AN/OTHER SCENARIO
What initially caught my attention was the intense scrutiny with which the Kaiapó and Maxacalí regarded other performances. The Kaiapó recorded them on cassette. Some of the Maxacalí men subjected Larry Yazzie’s activities and costume, in particular, to a sustained attention unusual among Encuentro participants, most of whom belong to a cosmopolitan interpretive community that is comfortable consuming cultural objects abstracted from their original contexts (Alpers, Baxendall, Berger). These conventions, however, are not universal. I had difficulty applying familiar interpretive frameworks to this event; I wondered how participants with different hermeneutic repertoires made sense of it. How the indigenous people who did not publicly express their critiques decode the performances? As challenges, gifts, diplomatic formalities, prescriptions for how to behave at cosmopolitan meetings?
I would like to put forward the idea that the event in which we participated indexes a relatively new scenario of cosmopolitan indigenism, informed by canonical modernist culturalisms and postmodernist critiques, and performed (with varying degrees of competence) in the language of global elites who can underwrite international gatherings. The generic instability of this frame partly derives from its emergent nature, from the vexed nature of the union of local and global social movements, and from the challenge of developing inter-indigenous conventions, when the value and moral authority of indigenous groups derive from their cultural uniqueness. The result is not a horizontal global anti-modern indigenous comunitas (even if this utopian ideal is at times expressed by indigenous activists in dialogue with environmental, new age, or other cosmopolitan discourses). Rather, we are confronted with dynamic field of heterogenous actors, among whom a cosmopolitan modus operandi is developing to enable them to cooperatively pursue their interests in a global arena, while maintaining the specificity of their identities and claims.
Tensions in these encounters inevitably result from the ideological and cultural dissimilarities between the groups performing their cultures. As critics such as Linda T. Smith argue, the integration of indigenous culture can empower and enable indigenous participation. However, the incorporation of one group’s norms has the potential to alienate others with dissimilar conventions. For example, while much of his speech eloquently argued for the incorporation of indigenous culture in more integral ways than programmed performances, in this context, the Maori scholar’s request to incorporate his culture’s customs came from an elite foreigner with the power to intimidate and coerce. He did inform the audience (in English) that they could “agree or disagree” because that is also appropriate in his culture; he did not appear to consider that not all cultures value individual assertiveness, but in some cases, challenging hierarchical relations are felt to be selfish, socially chaotic, and destructive of the social fabric of the community. The imposition of his demands may not have felt emancipatory to all of those with whom he hongied, but rather may have been experienced as an assertion of his power and influence. He asked the audience in English if they wished to participate. However, it was Diana Taylor who intervened with: “We’d better ask the host people first.” With the pressure of time and of the public’s eyes upon her, Leida had time enough to explain and ask permission of the Kaiapó and Maxacalí leaders in Portuguese, who apparently gave blanket permission for him to hongi their companions. Some resisted the hongi, on the other hand, others, who were not Kaiapo or Maxacalí wanted to hongi. These actions had the (likely unintended) effect of reinforcing the gendered hierarchies that the indigenous women’s performance attempted to deconstruct.
The women’s ceremony performed by Luisa Calcumil, Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, and Isabel Juárez Espinoza was also surely performed with the best of intentions: to insert indigenous feminist subjectivities into the meeting, to liberate the Kaiapó women from inequalities that were reinforced by a cultural relativism that respected cultural structures and norms of holistic cultures over the individual women’s rights. Did they successfully liberate the voices of the Kaiapó women? From my perspective, they appeared to be pressured by their masculine companions, the audience, their translator friend, as well as the Maya and Mapuche women.
The emancipatory significance of these political performances was mollified by the pena ajena many felt for the indigenous people who appeared to be made embarrassed, uncomfortable, or confused by the cooptation of their persons into the performance of a different indigeneity.
The Encuentro enabled individuals and groups to dialogue with allies and collaborators they would not have had the opportunity to meet. A number of social scandals also occurred when interactions did not occur to the satisfaction of the parties involved. Victor Turner’s notion of the “social drama” can be fruitfully applied here. In lieu of trying to reconcile the ideological contradictions that cropped up between the performances, we might consider how norms are socially and dialogically constructed. We can consider how actors who identify with particular groups, work out hierarchies, pecking orders, and the rules of a relatively new game –not just between indigenous performer and dominant white audience, but between indigenous agents of radically different backgrounds. This event gave us a small taste of the larger questions which may continue to vex this type of space which is becoming increasingly formalized in transnational ONGs, UN resolutions, and national policies. Which principles will dominate these scenarios? How will compromises be made? Who has the authority to speak on whose behalf? What language should prevail? Which type of cultural capital should prevail --cosmopolitan or authentic premoderness? By what criteria should actors be included as indigenous? As the most powerful weapons of indigenous groups are symbolic rather than martial, there will likely be contests over the basis of the moral authority that legitimizes their claims.
The international arena of indigenous activism also requires intra-group negotiations. In objectifying their identities and pursuing their interests as groups, members of indigenous communities must develop some consensus about the nature of their group, how it can be communicated to outsiders, and by whom. The Kaiapó, for example, have used video as an important tool with which to represent themselves to each other and to outsiders and with which to defend their land claims. Terrence Turner has observed that the incorporation of video as an objectifying medium has caused an increased objectification of their ethnic consciousness, and that they organize their relationship to this media in culturally specific ways. He explains, “dramatic self-representation in contemporary contexts of inter-ethnic confrontation continues cultural forms of mimetic representation,” and that for men, being a videographer or editor combines a traditionally prestigious role with one that enables them to mediate their relations with Western society” (10). Turner’s findings from the Kaiapó case can illuminate our discussions on indigenous performance as an objectifying media in general. His work also sheds light on the gendered dynamics we observed at the Encuentro. Among many groups pursuing their common interests as cultural groups, the conflicting imperatives to preserve their unique social structure and to perform their culture in ways acceptable to cosmopolitan liberal humanists provoke internal social dramas which empower marginalized community members to change their structural positions in their own communities.
To survive as a group with a distinct cultural identity, minority groups performativly construct viable identities, and objectify their cultures in dialogue with the larger systems that threaten them, in forms that can mobilize collective action. To do so, they must navigate the institutional, technological, as well as the symbolic and representational forms and conventions of national and transnational discourses in which they would participate. Indigenous groups such as the ones we met at the Encuentro, inform their cultural production with the interpretive frameworks and scenarios shared by a cosmopolitan group if supporters. In doing so, they regard events such as these with an ethnographic gaze, and must decide the adequacy of the templates to their values and needs. Performing or representing themselves through reproducing these forms in an intercultural and mulitvocal fashion, they are transforming them and producing a new scenario adequate to this historical moment.