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Dark matter: Toward a political economy of indigenous rights and aspirational politics

Critique of Anthropology 2016, Vol. 36(4) 439–457 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308275X15619017 coa.sagepub.com

Mark Goodale University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Abstract This article shines a critical light on a trend in anthropology that has both mirrored, and, not inconsequentially, shaped, a broader preoccupation with rights-making and rightsclaiming as the foundational strategies behind what Karen Engle called the ‘‘elusive promise of indigenous development.’’ The article uses recent ethnographies of legal implementation and state-capital appropriation to think more generally about the history of indigenous rights in relation to what Tania Li has aptly described as the ‘‘dynamic specificity’’ of global capitalism. The article concludes by arguing for the development of an ethnographic political economy of indigenous rights and aspirational politics that reflects an analytical shift from what James Scott called the ‘‘symbolic balance of power’’ to questions of redistribution, state-capital interdependence, and the cooptation of indigenous rights as a new form of capital accumulation. Keywords Indigenous rights, anthropology, capitalism, land-grabbing, political economy, politics of recognition, politics of redistribution

Instead of simply endorsing or rejecting all of identity politics simpliciter, we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a critical theory of recognition, one that identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality. (Nancy Fraser)

Corresponding author: Mark Goodale, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Culturelle et Sociale, University of Lausanne, Lausanne 1015, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]

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This article is part critical discussion of a set of recent case studies on the intersections between the politics of indigeneity and the political economy of land rights and part provocation. The first of these two will become clear presently and what follows will develop a set of arguments about the limitations of indigenous rights mobilization in the face of what I will call accumulation by juridification. But these arguments are also meant in part as a challenge to a trend in scholarship that has both mirrored, and, not inconsequentially, shaped, a broader preoccupation with rights-making and rights-claiming as the foundational strategies behind the ‘‘elusive promise of indigenous development’’ (Engle, 2010). Writing in 1995, Nancy Fraser foresaw the problem and tried to offer an alternative. As she put it then, [t]he ‘‘struggle for recognition’’ is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict in the late twentieth century. . . Cultural domination supplants exploitation as the fundamental injustice. And cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle. (1995: 68)

Fraser’s proposition to ‘‘finesse the dilemma’’ that both recognition and redistribution were essential to any lasting vision of justice was to argue for a synthesis of redistributive economics and what she described as ‘‘deconstructive cultural politics’’ (92). However, as we will see, on the one hand, what Fraser called the ‘‘struggle for recognition’’ evolved and deepened over the intervening two decades and this form of political conflict became the basis for indigenous rights mobilization from the early 1990s to the present. But, on the other hand, the struggle for redistribution did not evolve with the struggle for recognition (as Fraser suggested). Instead, the ‘‘deconstructive cultural politics’’ that was so essential to her framework became a mode a reconstructive cultural politics that depended upon essentialized accounts of indigeneity that underwrote the expansion of land appropriation and the further alienation of indigenous peoples from modes of production that could not be readily assimilated into national programs of neoliberal sustainable development. The result is that what Fraser called ‘‘political-economic differentiation’’ (78), that is, the means through which structures of exploitation are traced critically back to the relations of production that produce and perpetuate them, was absorbed in practice into dominant forms of ‘‘cultural-valuational differentiation’’ (79) – including the struggle for indigenous rights. In this sense, the ‘‘promise of indigenous development’’ based in ‘‘rights talk’’ (Glendon, 1991) and the struggle for legal recognition has proven to be not so much ‘‘elusive’’ as misdirected. And if Richard A. Wilson is correct, and rights talk has become the ‘‘only legitimate language’’ (2001: 1) of resistance, political mobilization, and social change, then the dilemma that Fraser described in 1995 has now morphed into something more ominous. It will be the task of this article to describe the implications of this transformation in part as they are playing out within ongoing conflicts over land and identity in a selection of ethnographic and comparative case studies. In the next section, I briefly examine the history of indigenous rights politics and its relationship to policies of national development. As I will argue, the use of

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international law to regulate and shape certain forms of indigenous rights mobilization within broader labor markets was not an aberration. Rather, the relationship between indigenous rights and the promotion of forms of labor and land ownership that were consistent with the logic of capitalism was hardwired into international law from the beginning. Following this, I turn to a selection of recent case studies on land rights and identity conflicts. I examine these accounts for signs of ‘‘dark matter’’: the ineluctable, constant, and veiled presence of transnational (primarily extractive) capital working not against, but with, policies of indigenous rights. That the shaping, even defining, influence of the dark matter must be teased out from what are more often than not vague allusions to ‘‘resource issues’’ or ‘‘economic pressures’’ says much about both the sidelining of political economy within contemporary anthropology and the urgent need to reorient our analytical priorities going forward. I then return to the question of intellectual history and offer a re-reading of the influence of James Scott’s seminal study of the way peasants in rural Malaysia created ‘‘weapons of the weak’’ out of everyday forms of social life. I will argue that Scott’s focus on local political economies was never meant to exclude a critical account of the way the state and capital come to form assemblages – political, legal, and, as always, economic – that create downward pressure on local communities. When resistance to this pressure is absorbed into national legislation intended to protect indigenous communities and even advance their interests, the possibilities for creative slippage are radically altered. In the final section, I bring the preceding intellectual histories and discussion of the case studies together to argue for the development of an ethnographic political economy of indigenous rights and aspirational politics that reflects an analytical shift from what Scott called the ‘‘symbolic balance of power’’ to questions of redistribution, state-capital interdependence, and the cooptation of indigenous rights as a new form of capital accumulation.

