The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America

David Lehmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137509574
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137509581
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

                  

© The Author(s) 2016

David Lehmann (ed.)The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin AmericaStudies of the Americas10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

David Lehmann¹

(1)

University of Cambridge, London, UK

David Lehmann

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Politics of recognitionLegal pluralismMulticulturalism in Latin AmericaInterculturalidad

I wish to thank Maxine Molyneux, Joanne Rappaport, Peter Wade John Gledhill and Tanni Mukhopadhyay for their help in writing this Introduction.

End Abstract

The International Labour Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, no.169, drawn up in 1989, is the most important international agreement on the subject of the rights of indigenous peoples. It has been ratified by every Latin American country except Uruguay and Cuba, but only by six other countries in the whole world.¹ This exceptionalism is rarely remarked upon. It shows that in the past generation, the states of the region, and their political élites, have been confident enough to proclaim their pluriethnic character without conveying any sense that they were endangering their sovereignty or their unified constitution. The ratification of the Convention by so many of the region’s countries also reflects, and has brought about, a significant long-term development of ethnic awareness and a politicization of race and ethnicity which may only be in their infancy, raising questions which will not go away.

In our different ways, the authors of this book write in a somewhat critical vein of the policies and practices which governments have adopted in respect of indigenous and Afro-American peoples, and of the directions taken by some academic writing on the subject, but the simple fact of the region’s exceptionalism in recognising its ethnic diversity and implicitly its history of racial exclusion should not be forgotten. We have come together because, sharing a basic commitment both to the pursuit of social justice and also to the rights of people and peoples subject to exclusion and discrimination on account of their racial and ethnic affiliation, we believe that a renewed discussion is called for in the study of identity and ethnicity what is also called the politics of recognition. This also applies to the enactment by governments of constitutions, laws and programmes inspired by identity politics, broadly known as multiculturalism. There are conflicts between the rights of a society’s population as a whole and indigenous rights, and between legal systems at the international, national and local or community level. Tensions can arise when multiple interests legitimately claim competing protection under legislation designed to support varied indigenous and Afro-descendant populations offering ‘omnibus’ recognition to them in general, but not the same recognition to them all. The scholarly enterprise itself may be in tension if researchers’ commitment to a cause or to particular movements draws them to silence some things and emphasize others, and sometimes even to possess information they would rather not have. Problems of naming arise when populations find themselves at odds with state agencies or with each other in the very designation of their own identity as in the case of the Mam people of Chiapas (Hernández 2003: 68). After some three decades of national and international legislation, multicultural legislation and policies have created new axes of power which in turn create novel inequalities and vested interest.

After Charles Taylor coined the term in the early 1990s, the politics of recognition generated all sorts of philosophical disputes (Appiah 2005: 135–6 and passim), especially around the notion of authenticity, but his essay did not confront the question of who is ‘doing the recognizing’, or who is the ‘agent of recognition’ as distinct from its ‘object’. Since then, recognition has become a matter of everyday politics and bureaucracy, raising new questions such as who has the authority to pronounce on authenticity? how can it be fitted into a framework of social justice? does recognition involve special dispensations for practices which are the heritage of a particular group, and if so, who has the authority to decide on what is heritage and what is not? And when it comes to material questions of land and territory, can the state simply reallocate land to deserving groups or communities and make that the ‘end of the story’? Our studies show that reallocation is extremely complicated and such stories seem never to end.

The two themes of recognition and land tenure are closely connected. Whether the subject is the reappearance of indigenous groups claiming their own land back in north-west Argentina or bitter land disputes in the Mexican state of Michoacán, or bureaucratic redrawings of ethnic boundaries in the Brazilian Amazon, strenuous efforts are deployed to demonstrate and contest the authenticity of land claims based on ancient written title or on cultural criteria or some combination of the two; in Bolivia, as described by Andrew Canessa in this volume, Aymara from the highlands adopt ‘kinship strategies’ to gain access to land in the lowlands by taking a locally born ‘second wife’. Once land title is at stake, government agencies and sometimes also courts of law are required to make bureaucratic assessments and decisions on the basis of very unbureaucratic criteria like self-assigned racial classification or ethnic affiliation. In our Mexican case, the status of comunero (member of a landowning community with ancient title), which one might think is a consensual affair, is the subject of bitter legal and political contestation, especially when the land is valuable. Our themes bring what might otherwise appear to be ethereal discussions about the construction, or (as Judith Butler would have it) performance, of identities into the realm of state resource allocation and land tenure, and these are as important to social justice as a recognition of identity and culture.

