WHO ARE THE INDIANS?

Reconceptualizing Indigenous Identity, Resistance, and the

Role of Social Science in Latin America

Les W Field
University of New Hampshire

STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CULTURAL RESILIENCE

IN ETHNIC MINORITIES. By Peter Elsass. (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1992. Pp. 263. $35.00 cloth.)
PORTALS OF POWER: SHAMANISM IN SOUTH AMERICA. Edited by E. Jean
Matteson Langdon and Gerhard Baer. (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1992. Pp. 350. $35.00 cloth.)
'TAMBO: LIFE IN AN ANDEAN VILLAGE. By Julia Meyerson. (Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1990. Pp. 265. $30.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.)
I SPENT MY LIFE IN THE MINES: THE STORY OF JUAN ROJAS, BOLIVIAN TIN
MINER. By June Nash. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Pp. 390. $49.00 cloth, $18.50 paper.)
DOMINATION AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE: ALITHORITY AND POWER AMONG
AN ANDEAN PEOPLE. By Roger Neil Rasnake. (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1988. Pp. 321. $39.95 cloth.)
NATION-STATES AND INDIANS IN LATIN AMERICA. Edited by Greg Urban
and Joel Sherzer. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Pp. 355. $3Z50
cloth, $14.95 paper.)

Social science analysis and representation of the indigenous peo-

ples called "Indians" is undergoing an important transformation.' A new
literature is challenging the more established conceptualization of indige-
nous peoples as precariously balanced on the precipice of cultural extinc-
tion. This body of work is represented by several of the titles grouped
here for review. The newer perspectives focus on the processual nature of
indigenous identities, those always transforming collective self-repre-
sentations of particular social groups as indigenous. Such identities are

1. Indigenous peoples and movements in Latin America employ the term indigena as a
self-description, while indio (Indian) is a deprecating term-except when used to defy
hegemonic stereotypes in the same manner that words like nigger or queer are used by
radicalized artists, intellectuals, and others in the United States. I am using indigenous people
here as a neutral term and Indian only in an ironic and critical sense.

237

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Latin American Research Review

determined through specific and varying forms of resistance to domina-

tion by the political and economic power structures of Latin American
nation-states. At present, both the newer and older styles of analyzing
indigenous ethnicity in Latin America are increasingly aligned with polit-
ical movements for indigenous rights, led by a new generation of indige-
nous leaders. These resistance movements embody struggles over iden-
tity and thus are living proof that indigenous peoples are not necessarily
disappearing.
The more established school, or what I call the "cultural survival
position," is exemplified here by Peter Elsass and a number of the con-
tributors to the Urban and Sherzer and the Langdon and Baer collec-
tions.? Social scientists working from this stance assume the authority to
identify discrete, named indigenous societies that exist in given locations
and to assign to these societies fixed cultural traits, particularly language,
worldview and its rituals, social organization, and leadership. The cul-
tural survival perspective embodies an essentialism in which cultural
traits or traditions constitute the "essences" of being Indian and function
as Cartesian coordinates against which the degree of "Indianness" of a
group can be determined by social scientists. To the extent that the coor-
dinates change or remain stable over time, they determine the chances for
the survival or assimilation of any specific Indian group in the larger
society in which the Indians find themselves embedded.
This position evolved from two sources: the problematic set forth
by Franz Boas in the United States, which tightly bound language, mate-
rial culture, and cultural identities together; and British structural func-
tionalism, which imagines social relations as a homeostatic organism in
which individual and collective behaviors are defined by cultural norms
and values in order to maintain social equilibrium. In contrast to earlier
traditions in anthropology, the cultural survival school is innovative in
bringing with it a morality that motivates anthropologists and other
social scientists to act as advocates for the survival of indigenous cul-
tures. Turning indigenous peoples into objects for research and believing
that any culture is discrete only insofar as it remains "uncontaminated"
by other cultures have both come under strong attack from postmodern-
ists, especially James Clifford." But the political sea change toward advo-