The evolution of a hyper-politics machine In his 1990 study of development in Lesotho (based on fieldwork in 1982 and 1983), James Ferguson argued that it was of critical importance to reveal the instrumental effects of development projects that involved networks of international and transnational agencies, the state, and regional and local actors. As he described it (1990: 256), one of these instrumental effects was to reduce deeply entrenched structures of poverty to ‘‘technical problems’’ that could be solved through the application of solutions devised by coteries of technocratic experts. The result was that the actual nature of problems that were essentially political economic was buried within discourses of agricultural project management, technocratic governmentality, and quantitative indicators. Ferguson famously called this conversion process the ‘‘anti-politics machine’’ and one of its virtues as an analytical frame was to draw attention to the ways in which patterns of inequality within relations of production can be reinforced when the logic of political confrontation becomes discursively untenable.

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The implication of Ferguson’s critique is that the broader relations of production that depend on exploitative forms of land usage and labor mobilization at the local level can only be both uncovered and destabilized when they are seen as they really are: political problems that demand political solutions. But with the emergence of indigenous rights mobilization as a multiscalar form of contentious politics, something went astray. Rather than opening new avenues to undermine the political-economic scaffolding that supports what Ferguson (2006) would later describe as the ‘‘neoliberal world order,’’ the evolution of indigenous rights strategies has in fact made such fundamental challenges less likely. This is precisely because longstanding struggles over land, self-determination, and even cultural legitimacy have become intensely politicized in ways that constrain, not enable, the possibility of direct action that would challenge the political-economic basis of social conflicts. Thus, indigenous rights mobilization has had as little transformative impact on the underlying political-economic conditions that perpetuate vulnerability as development projects, but for a different, if not quite opposite, reason. As we will see more fully below, national indigenous rights enforcement sets in motion a particular chain of events that brings together both collective identity formation and claims-making within the political and legal spheres of the state. The result is that peoples and communities under threat are both encouraged – indeed, in most cases, required – to pursue justice and forms of (collective) self-preservation by running on the political and bureaucratic treadmills that are meant to keep claimants in constant motion but going nowhere. In this way, indigenous rights mobilization has become a hyper-politics machine that offers symbolic-political solutions to political-economic problems. But how did this happen? And was this ‘‘instrumental effect’’ anticipated by the very structure of indigenous rights itself? It is significant, in this respect, that indigenous rights have been closely associated with – even derived from – International Labor Organization (ILO) initiatives. Although it is not possible to pursue this line of analysis fully here, several important things about this historical legacy merit attention. First, as Guy Standing has shown (2008), the ILO – although it has passed through several iterations since its founding in 1919 – has always been an international organization whose primary purpose is to ‘‘shape regulated. . . labor markets’’ (355) and ameliorate the worst effects of labor relations for workers around the world. However, the regulation of labor markets takes place through the ILO in order to ensure the smoother and more sustainable functioning of what another scholar of the ILO calls the ‘‘global capitalist state’’ (Richards, 2004: 105). In its starkest moments of action and purpose, the programs of the ILO are designed as a ‘‘means of locking in the international division of labor. . . to the advantage of the affluent capitalist countries’’ (Standing, 2008: 357).1 Thus it was that ILO Convention 107 (1957), which is the beginning of indigenous rights within the international system, was conceived of as a progressive mechanism for protecting ‘‘indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations’’ by preparing them for entry into national capitalist labor markets – both existing and those yet to come. And while the convention was later disavowed by groups who

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organized in terms of what was a novel and even perplexing new category of identity (Niezen, 2003) and critiqued by scholars for the assimilationism of the convention (Allen and Xanthaki, 2011; Engle, 2010; Pulitano, 2012), this collective opposition in many ways missed the mark. Cultural heritage, language, ‘‘spiritual development’’ – all of these markers of identity were superstructural distractions from the basic intent of the convention, which was to encourage states to open capitalist labor markets to ‘‘indigenous’’ people so that they could more freely exercise (individually, not collectively) ‘‘the right to pursue. . . their material wellbeing,’’ as the convention’s Preamble puts it. Despite the fact that only 27 countries eventually ratified ILO 107, it remained the basis of indigenous rights within international law until 1989, when it was revised through a new convention, 169. As a simple matter of international legal enforcement, ILO 169 fared even worse than 107, since to-date only 22 countries have ratified it, almost all of them in Latin America.2 But despite the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN-DRIP) in 2007, ILO conventions 107 and 169 remain the legal and political basis for indigenous rights. The language of 169 is quite different in many respects than that of 107. For example, the Preamble calls ‘‘attention to the distinctive contributions of indigenous and tribal peoples to the cultural diversity and social and ecological harmony of humankind and to international co-operation and understanding’’; the right to apply customary law within communities is recognized (in Art. 9, but qualified by the dictates of national and international law); and, perhaps most importantly, the doctrine of ‘‘free, prior, and informed consent’’ (FPIC) gives indigenous peoples the right to be consulted ‘‘through appropriate procedures’’ (Art. 6) on ‘‘plans and programmes for national and regional development which may affect them directly’’ (Art. 7). However, it is clear in the language of the convention, in the debates over its passage, and, most importantly, in the ways in which it is has been implemented in practice, that ILO 169 was never intended to become a mechanism through which indigenous peoples could challenge the underlying political-economic structures of the countries of which they were ambiguously citizens.3 To understand how ILO 169 can be widely seen as both a major advance over 107, and yet still serve the essential purpose to ‘‘shape regulated. . . labor markets’’ in order to reinforce the ‘‘global capitalist state,’’ it is necessary to distinguish between two forms of assimilationism. By establishing the principle that indigenous identity and cultural practices should be protected and that indigenous peoples should not be forced to assimilate their identities to the majority, ILO 169 represents a radical break from 107. But in Parts II and III of 169, the articles that cover land relations and ‘‘recruitment and conditions of employment,’’ another, more basic, form of assimilation is both anticipated and encouraged. At the same time that the ‘‘spiritual values of the peoples concerned [in] their relationship with. . . lands or territories’’ (Art. 13) shall be respected, the convention also recognizes the fundamental right of the state to explore and exploit mineral or sub-surface resources (either on its own or through private contractors) on indigenous lands (Art. 15); to oversee and

