Page 61 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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32 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

This is a differentiation that identity politics dispossessed them. A major focus in their
has not been inclined to make, tending, as a struggles is the call for recognition of their
result, to neglect the complex and contested ‘land rights’ and claims of ownership of the
relationship between individuals, groupings, lands where they used to reside before the
and collectivities. Since individuals and European invasion. As they had often been
collectivities are interchangeable emotion- stateless nomadic populations, they had no
ally in identity politics, questions of repre- official land titles registered in their name, as
sentation, accountability, and governability would be the case under a bureaucratic state
have tended to be ignored (Bourne, 1987; apparatus. As the lands they claim are often
Cain and Yuval-Davis, 1990; Yuval-Davis, now either privately or state owned, their
1994, 2006c). The politics of belonging is claims have frequently been faced with fierce
where the sociology of emotions and the resistance by settler societies and states, at
sociology of power intersect. the same time as they are endorsed by human
To illustrate the different ways identities, rights discourse.
citizenships, and belonging(s) interrelate in One of the questions that arise in the
different modes of the politics of belonging, attempts to define who the indigenous inhab-
I shall now turn briefly to exploring narra- itants of a particular territory are concerns
tives of belonging of both indigenousness the temporal dimension. Although in the nar-
and diasporism. ratives of indigenous people’s movements
‘they have occupied a specific territory from
time immemorial’(Abu-Saad and Champagne,
2001: 158), usually the crucial date of authen-
DISCOURSES OF INDIGENOUSNESS ticity is fixed as that of occupation at the time
of European colonization. This can prove to
To be an indigene means to ‘really’ belong to be Eurocentric. It constructs the past as if his-
a place, and to have the most ‘authentic’ tory started when contact with the Europeans
claim for rights over it. The discourse of was established, and covers up previous
‘indigenousness’ has been used by hege- population movements and colonizations (as
monic majorities as an exclusionary means to happened in Algeria, for instance, with the
limit immigration, withhold citizenship Arab settlement, and, in the case of
rights, call for repatriation, and in its most Amerindians, with empires such as those of
extreme forms, for ‘ethnic cleansing’. In such the Aztecs and the Mayas).
a discourse, the immutable link of people, Another question, however, even more
state, and territory is formulated in its most central to our discussion here, concerns the
racialized mode. form of ownership to be claimed by those
However, the discourse of ‘indigenous- ‘land rights’ movements. Should land be
ness’ has also played a central role in the given to individual members of the ‘first
politics of inclusion and recognition, of claim- nation’, in a way that would not limit their
ing rights. It is used by movements of freedom to sell it? Or should it be transferred
the largely excluded, dispossessed, and mar- collectively, to families/households, or to ‘the
ginalized remnants of societies that existed community’ as a whole in the form of a
before or on the margins of settler and other Trust? Who should then have the decision-
nation-states (Feldman, 2001; Stasiulis and making power in these Trusts? And who
Yuval-Davis, 1995). These remnants are fre- should be included in these ‘communities’
quently seen, by themselves and by others, as or collectivities? Very often there are bitter
an ‘organic’ part of the land and the land- conflicts between certain kinship groups of
scape, and all other inhabitants are seen as aboriginal people who each claim that only
part of the ‘imposing society’ (to use an they are the rightful inheritors of a specific
Australian Aboriginal expression) who territory and that other Aborigines, who are