2. in calling the established essentialist position the "cultural survival school," I am in no

way implying that this position represents the views of Cultural Survival International or
its journal. Cultural Survival Quarterly has increasingly become a forum for authors, both
academic and indigenous, who are writing from pronounced resistance perspectives.
3. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1986). The postmodernist critique is turning out to be an ever-expanding industry.
Two other important and insightful views are found in Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:
How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and
George W. Stocking, Observers Observed: Essays in Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

238

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 REVIEW ESSAYS

cacy has perhaps buttressed the essentialism inherent in the cultural

survival position. More telling still, alliances between social scientists of
the cultural survival school and particular indigenous political move-
ments are highlighting the current of essentialist thought flowing through
the ideologies of these movements."
The analyses of the "resistance school" take a variety of stances
concerning the dynamics of constructing indigenous identity, many of
which are mapped out in the Urban and Sherzer collection as well as in
the studies by Roger Rasnake and June Nash. The term resistance, as used
in these works, denotes centuries of varying kinds of struggle that began
when Europeans successfully destroyed precontact polities and the posi-
tions of authority and control that precontact leaders had maintained
over territory and resources. Such struggles continued in new forms as
colonial and republican regimes confiscated indigenous territories and
resources, legislated against indigenous languages, worldviews, and reli-
gious rituals, and erased the distinctive identities of indigenous peoples
from the constructing of nation and nationality. For many authors, the
development since the conquest of numerous forms of indigenous strug-
gle-armed conflicts, cultural revitalization, religious movements, reposses-
sion of resources, and other manifestations-derive from the characteristics
of sociocultural difference that antedate contact.
In departing from the cultural survival position, several authors
argue that the struggle to resist confiscation of territory and resources as well
as social and cultural assimilation into the bottom-most economic strata of
colonial and republican social orders has been molded so strongly by the
institutions of colonialism that "being Indian" may have little or no con-
nection to precontact sociocultural forms. According to this argument,
the resistance struggle itself has become the primary characteristic of
Indian ethnicity. Such authors describe anti-essentialist sociocultural dy-
namics within Latin American nation-states in which the self-identified
indigenous social groups continuously redefine (and often reinvent) their
identities in extremely fluid ways. But even while doing so, they are
always constrained by a struggle for resources waged between hege-
monic socioeconomic institutions of the nation-state and the social orga-
nizations of indigenous communities.
In the introduction to Nation-States and Indians in Latin America,
editors Greg Urban and Joel Sherzer make several caveats that undercut

4. As social scientists encounter, analyze, and represent what they identify as essential-
ism in the ideologies of indigenous political movements, they are being challenged to
enlarge their discourses theoretically and politically while retaining their capacity for con-
structive critique. For a fascinating, intellectually honest encounter with Mayan nationalist
ideology in Guatemala, see Kay B. Warren, "Transforming Memories and Histories: The
Meaning of Ethnic Resurgence for Mayan Indians," in Americas: New Interpretive Essays,
edited by Alfred Stepan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

239

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Latin American Research Review

the cultural survival position to a certain extent. They are concerned with
conceptualizing usage of the terms indigenous ethnicity and ethnic group
more precisely.f Just as "Indians" did not live in the Americas until
Europeans invented the term and its social positioning, the myriad dis-
tinctive indigenous societies of these continents became "ethnic groups"
only as their territories were incorporated into colonial and later republi-
can national regimes of power. Thus ethnicity and ethnic group should be
understood as processual terms that signify changing identities in rela-
tion to colonialism through history, rather than as a set of more or less
fixed social categories.v
One cannot dispute that certain indigenous cultures have disap-
peared entirely, certain indigenous populations have been genocidally
exterminated, and sociocultural assimilation has eliminated certain in-
digenous ethnic groups. These events doubtless underlie the cultural
survival paradigm, as represented in the Sherzer and Urban volume by
David Maybury-Lewis and by Richard Adams to a lesser extent. In these
essays, the authors name endangered Indian cultures (the Mapuche, the
Miskitu) and their respective cultural characteristics without foreground-
ing that naming or those markers historically, regionally, or in reference to
how or whether people within that group identify themselves as a social
unit.? This mode of analysis locks indigenous cultures and identities into