Multiculturalism and ‘interculturalidad’: The Material and the Symbolic

In placing multiculturalism in our title, we have taken some liberties with the word, using it as shorthand for a range of advocacies including claims to indigenous land restitution, affirmative action for groups suffering ethnic exclusion and racial discrimination, rights to indigenous political and judicial autonomy and the politics of identity in general. We are taking the word in its normative sense, so that our subject is not racial, ethnic and other culture-related coexistence in the region, but rather the crisis of the ways in which scholarship and politics have constructed and responded to the region’s multifarious racial and ethnic-based social movements. The word is used here principally because that is what the Anglo-Saxon and French literature uses—though in France, the word ‘communautarisme’ is also used widely: if the book is translated into Spanish or Portuguese, we might well not use ‘multiculturalismo’ in the title, but the resonance of ‘multiculturalism’ for the readership of a book in English is unavoidable.

The possible reasons why ‘multiculturalismo’ has not caught on in either Spanish or Portuguese-speaking Latin America are in themselves relevant. In Brazil, where little attention is paid to cultural faultlines as far as the black population are concerned and where Afro-Brazilian religions are considered part of Brazilian culture as a whole and not the prerogative of the black population (large numbers of whom are evangelicals and reject them violently), the word is very rarely heard in connection either with indigenous peoples or with racial discrimination: the watchwords are ‘rights’ and ‘affirmative actions’. In Spanish-speaking countries, political, scholarly and policy debate overwhelmingly use the word ‘interculturalidad’. It would appear that the word multiculturalism is avoided for some or all of the following reasons: one is the connotations of ghettoization and social fragmentation associated with Europe’s immigrant, populations; a second reason could be that in spite of sometimes fervent advocacy of the recognition of cultural and collective rights for indigenous peoples, Latin American advocates, scholars and politicians do not question the unitary and pyramidal Republican order, and, however vociferous their demands for autonomy, avoid connotations of political separatism.² A third possible reason may be simply that Latin American intellectuals prefer to avoid terminology coined in Europe and the USA.

To compound the non-correspondence of terminology, whereas in Europe, the word ‘intercultural’ is largely restricted to the adaptation of educational curricula and institutions to the needs of some immigrant populations and their children, in Hispanic America, ‘interculturalidad’ could be described as multiculturalism ‘latino-style’, ranging widely from proposals for the recognition and institutionalization of distinctive educational and juridical arrangements tailored to the heritage or culture of indigenous peoples (usos y costumbres), to a heightened wide-ranging public profile for ‘indigeneity’ as a category covering multiple linguistic, territorial and cultural affiliations, and integrationist policies designed specifically for indigenous people to enable them to participate on equal terms in the hegemonic culture, in education and in labour markets. In addition, it is also used in connection with the content of education, involving notably bilingual education especially at primary levels, and also including Intercultural Universities (Llanes Ortiz 2009; Schmelkes 2009; Lehmann 2013). Importantly, as defined by the leading authority on intercultural education Luis Enrique López and by the anthropologist María Elena García, it also includes a mutual relationship with dominant cultures by taking the prefix ‘inter’ seriously and including indigenous languages and culture in all educational curricula—not only in indigenous education (López and Sichra 2004)—and enabling pupils and students to attain competence in different cultural and linguistic environments (García 2005).