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regulate land conflicts in indigenous communities (Art. 14); to forcibly relocate indigenous peoples (after FPIC and, in certain cases, with a duty to compensate, Art. 16); to establish procedures through which indigenous people can ‘‘alienate their lands or otherwise transmit their rights outside their own community’’ (Art. 17); and to establish the ‘‘means required to promote the development of the lands which [indigenous] peoples already possess’’ (Art. 19). Regarding ‘‘recruitment and conditions of employment,’’ Art. 20 sets out procedures through which indigenous peoples are encouraged to enter national (necessarily capitalist) labor markets with all the rights and protections that other workers should have, including equal pay for equal work, occupational safety, and the ability to unionize. Thus, while ILO 169 recognizes and even celebrates the right of indigenous peoples to ‘‘cultural-valuational differentiation,’’ to return to Fraser, it also – in keeping with the overarching mission of the ILO itself – establishes the means through which indigenous peoples will eventually be assimilated to the logic of capitalism. To this point, the analysis has skirted the problem of indigeneity itself, in part because, as we will see in the next section, the construction of categories of identity both in terms of, and in contrast to, indigeneity, is inseparable from the legal and political regimes that are put into place to ensure that cultural-valuational differentiation serves the broader purpose of labor and land market regulation. Nevertheless, as scholars like Niezen (2003) and Li (2010) have shown, indigenous identity formation is never an either/or proposition. That is, collective identity is neither imposed fully by the state, but nor does it emerge organically from below as a tool of resistance or collective expression. Rather, as Li argues, like other categories of identity, ‘‘indigenous’’ should be seen as a mechanism of social positioning, one that is embedded in what Baird (2013: 272) calls ‘‘particular fields of contingent power.’’ But as Li also reminds us, in her discussion of the ‘‘tribal slot’’ in Indonesia, these fields of power are not random; the vectors that shape them can be traced back to their sources. Before moving to the case studies, one final distinction should be drawn. I have argued that indigenous rights within international law are structured in terms of two forms of assimilation, one symbolic-cultural, the other political-economic. I have further argued that ILO 169 represents a major shift from the earlier 107 because, after decades of advocacy and critique, the 1989 convention rejected the principle of symbolic-cultural assimilation in favor of cultural-valuational differentiation. At the same time, however, neither ILO 107 nor 169 accomplishs the more basic task of establishing a framework through which indigenous peoples – understood very much in the contested plural – can challenge their historical political-economic marginalization because both conventions are tightly bound up with the broader regulation of land and labor markets within national – and, eventually, regional and global – capitalist economies that feed on land-grabbing, cheap labor, and the reduction of risk to capital. But how, it might be asked, does this dual assimilationism play out for indigenous rights mobilization in countries that have not ratified particularly ILO 169?

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In some countries that have eventually adopted a different form of national indigenous rights legislation, or have revised existing land law (often under pressure from transnational NGOs), what can result is a legal and political framework that in many ways is truer to its purposes: the sweeping markers of culturalvaluational differentiation for which ILO 169 is celebrated are decentered; and the intent to legitimate land appropriation and accelerate the movement of indigenous peoples into regional and national labor markets stands out both in the body of law and in the consequences of its implementation.

Dark matter As the introduction to a special forum of the Journal of Peasant Studies explained: the convergence of global crises in food, energy, finance, and the environment has driven a dramatic reevaluation in landownership. Powerful transnational and national economic actors from corporations to national governments and private equity funds have searched for ‘‘empty’’ land often in distant countries that can serve as sites for fuel and food production in the event of future price spikes. This is occurring globally, but there is a clear North–South dynamic that echoes the land grabs that underwrote both colonialism and imperialism. (Borras et al., 2011: 209)