5. Urban and Sherzer accept Jean Jackson's view of ethnic groups (influenced by Fredrik
Barth) as interest groups operating within larger societies, among whom markers of eth-
nicity are produced through interactions with other social sectors. This definition assumes
the hegemonic domination of nation-states and their sovereignty over the territorial, collec-
tive, and individual rights of the ethnic groups embedded within each nation-state. Brack-
ette Williams has greatly enriched this discussion through insightful considerations of the
theoretical implications of class, race, and resistance in the construction of ethnicity. See
Williams, ''A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain," Annual
Review of Anthropology 18 0989}:401-55.
6. This point is stressed by Urban and Sherzer in the crucial distinction they make between
highland and lowland peoples in South America: highland groups compose numerically large
populations that have internalized European social and cultural forms since contact, while
lowland peoples (in much smaller groups) remained more isolated and closer to precontact
conditions for a long time. Urban and Sherzer also distinguish between the peoples living on
the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts in Central America: the native societies of the Pacific Coast
were incorporated early on into the Spanish empire and became part of the new Hispanic
nation-states, while the Atlantic Coast peoples fell under the influence of the British empire
and eluded incorporation into Hispanic nation-states until the twentieth century.
7. In several instances, anthropologists employed terms for indigenous groups for a long
time that in no way corresponded to those people's self-identity and consciousness. It is
interesting to note that the contemporary politics of resistance have created conditions
under which indigenous peoples have adopted and adapted such terms. In the case of the
"Mayans" of Guatemala, see Carol A. Smith, Guatemalan Indians and the State, 1540-1988
(Austin: University of Texas Press 1990). On the "Mixtecs" of Oaxaca, see Michael Kearney,
"Mixtec Political Consciousness: From Passive to Active Resistance," in Rural Revolt in
Mexico and u.S. Intervention, edited by Daniel Nugent (La Jolla, Calif.: Center for U.S.-
Mexican Studies), 113-24. On the "Ohlones" of California, see Les W. Field, Alan Leventhal,
Rosemary Cambra, and Dolores Sanchez, ''A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization
Movement," California History 71, no. 3 (Dec. 1992}:412-31.

240

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 REVIEW ESSAYS

a dualism of survival versus extinction in which social scientists inevita-

bly play the role of experts. Other essays in Nation-States and Indians
clearly suggest that such a dualism is not useful in analyzing many, if not
most, historical indigenous groups, whose existence should be seen more
as an ensemble of possibilities for transformation.
Peter Elsass, a psychologist and anthropological field-worker, de-
velops a sophisticated cultural survival perspective based on research
among several Indian and African-American populations." In Strategies
for Survival: The Psychology of Cultural Resilience in Ethnic Minorities, he
seeks to identify how and why particular groups survive assimilation
into national societies (which are represented in his cases by Christian
missionaries and state bureaucracies) better than others. Working in the
distinctive, mixed highland-lowland region of northeastern Colombia
dominated by the massive Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Elsass exam-
ined the divergent fortunes of the highland Arhuacos and the lowland
Motilon. He finds that the Arhuacos' hierarchical social organization,
characterized by the leaders' coercive powers and control over knowl-
edge of ritual and group history; serves as a far better basis for cultural
survival than the egalitarian social relations and communal living ar-
rangements of the Motilon. Using the central symbols of the Arhuaco
loom (structure, control) versus the Motilon longhouse (anarchy, chaos),
Elsass argues eloquently that the acculturation of an indigenous people
produces mental states akin to clinical depression and acute anxiety. His
case study of the village of Chemescua, populated by "halfway assimi-
lated" Arhuacos, illustrates this analysis with haunting images of social
and individual anomie and alienation, particularly in relations between
men and women.
While one may dispute or defend Elsass's conclusions about hier-
archy, social control, and the survival of Indian cultures, his analysis is
problematic in its stance on culture and history-that is, tradition. He
perceives that indigenous groups invent and reinvent traditions as a
part of the reproduction of their identities but finds the fact that the
Arhuaco wear more traditional clothing and speak their language more
fluently now than fifty years ago unsettling rather than analytically
illuminating. He explains, "In trying to understand Indian survival, it is
difficult to unveil structures they have always possessed, one reason
being that Indians do not present their past in such a way that it can be
included in historical research with time as a linear measure" (p. 94).
Aside from the inability to establish "structures they have always pos-
sessed" for any social group anywhere, Elsass's approach implies that
European and Euro-American observers must leave behind questions

