that 'the
Dayak adat community' demanded that a federal system
be put into place for Indonesia. His article was posted on
a 'civil society discussion' website run by PACT (Private
Agencies Cooperating Together), which is headquartered
in Washington, D.C., funded by USAID, and involved in
civil society, HIV/AIDS, and civil-military dialogue
projects. The article was then emailed by the site's editor
to the co-ordinator of a free Indonesianist mailing list
headquartered in Maryland, U.S.A., and in that way
ended up on the computer screens of many Indonesians
and Indonesianists throughout the world as well as in
Indonesia.18 Thus, an international NGO set of networks
creates Dayak 'public opinion' about itself: about what
kind of a group, or community, has emerged or ought to
emerge in West Kalimantan, and about what its relation-ship
to the broader national community ought to be.
These contemporary Indonesian political self-concep-tions
are phrased in terms of durable social norms, land
rights recognized by Indonesian law (hak ulayat), and the
importance of regions in the contemporary climate
favouring more otonomi. Each is feeling its way toward a
balance among ethnicity, language, customs, land-use,
and regional identity as a basis for its self-definition that
would also allow negotiated relationships across regions.
Minority status vis-?-vis the nation as a whole is not
highlighted - Javanese also have their adat - nor are
claims to be 'indigenous people' : neither pribumi nor asli
are key terms in this discourse (although they are some-times
used). Analysing these developments in terms of
'indigenous peoples' would both miss the key terms of
local significance and, if it were part of policy interven-tions,
skew the debates in a particularly ethnically-deter-mined
direction that, I would argue, would be highly
unfavorable for a peaceful transition towards a decentral-ized
Indonesia.
Something like the analytical framework suggested
here offers a universalistic normative framework in
which considerations of equality and self-governance
serve as key values. It would then include the myriad
ideas of locality, groupness, and relations of regions to
centres that radically differ across the world. It would
refrain from granting a universal legal privilege to the
concept of 'indigenous peoples', but recognize that in
certain regions and cases that concept has been, and pre-sumably
will continue to be, the most appropriate one for
purposes of analysis and political struggle.19 D
NEW BOOK FROM IWGIA
INTERNATIONAL WORK GROUP FOR INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS
THE INDIGENOUS WORLD 1999-2000
With contributions from indigenous and non-indigenous scholars and activists
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the Pacific and the Americas, with a special focus on indigenous women;
? presents reports on the work of the Open-Ended Working Group on the UN
Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, on the process of the
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and on the Organisation of American States' Working Group on the
Proposed Inter-American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
432 pages
Price: USS 20.00 + postage
16 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 16 No 4, August 2000
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andc ustomarlayw i n Mexico.
Law& S ocietyR eview2 9 (2),
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