The editors go on to describe a landmark 2010 World Bank study of the rapidly expanding global transfer of land from indigenous and peasant peoples to public and private actors that make up what Li has recently called the ‘‘global land investment assemblage’’ (2014a: 593).4 As they put it, although the scope of the crisis is now well understood at a macrolevel, what is missing are answers to the ‘‘fundamentally important questions of who wins, who loses and why, and what are the social, political, and ecological drivers and consequences’’ (Borras et al., 2011: 210) of the massive commodification and transference of land in the Global South to ‘‘[p]owerful transnational and national economic actors’’ (2011: 209, 210; emphasis in original).5 A cross-section of recent case studies suggest that when ‘‘indigenous’’ populations and the lands they control or utilize come within the commoditizing gaze of transnational capital, resources that are paradoxically both ‘‘irreducibly social’’ and ‘‘material,’’ as Li argues (2014a: 589; quoting Bridge, 2009), are neither protected nor put out of reach through the implementation of national indigenous rights legislation.6 Rather, in practice, state-capitalist enforcement regimes are created that both feed on what Li (2014a: 598) calls the ‘‘fuzziness’’ of the legal regulation of land markets and take advantage of the fact that communal and collective titling facilitates accumulation because it rationalizes the process by offering to investors what Borras and Franco (2010) describe as a ‘‘one-stopshop.’’ That is, the process of collective titling gives investors the ability to more easily negotiate over vast tracts of land that were previously subject to many competing cultural and historical claims. Although national indigenous and communal rights programs have emerged, as I have argued, in relation to a broader

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political economy in which land embodies merely one category of relations of production among others, there is no question that land is a ‘‘resource assemblage’’ (Li, 2014a: 590) that is central to understanding indigenous rights mobilization as a new mechanism for capitalist accumulation. We begin with Irina Wenk’s analysis of land titling conflicts in Mindanao, the Philippines. The Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997 (IPRA), as Wenk explains, was ‘‘unprecedented in the modern legal history of Southeast Asia’’ (2014: 3). As we have seen (see Note 2, above), no Southeast Asian country is a state party to either ILO 107 or 169, and yet IPRA both recognized ‘‘Indigenous Cultural Communities/Indigenous Peoples’’ and established a complicated bureaucratic regime that was meant to ‘‘protect and promote’’ their collective rights. Wenk focuses on the provisions of IPRA that give communities the right to apply for collective land titles on the basis of ‘‘ancestral domain.’’ As she puts it, the ‘‘dimension of the land titling scheme. . . is staggering: it affects between 6.4 and 10 million hectares’’ that cover as much as ‘‘80 percent of the Philippines’ remaining natural resources’’ (5). Up to 2010, 156 collective titles over ancestral domain had been awarded. But as she shows, through ethnographic fieldwork among the Matigsalog of the central Mindanao uplands in the southern Philippines, the granting of collective land titles served to rationalize the likelihood of accumulation of land by investors for particularly, but not exclusively, extractive industries. Like all claimants under IPRA, the Matigsalog, who obtained the 10th ancestral land title in the country in 2003, were required to submit themselves to a carefully calculated process of governmentality called ‘‘delineation’’ that culminates in an ‘‘Ancestral Domain Sustainable Development and Protection Plan’’ (ADSDPP). The problem, according to Wenk, and the revelation with the most far-reaching implications for my purposes, is the fact that ‘‘delineation’’ requires communities to exhaustively materialize their ‘‘ancestral domain’’ in precisely those ways that make what results most attractive to capitalist investors, who are more than willing to pursue accumulation under the guise of ‘‘sustainable development and protection.’’7 Indeed, if the exploitation of commoditized land in the Global South is an inherently ‘‘risky business’’ for transnational capital, as Li (2015) has argued, then the mechanisms of delineation and the resulting ADSDPP under IPRA create a ‘‘resource assemblage’’ that goes a long way toward reducing that risk.8 As Esther Leemann argues, in her study of the implementation of the 2001 Land Law of Cambodia, despite significant cultural and historical differences with the Philippines, particularly, as she emphasizes, in the enduring influence of what she calls ‘‘neo-patrimonial governance,’’ the results of indigenous rights mobilization in Cambodia have likewise proven to be a bonanza to transnational capital, in this case in the form of what Leemann describes as ‘‘large-scale industrial agriculture’’ (2014: 5).9 Her research provides an important ethnographic and longitudinal perspective on the problem. When she first began her fieldwork in Boursa Commume among the Bunong people in 2011, the villagers (and their transnational donor allies) were optimistic about the ability of the land titling process under the 2001