8. For the purposes of this essa)T, I am not discussing Elsass's African-American case
studies, which form an important part of his argument.

241

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Latin American Research Review

about the historical construction of tradition and "read Indian culture

here and now."9
Elsass's analysis returns several times to shamanism, which he
considers the most important foundation for Indian identity and its sur-
vival. The contributors to Portals of Power: Shamanism in South America,
edited by Jean Matteson Langden and Gerhard Baer, also portray sha-
manism as central to indigenous identity and a rational and practical
instrument for achieving and reestablishing social harmony and individ-
ual health. In the first nine essays in the book, contributors document the
key role of shamanism in indigenous cosmovision (Donald Pollock, Jean
Langdon, Bruno Illius, Gerhard Baer), the nature of shamanic powers in
the clearly visionary experiential world of shamans (Waud Kracke, Pablo
Wright, Michel Perrin), and the aesthetic dimensions of shamanic ritual
practice in the mediums of music, incantation, and the plastic arts (Jon-
athan Hill, Dominique Buchillet). Most impressive in this collection are
Langdon's detailed cosmology of the Siona of the Colombian Putumayo,
in which shamans have developed a will to power through visionary
knowledge; Perrin's analysis of gender, sexual deviance, and dreams as
power bases for Guajiro shamans; and Hill's revisionist assessment of
Wakuenai curing rituals, which challenges the scientific and artistic canons
of Western culture.
Most of the contributors to Portals of Power, like Elsass, treat Indian
cultures as discrete and historically continuous units and shamanism as a
marker of indigenous identity; perhaps implying that changes in sham-
anistic activities in any given indigenous society could endanger its cul-
tural survival. Such an assessment is questioned by the last three essays
in the volume (those by Luis Eduardo Luna, by Robin Wright and Jon-
athan Hill, and by Maria Clemencia Ramirez de [ara and Carlos Ernesto
Pinzon Castano). Luna describes indigenous shamanism as practiced
among Amazonian mestizos, suggesting that the rituals and cosmovision
of indigenous shamanism are not necessarily bound up with the identity
or survival of any indigenous group per se. Hill and Wright document a
syncretic millenarian movement among the Wakuenai that spread to
many different ethnic groups in one Amazonian region, manifesting itself
as both a political and spiritual movement. Finally, [ara and Castano
detail the role played by shamanism in the contemporary creation of the
Sibundoy ethnic group, primarily through the relationship between sha-

9. Recent influential work has strongly legitimated indigenous systems that recount his-
torical information, both as historical literature and as data that can be used to analyze and
confirm the construction of indigenous traditions and identities. See Joanne Rappaport, The
Politics of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Frank Salomon, Native
Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and
RethinkingHistory and Myth: South American Perspectives on the Past, edited by Jonathan Hill
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

