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Critique of Anthropology
2016, Vol. 36(4) 439–457
Dark matter: Toward ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X15619017
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 rights-
claiming 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 his-
tory 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 coopta-
tion 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
Corresponding author:
Mark Goodale, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Culturelle et Sociale, University of Lausanne, Lausanne 1015,
Switzerland.
Email: Mark.Goodale@unil.ch
440 Critique of Anthropology 36(4)
This article is part critical discussion of a set of recent case studies on the intersec-
tions 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 ‘‘elu-
sive 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 redistri-
bution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle. (1995: 68)
Fraser’s proposition to ‘‘finesse the dilemma’’ that both recognition and redistribu-
tion were essential to any lasting vision of justice was to argue for a synthesis of
redistributive economics and what she described as ‘‘deconstructive cultural pol-
itics’’ (92). However, as we will see, on the one hand, what Fraser called the ‘‘strug-
gle 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 develop-
ment’’ 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
Goodale 441
international law to regulate and shape certain forms of indigenous rights mobil-
ization within broader labor markets was not an aberration. Rather, the relation-
ship 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 trans-
national (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 commu-
nities. 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 aspir-
ational 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.
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 well-
being,’’ 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 ‘‘atten-
tion 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 com-
munities 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 assimi-
lation 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
444 Critique of Anthropology 36(4)
In some countries that have eventually adopted a different form of national indi-
genous 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 cultural-
valuational differentiation for which ILO 169 is celebrated are decentered; and
the intent to legitimate land appropriation and accelerate the movement of indi-
genous 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 invest-
ment 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 trans-
national and national economic actors’’ (2011: 209, 210; emphasis in original).5
A cross-section of recent case studies suggest that when ‘‘indigenous’’ popula-
tions 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 pro-
tected 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-stop-
shop.’’ 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 com-
munal rights programs have emerged, as I have argued, in relation to a broader
446 Critique of Anthropology 36(4)
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 govern-
mentality that rationalizes the potential for accumulation by legalized disposses-
sion. 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 demar-
cated 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 com-
munities 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 terri-
tory 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 assimi-
lation – 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’’
448 Critique of Anthropology 36(4)
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 finan-
cial 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 epi-
sode in a much longer history of political-economic assimilation and structural
violence. A broader historical context demonstrates that contemporary commodi-
fication 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, some-
thing 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 influ-
ence of state-capitalist assemblages comprising government ministries, multi-
national 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 con-
cessions, forced participation in public–private joint ventures (as in Malaysia, see
Cooke et al., 2011), the invention of ancestral domains that make ‘‘one-stop shop-
ping’’ possible, and so on. If this is true, then at least two parts of the question with
Goodale 449
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-valua-
tional differentiation – is not an aberration but is rather structural, revealing the
omnipresence of what might be thought of as ‘‘dark matter.’’ Much like the con-
cept 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.
Acknowledgements
Several colleagues offered critical suggestions on different parts of this article. I would like to
thank, in particular, Tania Li and Anne-Christine Trémon. 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 École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.
454 Critique of Anthropology 36(4)
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 popu-
lations of all of Latin America and the Caribbean (http://www.iwgia.org/regions/latin-
america/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 indi-
genous 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 assem-
blage 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 accumula-
tion 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
Goodale 455
analysis of terrain and soil types; and a long section that explains where potential out-
side 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 – indi-
genous, 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.