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law to protect their lands from encroachment and dispossession by private rubber plantations. But by 2013, during a second period of ethnographic research, the situation in the commune had changed considerably. The commune’s land claim had disappeared into a governance process that Leemann describes as a ‘‘tedious, costly, red tape nightmare’’ (2). As with IPRA’s process of ‘‘delineation,’’ the 2001 Cambodian Land Law requires several types of materialization, each of which serves as a form of governmentality that rationalizes the potential for accumulation by legalized dispossession. Communities must self-identify and in most cases newly self-constitute (including establishing authority structures that did not otherwise exist) in order to receive formal verification from a government department. After verification, communities must register land titles with another ministry, but only after having submitted community by-laws to the Ministry of the Interior and having demarcated and mapped their territory. As Leemann explains, registration is done in light of several ‘‘absurd and arbitrary limit[s],’’ including the fact that a 2009 revision to the land law sets a limit of only seven hectares of (potentially problematic) spirit forests and burial grounds that can be officially demarcated. At the same time that one part of the Cambodian land law was suffering a slow death by administrative bureaucracy, another provision of the 2001 Land Law was moving forward expeditiously through the ‘‘rapid advance’’ of Economic Land Concessions (ELCs). As Leemann explains, although only eight indigenous communities had received collective land titles in the 12 years since the land law’s passage, during that same time, more than 2 million hectares of Cambodian territory had been transferred to a group of 227 agro-industrial companies. Leemann describes a complicated assemblage of regional, national, and transnational actors who have used the ELC provision of the land law to commodify large swaths of the Cambodian countryside. In this way, Leemann’s ethnography of what she calls the ‘‘dramatic disconnect between policy-making at the international level and its implementation’’ (2014: 1) is also a valuable reminder of the importance of ‘‘attend[ing] to the dispossessory and accumulative practices of ‘indigenous’ elites and ‘customary’ authorities, whose position [is] strengthened’’ (Li, 2010: 400) because of this supposed ‘‘disconnect’’ (see also Rata, 2011, on the development of ‘‘neotribal capitalism’’). However, as I have argued, there is good reason to believe that the dispossessory and accumulative practices that are associated with the implementation of indigenous rights – in Southeast Asia and elsewhere – are not an unintended consequence or a deviation from international indigenous rights law. Rather, they are the political-economic substance – a form of capitalist assimilation – that goes hand in hand with the ‘‘struggle for recognition.’’ Finally, in a recent comparative study of the ability of the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to shape the course of local land conflicts in Latin America and New Zealand, Fleur Adcock (2014) found that the influence of this high profile institution must be divided into two categories. In the first, the concerted pressure and international visibility that the Special Rapporteur brought to particular struggles did result in changes that Adcock describes as ‘‘soft’’

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markers of justice. For example, national governments trumpeted the fact that they revised national laws to protect cultural heritage, promote bilingual education, and even take up the possibility of reparations for past harms. But despite bringing lengthy attention and focused advocacy to particular conflicts, the Special Rapporteur has not been able to facilitate ‘‘hard’’ markers of indigenous rights promotion, like extensive land redistribution or territorial self-determination. As Adcock shows, in each case, such hard markers were blocked when they put at risk carefully constructed resource assemblages that brought together the financial and political interests of extractive conglomerates, political and military elites, and, increasingly, local ‘‘micro-capitalists’’ (Davis, 2006, quoted in Li, 2010; see also Medina, 2014 for a similar account from Belize). In a sense, this is where the ethnographic trail grows structurally cold. Each of these studies gives voice to local people taken in by the ‘‘elusive promise of indigenous development,’’ a kind of betrayal that is merely a contemporary episode in a much longer history of political-economic assimilation and structural violence. A broader historical context demonstrates that contemporary commodification and accumulation in terms of indigenous rights merely redefine and extend practices that have their roots in the colonial period (see, e.g. Li, 2007, 2014b). But despite the invaluable focus on what is irreducible within these local histories, and the clear ethnographic portraits of newly empowered local elites, regional political administrators, and others who constitute what Li (2010: 400) has called the ‘‘dynamic specificity’’ of capitalism in practice, nevertheless, something is missing. Behind the ratification and implementation of the 1997 IPRA, the effects of the 2001 Land Law of Cambodia, and the inability of the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to promote ‘‘hard’’ markers of justice like redistribution and self-determination is the subtle but oppressive influence of state-capitalist assemblages comprising government ministries, multinational extractive industries, national military, political, and ethnic elites, and, perhaps unwittingly, transnational NGOs and members of the international donor community (e.g. UNDP and various national development agencies). And yet the shaping role of these assemblages cannot be measured directly – it must be teased out within the language of national indigenous rights legislation and also, more importantly, tracked through the effects of this legislation in practice. On the one hand, the symbolic-political rhetoric that accompanies supposed ‘‘triumphs’’ for indigenous peoples through national law emphasizes all those markers of cultural distinctiveness that have made instruments like ILO 169 and the more recent UN-DRIP the benchmarks for indigenous rights mobilization worldwide. But on the other hand, the implementation of these national indigenous rights reforms often evolves into a broader strategy to rationalize capitalist accumulation by a range of means – legalized dispossession, long-term land concessions, forced participation in public–private joint ventures (as in Malaysia, see Cooke et al., 2011), the invention of ancestral domains that make ‘‘one-stop shopping’’ possible, and so on. If this is true, then at least two parts of the question with

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which I began this section can be, and have been, answered. But if we have a good idea now of who wins and who loses, there remains the third question – why? I suggest that the movement of this pendulum – swinging from the politics of recognition to the rationalization of capitalist accumulation through cultural-valuational differentiation – is not an aberration but is rather structural, revealing the omnipresence of what might be thought of as ‘‘dark matter.’’ Much like the concept of dark matter in astronomy, in which the existence of the majority of matter in the universe must be inferred through its shaping effects on what can be observed, so too with the state-capitalist assemblages that have developed a variety of means to adapt to different forms of indigenous rights mobilization in different countries to similar results.