242

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 REVIEW ESSAYS

mans from the Sibundoy valley and the dynamics of popular culture in
Colombia. These articles disentangle shamanism from the idea of "pure"
and distinct indigenous cultures and underscore shamanism's complex
role in transforming and inventing indigenous identities.
Several thought-provoking essays in Urban and Sherzer's Nation-
States and Indians in Latin America stress the complex relationships among
indigenous ethnicity, its cultural markers, and the politics of identity. Jean
Jackson shows how CRIVA, an activist political group, is attempting to
construct a common ethnic identity among previously distinct Tukanoan-
speaking groups in the Colombian Amazon. Using a pan-Indianist ideol-
ogy borrowed largely from indigenous confederations operating elsewhere
in Colombia, the leadership of CRIVA is working to graft a new political
agenda onto the traditional social organization and leadership of disparate
Tukanoan groups whose territories remained isolated into the twentieth
century. Because CRIVA's leaders are in fact Tukanoans, they are caught on
the horns of a dilemma between these two contradictory agendas. In a
contrasting case, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima shows how the Brazilian
state "Brazilianized" indigenous Amazonian groups by using indigenist
ideologies.!? He explains how employing an assimilationist form of indi-
genismo to build the Brazilian nation-state required the state to define the
special citizenship rights of the people called "Brazilian Indians," which
defeated the ultimate goal of assimilating indigenous peoples.
In two important contributions, Greg Urban and Jane Hill effec-
tively challenge the assertion that language is a marker of indigenous
identity. Urban skillfully contrasts the situations in Paraguay and Peru by
using census statistics. In 1981, 40 percent of the Paraguayan population
spoke only Guarani (the indigenous language) while 52 percent were
bilingual in Spanish and Guarani. Yet only 1 percent of Paraguayans
identified themselves as indigenous. In the same year, 73 percent of
Peruvian citizens spoke only Spanish, 16 percent were bilingual with an
indigenous language (mostly Quechua), and only 9 percent were mono-
lingual in an indigenous language. But most sources cite the indigenous
population in Peru as accounting for 35 to 45 percent of the total popu-
lation. Hill's case is even more startling. She describes a large popula-
tion of speakers of Nahuatl located in the Malinche region of central
Mexico who neither identify themselves as indigenous nor are identified
as such by the Mexican state. Rather, the Malinche folk call themselves
"Mexicanos" and their language "mexicano." And they brag that they are

10. Indigenism (indigenismo in Latin America) connotes a heavily romanticized idealiza-

tion of the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas. Indigenismo in the past has charac-
terized anti-hegemonic intellectual currents in Mexico, Nicaragua, the Andean countries,
and Brazil. But it may have played a more significant role in serving as a means for political
and economic elites to appropriate indigenous cultures for nation-building ideologies that
end up maintaining the subaltern status of indigenous peoples.

243

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Latin American Research Review

the "true Mexicans" in order to assert a special relationship with the state
that exploits their labor. 11 After examining these cases, assimilation of
indigenous identities into nation-states looks (and sounds) curiouser and
curiouser, at least to social scientists.
Such findings are not necessarily problematic for authors of the
resistance school because from their perspective, the assimilation of Euro-
pean institutions and sociocultural forms can actually playa key role in
resistance struggles. In Domination and Cultural Resistance: Authority and
Power among an Andean People, Roger Rasnake focuses on the Yuras, an
indigenous ethnic group of the southern Bolivian altiplano. Among the
Yuras, transformation of the role of traditional indigenous leaders, or
kurakas, during the five centuries of European political and economic domi-
nation has been central to ethnic identity. The Yuras became a distinct
social entity based on the ayllu, the local kin group widespread in the
Andes, following the historical fragmentation of large indigenous polities
produced by the Spanish throughout Latin America. During the colonial
and early republican periods, the kurakas acted as agents of the state in
extracting resources and labor from their fellow Yuras while attempting to
influence the policies of the state elite. In the contemporary era, although
the kurakas (now called kuraqkuna, or elders) still serve the state, they also
function as symbols of Yura resistance to assimilation into the social and
cultural mainstream who "create and recreate a model of Yura organization
and ethnicity." The analytic strengths of Rasnake's ethnography lie in two
areas: his meticulous historical recounting of consent and contestation by
individual kurakas when faced with the implantation and maintenance of
colonial and republican regimes in the Yura region, and his insightful
symbolic analysis of how contemporary kuraqkuna mobilize resistance to
assimilation through communal rituals.
Rasnake's work in the Yura region, where indigenous identity and
resistance are crisply defined and powerful (if not "pure"), typifies anthro-
pologists' preference for describing the "most Indian" sociocultural areas.
Historian Thomas Abercrombie insightfully explores (in the Urban and
Sherzer volume) the dynamics of resistance and cultural interface else-
where in Bolivia, where the lines between indigenous and nonindigenous
identities are much less sharply drawn. Abercrombie finds that what
defines Indian and Hispanic identities in highland Bolivia involves con-
siderable mutual internalization of the cultural characteristics attributed
to each group. The relationship between ethnic identity on the one hand
and language, cosmovision, and social organization on the other are
played out in an arena of contention. As he explains, indigenous tactics of
resistance derive from "the very institutions and doctrines that the colo-