The impact of intercultural and multicultural initiatives and also of movements themselves is as symbolic as it is material. Cultural rights of indigenous people embodied in interculturalidad are inseparable from the socio-economic components of universal citizenship, such as income, employment, general education, environmental preservation or protection and personal security. The resulting campaigns should awaken opinion to the vulnerability of indigenous people and to the willingness of governments to bypass or trample on legislation which is not even specifically indigenist, like laws requiring prior consultation on mining projects and properly conducted environmental assessments. From some points of view, these are primarily issues of survival and human rights and only secondarily of identity. The great rivers which bring energy and the mineral wealth contained in the subsoil have become indissolubly linked to conflicts over mining and dam construction, but the campaigns against them are probably strengthened by the portrayal of indigenous cultures, ways of life, bodies of knowledge, even moral codes, threatened with extinction. In Peru, where highland populations do not have a modern history of mobilization around indigenous causes, mining projects which usually affect the health and the territory of indigenous communities have provoked severe local conflicts, while governments circumvent or ignore requirements for prior consultation (Bebbington 2012). This has fed a renewal of indigenous awareness, and the leading highland indigenist organization is the organization for the defence of communities threatened by mining, CONCAMINA (Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería—National Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining). In Brazil, approval and financing the massive complex of dams known as Belo Monte was rammed through without proper environmental assessment and against much expert opinion, and is expected to destroy the lives of indigenous communities, notably the Munduruku people-although judicial decisions in 2016 may obstruct the project.³

The Indigenous and the Popular in the Administration of Justice

Another aspect of the study of ethnicity and multiculturalism in Latin America is the proliferation of what some would call false dichotomies. It has to be remembered that cultural variation is not by any means exclusively associated with ethnic difference, or with linguistic difference: it can be rooted in and reproduced by socio-economic differences, by ecological and regional differences, and of course, by religious differences. The English historian E.P. Thompson wrote extensively and influentially about the distinctive culture of the working classes, as did the early pioneer of cultural studies, Richard Hoggart, in his classic The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957: was the cultural abyss dividing the classes in their account of England at that time, or even today, any less deep than those dividing the Indians of Chiapas from Mexico’s respectable classes? In Latin America, we can point to works by the Brazilian sociologist José de Souza Martins on the São Paulo working-class culture and the culture of the peasantry (Martins 1979, 1986, 1989, 1992) and by the anthropologist Carlos Rodrigues Brandão on the religious culture of those who are sometimes called ‘the little people’ (Brandão 2007)—a phrase echoed in Véronique Boyer’s chapter where she poignantly quotes individuals who think of themselves not as indigenous, or quilombolas, or even dwellers in a particular place, but as just that: ‘os pequenos’. People somehow bereft even of a name.

Another dichotomy which may mislead is that opposing indigenous and ‘mainstream’ legal arrangements. This is because the differences observed seem to be as much about popular versus established ways of doing justice as they are about indigenous versus ‘white’, ‘mestizo’ or ‘mainstream’ ways and also because while the literature itself seems to use the terms ‘justicia indígena’, ‘justicia comunitaria’ (community justice), ‘justicia popular’ and ‘legal pluralism’ almost interchangeably (Van Cott 2000; Sierra 2009), there is an underlying presumption that the pluralism refers to cultural differences separating indigenous people from the rest of society. It is worth dwelling on examples of this because the contributions help us to clarify what is at stake analytically and also for the state when we speak of cultural difference.

Thus the legal anthropologist María Teresa Sierra, in an account of community justice in the Mexican state of Guerrero, describes how the unreliability of formal judicial institutions and the lack of trust in them has encouraged the development of non-official justice and policing to deal with small-scale disputes, to the extent that these ‘grassroots’ in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Multiculturalism as a Juridical Weapon: The Use and Abuse of the Concept of ‘Pueblo Originario’ in Agrarian Conflicts in Michoacán, Mexico
• 3. Paradoxes of Multiculturalism in Bolivia
• 4. The Ethnicization of Agrarian Conflicts: An Argentine Case
• 5. Inventing Rights of Our Own: Women Transcending the Opposition Between the Indigenous and the Universal
• 6. The Demand for Recognition and Access to Citizenship: Ethnic Labelling and Territorial Restructuring in Brazil
• 7. The Politics of Naming: Affirmative Action in Brazilian Higher Education
• Backmatter