Weapons of the juridified In this and the final section, I offer some preliminary thoughts – both theoretical and methodological – for how anthropologists of indigenous rights and aspirational politics might reposition themselves in order to begin to bring the dark matter into sharper focus. In his 1985 masterwork, James Scott revealed how close attention to the groundedness of power problematizes any number of key concepts, including hegemony, class consciousness, ideology, and, most importantly, resistance. What results is a finely grained panorama of what he calls the ‘‘landscapes of resistance’’ on which people lived their lives between 1978 and 1980 in the pseudonymous Malaysian village of Sedaka. He argued that although the broader political economy that framed everyday life in Sedaka was one in which ‘‘the rich have gotten richer and the poor have remained poor or grown poorer’’ (1985: xvii), nevertheless, he found it an important methodological move to limit his unit of analysis to what he called ‘‘local class relations’’ (1985: xix). This did not mean that he was dismissive of the broader political economy. Indeed, as he puts it, the ‘‘economic origins of the petty class relations examined [in the book]. . . might easily be traced all the way to the board rooms of New York City and Tokyo’’ (xix). It was rather that the dominant critical orientation of the time took these broader ‘‘economic origins’’ for granted in ways that led to a kind of top-down reductionism in which the ‘‘dynamic specificity’’ of capitalist relations of production was collapsed into abstract political-economic categories. What Scott did through his ethnography of power and resistance in Sedaka was to unpack these categories in ways that enlarged the understanding of how those within the broader capitalist system who ‘‘remained poor or [had] grown poorer’’ responded to this steady process of immiseration. Thus, Weapons of the Weak reveals what happens after the ‘‘coup de grace’’ (xvii), after the imposition of an earlier project justified by the ‘‘will to improve’’ (Li, 2007) – in this case, the green revolution and the coming of the combine-harvester – had ‘‘eliminated two-thirds of the wage-earning opportunities for smallholders and landless laborers’’ in the area (xvii). But two things happened for my purposes that complicate the applicability of Scott’s signal ethnography for understanding the relationship between indigenous

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rights mobilization and late capitalist accumulation – whether in Southeast Asia, or elsewhere. The first is that Scott’s reorientation was a response to a set of thenprevailing critical assumptions that, while true (as he acknowledged), tended to elide the complexity of everyday life. In this way, Scott’s work can be taken as an argument for the value of knowing what Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) called the ‘‘hold that life has’’ – in this case, the hold that life has for villagers at the ‘‘capillary ends’’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000) of a global political economic system. Because they are not able to do anything about this broader system, they turn inward, toward each other, and outward, but only on a small scale, and engage in what Scott describes as ‘‘foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on,’’ that is, ‘‘commonplace forms of resistance. . . [that] the peasantry has historically [used] to defend its interests against both conservative and progressive orders’’ (xvi). And yet, particularly after the end of the Cold War, many ethnographers of the capillary ends of global capitalism lost track of the very assumptions about ‘‘economic origins’’ that could be ‘‘traced all the way to. . . board rooms’’ that made Scott’s corrective so necessary in the first place. It is not possible to examine here the intellectual histories that led to what might be thought of as a kind of misreading of the move that Scott made in 1985. But one would be right to point to the challenge to political economy by theoretical preoccupations that were impatient with the focus on what Eric Wolf called the ‘‘totality of interconnected processes’’ (1982: 3) and, even more consequential, dismissive of the materiality of production – and relations of production – that constituted the warp and woof of these interconnected processes. However, more important for my purposes here was the fact that with the coming of indigenous rights mobilization, the very nature of resistance underwent a transformation. As Scott’s study reveals, when ‘‘local class relations’’ play out in the face of a hostile and dismissive state, resistance must take forms that can only work to shift what he called the ‘‘symbolic balance of power,’’ since the state is both committed to existing political-economic networks and willing to use force if necessary to preserve them. This is why villagers in Sedaka had no choice but to engage in oppositional and symbolic strategies like ‘‘calculated conformity,’’ ‘‘imposed mutuality,’’ and ‘‘resistance that covers its tracks.’’ But with the emergence of indigenous rights in the early 1990s, the relationship between vulnerable populations and the state changed in countries in which this new form of mobilization had purchase. Indigenous rights – whether in the orthodox form of ILO 169 or in various derivations, as we have seen in the case studies from Southeast Asia – represent a shift in the logic of empowerment. Indigenous rights require the state to both recognize its fundamental role to address the historical claims of vulnerable populations and to establish bureaucratic regimes to bring diverse legacies of injustice and exploitation within its control. In this way, the state becomes an indispensable ally for populations whose exploitation is tightly bound up with the state’s position in a broader political economy. At the same time, indigenous rights legislation is not only, or primarily, technocratic. It also embodies