11. Hill's analysis is developed in Kenneth Hill and Jane Hill, Speaking Mexicano: Dy-
namics of Syncretic Language in Central Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986).

244

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 REVIEW ESSAYS

nizers imposed to erase the past and destroy resistance," with the result
being that "modern day 'indigenous ethnic groups' and 'indigenous cos-
mologies' are unintelligible apart from their struggle with the state"
(p. 111). While Christian symbols and rituals have become integral parts
of being "Indian," urban Hispanic Bolivians act out partly imagined pre-
Christian Indian rituals at Carnaval and other festivals. Such public
embraces of precontact spirituality are, in turn, part of the way that urban
Bolivians manifest their identity as Bolivians.
Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino corroborates this overlapping
between ethnic and national identities in his analysis of indigenous music
in Peru. He finds that contemporary indigenous music is both highly
derivative from European forms and yet a symbolic basis for resistance to
state policies designed to assimilate indigenous peoples. Twentieth-century
indigenista intellectuals have turned to this syncretic postcolonial Andean
music to represent the vitality of indigenous culture and its role in shaping
a uniquely Peruvian national identity. Ironically, since such indigenismo
became state policy, it has legitimized indigenous cultural forms and main-
streamed these forms as Peruvian. In a similar vein, Carol Hendrickson
shows how Guatemalan indigenous clothing (traje) functions both to label
the economically; politically, and socially inferior position of Indians and to
identify the Guatemalan highlands as touristically attractive, thus defining
the Guatemalan nation as culturally remarkable and exotic.
The close relationships among colonialism, resistance, and indige-
nous identity and the strange interplay between nation-states' suppres-
sion of indigenous ethnicity and appropriation of indigenous cultural
markers found in these examples from highlands regions are not necessarily
duplicated in the lowlands. Janet Hendricks's contribution to Urban and
Sherzer on the Shuar of Amazonian Ecuador details how a contemporary
organization, the Shuar Federation, has successfully opposed expansion
of state authority into Shuar territory and constructed a cultural counter-
hegemony. Inspired partially by the influence of Salesian missionaries,
the federation is a Western-type political organization that promotes eco-
nomic development projects recognized as "modern" by the state. In
Hendricks's view, Shuar identity is processual rather than fixed, and
therefore the federation is a creative form of resistance that springs from
Shuar cosmovision and symbolic understanding. In this instance, cultural
identity is not the same as resistance; rather, cultural identity provides
the raw materials for resistance.l?

12. For the perspectives of the indigenous leadership on this process (among the Shuar
and other indigenous Ecuadorian nationalities), see Confederaci6n de Nacionalidades Indi-
genas del Ecuador (CONAIE), Las nacionalidades indigenas en el Ecuador (Quito: Ediciones
Tincui Abya-Yala, 1989). Another recent consideration of the processes involved in con-
structing indigenous identity is found in Persistencia indigena en Nicaragua, edited by Ger-
man Romero Vargas et a1. (Managua: CIDCA-UCA, 1992). This work focuses on western

245

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Latin American Research Review

James Howe's essay on the Kuna of Panama in the Urban and

Sherzer collection resonates to a certain extent with Hendricks's observa-
tions on the building of resistance through cultural difference, rather than
vice versa. Howe describes the nuanced emergence of contemporary Kuna
identity shaped by contact with the Panamanian state, resistance to that
state, and the intervention of an outside power (the United States). Every
attempt by the Panamanian state to assimilate the Kuna provoked resis-
tance that emphasized those cultural markers differentiating the Kuna
most sharply from mainstream Panamanian society. As Kuna resistance
became a struggle over land rights and political self-determination, Kuna
cultural identity drew strength from the intervention of the United States,
especially in the form of bizarrely idealized racist representations of the
Kuna created by individual U.S. interlopers.P Howe's case thus draws
attention to the power of outsiders and their representations, an appropri-
ate focus for social scientists engaged in studying indigenous identities.
The issue of how to represent indigenous identities is clearly related
to the different ways that social scientists are theoretically and politically
positioning themselves with respect to cultural survival and resistance strug-
gles. In I Spent My Life In the Mines, June Nash provides a highly personal
testimonial of her relationship with the family of Juan and Petrona Rojas,
key informants in her classic analysis of resistance among Bolivian tin
miners, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat US. 14 In her new book, Nash
explains the dynamic between her methods of inquiry and the kinds of
information produced. As comadre to the Rojas family, Nash was drawn
into the action of her ethnographic investigation and the life histories of
her adopted family. Her empathic, yet never self-indulgent, exposition of
these lives and her involvement in them permits Nash to pursue her own
theoretical agenda even as the book is in many senses taken over by
Juan's and Petrona's telling of their own stories.
In neither We Eat the Mines nor I Spent My Life in the Mines does
Nash emphasize issues of ethnic identity, although the miners are bilin-
gual speakers of Quechua or Aymara and Spanish. Their families mi-
grated from rural areas where, as with the Yuras, individuals identify
themselves and are acknowledged by outsiders as ethnically indigenous.
Rather, Nash's concern has been to generate analyses of contradictory
consciousness among the miners. Resistance to the state and to economic

Nicaragua, where twentieth-century elite ideologies have claimed the extinction of indige-
nous identity notwithstanding the persistence of self-identified communities.
13. Howe focuses in particular on one interloper, Social Darwinist Richard O. Marsh.
During the 1920s, Marsh, in alliance with several notable anthropologists from the Smithso-
nian Institution, represented the Kuna as "a white tribe," quite possibly the descendants of
Vikings. According to Marsh et a1., Kuna ancestors constructed the pre-Columbian architec-
tural monuments found in Latin America.
14. See June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1979).