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a prevailing spirit of ‘‘transformative utopianism’’ (Moyn, 2010: 120). Thus, the political and cultural aspirations of indigenous peoples and other marginalized collectivities are absorbed – or, we might say, rationalized – within the four corners of national indigenous rights documents. As a result, populations that historically occupied a tenuous position within the state-capital assemblages that put downward pressure on communities and territory found themselves empowered – that is, given new weapons with which to both resist and actively engage. But as we have seen, these weapons of the juridified do not necessarily enlarge in practice the range of effective strategies for the populations that are encouraged to use them. Indeed, as we have also seen, the juridification of indigenous mobilization and self-determination can actually reduce the possibility for the kinds of creative slippages and subversions that have ‘‘historically [been used] to defend. . . interests against both conservative and progressive orders.’’ One extreme result of this transformation is that the process of juridification itself becomes a new form of capitalist accumulation, as we have seen with the implementation of the 2001 land law in Cambodia. At the same time that indigenous peoples in Cambodia were empowered to seek communal titles as a form of state-sanctioned protection against dispossession of their lands, another part of the law made possible the massive transference of these same lands to hundreds of transnational agro-industrial conglomerates. Even at a broader level, as Stuart Kirsch (2012) has argued, what he calls the ‘‘juridification of indigenous politics’’ has had mixed results. Well beyond the question of the relationship between national indigenous rights legislation and forms of capitalist accumulation, Kirsch examines three quite different conflicts – a legal case in Australia brought by indigenous people from Papua New Guinea against an Australian mining company for massive environmental damage to rivers that flow through their territories; a legal case brought before a US regulatory tribunal for damages caused by US nuclear testing in the Marshal Islands during the 1940s and 1950s; and, finally, the impact in Suriname of a 2009 ruling in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that found the state in violation of its obligation to recognize indigenous land rights under international law (even though Suriname was not a state party to either ILO 107 or 169). What is critical for the analysis here is the way in which Kirsch distinguishes between two kinds of impacts, which can be sorted into what I have called the symbolic-political and the political-economic. For the first, Kirsch’s study shows how the use of international law by indigenous peoples as a form of resistance and empowerment can have a number of positive outcomes. Indigenous ideas and practices can be creatively ‘‘refashioned through [the] engagement with the courts,’’ thereby creating new discursive resources for making political demands (2012: 24); the pressing of indigenous claims in court can lead to the emergence of new legal categories, for example, regarding the principle of subsistence rights; and the use of law by indigenous people can serve to ‘‘unif[y] what might otherwise be disjunctive social positions’’ within complicated and protracted conflicts over land, recognition, and history (38).

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But as a political-economic question, Kirsch’s comparative research reinforces the suggestion that international law – including indigenous rights – is a tool of empowerment that even in the best of cases cannot be used to undermine the structures of economic power that are at the root of these conflicts. Indeed, in the case study that is closest to the ones from Southeast Asia, Kirsch explains that the government of Suriname has completely refused (as of 2011) to implement the findings and recommendations of the Inter-American Commission (39).10 Thus, it might very well be true that indigenous peoples have been able to use law to ‘‘influence jurisprudence,’’ ‘‘drive social movements,’’ engage in a transnational ‘‘horizontal exchange of ideas,’’ and ‘‘enter into intercultural conversations that have the potential to transform all of the participants’’ in a conflict. Nevertheless, the lengthening ethnographic and historical record of ‘‘dramatic disconnect’’ between these symbolic-political accomplishments on the one hand, and continuing political-economic assimilation and exploitation on the other, cries out for a critical reappraisal of the role of international law and the search for alternative strategies through which indigenous peoples can meaningfully reposition themselves within the state-capital assemblages in which they are all-too-often ensnared.11

Conclusion: Toward a political economy of indigenous rights and aspirational politics This article has used selected cases from the recent ethnography of indigenous rights mobilization to revisit the problem of the dynamic interplay between the struggle for cultural recognition and the struggle for political-economic equality – whether through redistribution or otherwise. This interplay is one in which cultural-valuational differentiation is given more or less prominence depending on a number of factors, including the local history of identity politics around indigeneity, whether or not a country is a state party to the major indigenous rights instruments, and the extent to which indigenous people have been able to gain political power. However, what does not vary as widely is the fact that political-economic assimilation and exploitation are not fundamentally challenged by indigenous rights mobilization. As I have argued, the collective ethnographic and historical record over the 26 years since the passage of ILO 169 lends weight to the more troubling conclusion that indigenous rights mobilization within particular countries has actually accelerated capitalist accumulation by bringing the logic of empowerment within the state’s political and legal bureaucracies at the same time that the state pursues policies of ‘‘sustainable development and protection’’ that serve to reduce capital risk. Nevertheless, it should be clear that this is not, by extension, an argument that a better, more earnest, or more authentic practice of indigenous rights promotion would prove more effective in challenging the widespread transference of land and the assimilation of indigenous populations into national and transnational capitalist labor markets. As Tania Li (2010) has argued, in most cases there is no ‘‘communal fix’’ that could counter pervasive commodification, not the least