246

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 REVIEW ESSAYS

exploitation, she shows, manifests itself in various forms as ethnic, class,

gender, and family consciousness, each one establishing mutually con-
flicting loyalties and behaviors held in temporary check by individual
calculation of self-interest. Nash's choice of ethnographic testimonial rep-
resentation is intended to advance understanding of the historical resis-
tance struggles of the miners at the heart of their lives, the place of these
struggles in Bolivian history, and their significance in the overall trans-
formation of indigenous peoples in the Andes.
By contrast, Julia Meyerson's 'Tambo is an ethnography out of
which a cultural survival position could organically grow. An artist mar-
ried to anthropologist Gary Urton, Meyerson offers a detailed portrayal
of daily life in a small indigenous village near Cuzco. Her descriptions of
farming, toolmaking, and other aspects of daily life conflate her own
experiences with those of the people of ,Tambo. The full title of her
account is not "My Year in 'Tambo" or "My Life in 'Tambo" but 'Tambo:
Life in an Andean Village, which thus imbues the village and its people
with a static character. Lacking historical, regional, and theoretical con-
texts, 'Tambo tends to reinforce objectifying views of indigenous identities
and traditions. Readers would be shocked to discover later that Sendero
Luminoso was an active force in and around the village, a fair proba-
bility.IS The portrayal of the village in 'Tambo encourages anthropologists
and others to imagine that such places exist as independent cultural units
and should survive as such.
The considerable theoretical and representational differences be-
tween the cultural survival and ethnicity-as-resistance schools yield pre-
dictably contrasting forms of advocacy for indigenous peoples' rights in
Latin American countries and for particular indigenous political move-
ments. Elsass contends in Strategies for Survival that advocacy is "incom-
patible" with anthropology "because no cause can be legitimated in
anthropological terms per se ... ; the rationale for advocacy is never
ethnographic; it remains essentially moral" (p. 212). Such a moral posi-
tioning, if not ethnographically based, derives nonetheless from a closed
academic discourse that establishes what constitutes indigenous identity
according to social scientific criteria. Elsass, to his credit, has acted as an
advocate for the Arhuaco at their invitation. He reflects, "Cultural sur-
vival, therefore, does not imply conservation of a preconceived identity
which once and for all is anchored in an objectively existing, reified
culture. It implies that the agents of a particular culture remain in charge
of the shaping of local history" (p. 233).
Martin Diskin argues in Urban and Sherzer's Nation-States and

15. An insightful critique of the Andeanist literature that 'Tambo is part of and this
literature's role in obscuring the conditions surrounding the revolutionary war in Peru is
found in Orin Starn, "Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru,"
Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 1 (Feb. 1991):63-92

247

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Latin American Research Review

Indians that anthropologists must come to terms with the political impli-
cations of the discourse about ethnicity, culture, and identity in which
they and indigenous leaders are currently participating. Such a coming to
terms stresses the necessity for empowering the intellectual voices of
indigenous movements and their leadership. Having worked among the
Miskitu of the Nicaraguan Atlantic coast during the Sandinista era-a
situation that perhaps more than any other required anthropologists to
define themselves politically-Diskin concludes, "Part of the political
dimension of fieldwork is advocacy." 16 In the course of his fieldwork, the
Miskitu with whom Diskin worked took up arms against the Sandinistas,
with Miskitu leaders representing their struggle for self-determination
and land rights as an inseparable part of Miskitu identity. For Diskin and
for many social scientists of the resistance school, academic representa-
tions of such indigenous struggles must reflect the multiple dialogues
between social scientists, indigenous intellectuals, and the peoples living
out their indigenous identities. From an academic vantage point, this
polyvocal discourse is the most likely to produce fruitful ethnographic
work and analytic thinking about indigenous identities in the years to
come.'? Whether indigenous political movements will benefit from the
advocacy and activism of social scientists and from their innovations in
producing social science texts remains to be seen.
In conclusion, the current state of social science literature on indig-
enous ethnic identity is certainly leading toward a more historical and
processual view of ethnicity and away from emphasis on fixed ethnic
markers. More and more, the arena of the nation-state and the relation-
ship between indigenous peoples and nation-states is the central one for
analytic as well as political activity. This trend implies that when social
scientists increasingly couch their work in openly partisan language and
contexts, the relationship between social science research and the state ap-
paratus will likely lose the legitimacy of scientific neutrality that helped
authorize social scientists to define who and what is Indian. Whether
social science in Latin America has been wedded until recently to an
analysis of indigenous ethnicity that is inseparable from nation-building
and whether divorce proceedings should now be filed are the subjects of
another much more lengthy discussion.

16. The politics of ethnography among the Miskitu forms the foundational subtext in
Charles Hale, Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indiansand the Nicaraguan State,1894-1987
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.)
17. An outstanding and innovative example of the possibilities for such a reconfigured
discourse is found in Zapotec Struggles: Histories, Politics, and Representations from [uchiidn,
Oaxaca, edited by Howard Campbell, Leigh Binford, Miguel Bartolome, and Alicia Barabas
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1993).

248

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0023879100035639 Published online by Cambridge University Press