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because state-capital resource assemblages depend as much on the development of ‘‘capitalism from below’’ as on the management of dispossession from corporate headquarters in places like Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo. And this is to say nothing about the problematic juridification of collective identities themselves, which depends on forms of benevolent orientalism that have proven incapable of grounding enduring processes of structural transformation (see, e.g. Jackson, 1995). Rather, the most direct implication of this intervention is that anthropologists of indigenous rights mobilization in particular should collectively rediscover the ‘‘totality of interconnected processes’’ that give form and substance to what Li called the ‘‘assemblage of disparate elements, practices, and processes’’ (2010: 400) that constitute the lived experiences of capitalist relations of production. As she memorably argued, we cannot ‘‘tame’’ the dispossessory and alienating currents of capitalism by ‘‘building walls or wishing [them] away’’ (400). But at the same time, we should not allow ‘‘the very success of the [ethnographic] method [to] lull. . . [us] into a false confidence’’ (Wolf, 1982: 13) that by revealing what is irreducible in these lived experiences we have exhausted what it is that we, as anthropologists, have to contribute. To end, as I began, with Nancy Fraser’s framework of analysis, anthropologists of indigenous rights – and, perhaps, human rights more generally – must resist the tendency to develop critical theories that both mirror and, problematically, legitimate, forms of cultural struggle that have not been ‘‘coherently combined with the social politics of equality.’’ What is needed, instead, is a shift in orientation that moves beyond the logic of recognition and, even more, views its claims and purposes with deep skepticism. What lies beyond, both methodologically and theoretically, is not entirely clear. A cynic might say that symbolic recognition without redistribution is better than political-economic exploitation without symbolic recognition for vulnerable populations on the frontlines of the global crisis that the editors of the Journal of Peasant Studies warned us about in 2011. But I am not so certain that the only choice is to resign ourselves to passing between Scylla and Charybdis. It might be, as Marina Welker (2014) has recently reminded us, that transnational corporations at the center of state-capital resource assemblages in the Global South are not monolithic entities but rather ‘‘unstable collective subjects’’ that present a different face to different constituencies. And yet the trendlines from Cambodia to Belize, from Malaysia to Suriname, are clear enough. Without a more coherent ethnographic and theoretical approach to this political economy, the rest seems to me just a questionable preoccupation with what Razmig Keuchayan (2014) has called (invoking Chomsky) the ‘‘generative grammar’’ of capitalist resilience. Acknowledgements Several colleagues offered critical suggestions on different parts of this article. I would like to thank, in particular, Tania Li and Anne-Christine Tre´mon. However, I am solely responsible for the arguments and points of emphasis. In addition, I would like to thank colleagues at a number of different institutions, where versions of the article were presented during public lectures, including at the Universities of Bern, Basel, and Lucerne, Aarhus University, and the Ećole des hautes e´tudes en sciences sociales in Paris.

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Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1. It is worth noting that Guy Standing is both a well-respected economist and someone who worked for the ILO itself for over 30 years, eventually rising to become the Director of the ILO’s Socio-Economic Security Program. 2. Comparing the ratifications of 107 and 169 reveals an intriguing legal and political history. African countries are more represented among the 107 ratifications than 169, to which only the Central African Republic is a party. And India remains a party to the ‘‘assimilationist’’ 107 but has not ratified 169. According to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, India has by far the largest population of indigenous people of any country in the world, around 120 million (http://www.iwgia.org/regions/ asia/india). This is about three times greater than the entire combined indigenous populations of all of Latin America and the Caribbean (http://www.iwgia.org/regions/latinamerica/indigenous-peoples-in-latin-america). At the same time, no East or Southeast Asian country has ratified either convention. 3. For a more extended discussion of the question of citizenship within international indigenous rights law, see Lightfoot (2013). 4. Citing the World Bank study and other sources, the editors note that upwards of 45 million hectares were absorbed during the 2000s into this global land investment assemblage through what the Bank euphemistically describes as ‘‘agricultural investment’’ (Borras et al., 2011: 209). 5. The concept of the ‘‘Global South’’ is obviously a heuristic – and thus a simplifying – device that allows for the examination of both historical and contemporary patterns of inequality as these have been central to the development of global political economies. However, in this context, it should be emphasized that the trends described in the World Bank study and in the land grab literature also implicate waves of capitalist accumulation involving both state and private companies from the so-called BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. 6. The selection of these case studies from recent professional conferences is meant to both foreground the current state of ethnographic research and to provide a window into the historical moment in global rights promotion after the liminal period of the post-Cold War has ended (Goodale, 2013). 7. Although IPRA prohibits the sale of land covered by an ancestral title, it does not prohibit the granting of long-term leases, which is usually the preferred form of land tenure for extractive industries who are able to secure exclusive access to resources and exploit them well within the term of the lease (which is typically negotiated with just this limit in mind, see Alcoa, 2015). 8. As Wenk explains in detail, the Matigsalog’s ADSDPP is a 430-page document that reflects years of both cultural and geospatial mapping of territory; a description of timber and mineral resources as potential investment opportunities; a finely grained

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analysis of terrain and soil types; and a long section that explains where potential outside investors could best build a ‘‘golf course, a tennis court and a horsefighting arena’’ (13–14). 9. Although, as we have seen, the 1997 IPRA was the first indigenous rights law in Southeast Asia, the geographer Ian Baird makes the point that the 2001 Land Law of Cambodia was the first indigenous rights law in mainland Southeast Asia (2013: 269). 10. For a detailed report on how transnational mining conglomerates like BHP Billiton and Alcoa shape negotiations between the government and indigenous communities in Suriname, see Weitzner (2008). As she puts it, despite the fact that these companies have developed ‘‘corporate social responsibility’’ policies internally, ‘‘these have been disregarded in practice (there was no [environmental impact statement] for the advanced exploration, the communities were left out of the initial [survey] exercise, key reports [were] kept secret even when specifically requested, and to date the companies have not signed protocols with the communities to clarify how they understand and intend to protect the communities’ traditional rights and uphold their right to free, prior and informed consent . . .). Indeed, initial construction-related activities in the villages are already taking place without the villages being consulted, without them knowing or approving final project plans, and even though the government has not issued a permit for exploitation’’ (2008: iv–v). 11. I must leave aside here a discussion of the various ways in which collectivities – indigenous, or otherwise – come to embrace, not resist, the economies of desire that ground contemporary capitalism (see, e.g. Lordon, 2010).

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Author Biography Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including the forthcoming Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU Press, 2017), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009), and Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008). He is currently writing an ethnography of revolution and disenchantment in Bolivia.