ABSTRACT

I begin by noting that all three of the terms in the title of this chapter are deeply contested. Who counts as indigenous? How is the category defined, enforced, and mobilized? Scholars understand that encountering indigeneity is not to “describe it as it really is,” but to “explore how difference is produced culturally and politically” (García, 2008: 217). It is both a historically contingent formulation that changes over time, and a relational concept that emerges from a contested field of difference and sameness (de la Cadena and Starn, 2007: 4; Postero, 2013: 108). Development, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, is equally complex. Is it a discourse producing “underdevelopment” (Escobar, 2011) or a set of economic practices aimed at alleviating poverty and empowering marginalized populations? Is it a familiar and understandable wish to live better, or the name given to a capitalist system of commodity production deployed by powerful actors who are destroying the planet in the process (Dinzey-Flores, 2018: 166)? Who determines the goals and the beneficiaries (McMichael, 2010)? Even the notion of Latin America can and has been contested. Is it an idea (Mignolo, 2009)? Is it a geographical region south of the Rio Grande united by history? Do its borders extend into the US along with the diaspora of migrants inhabiting transnational labour circuits (Zilberg, 2004)? Do its populations share enough to make it a meaningful term of analysis (Goodale and Postero, 2013)? It can be argued that Latin America only came into being in opposition to the West, as a site where the West engaged in a struggle to tame the savage Other (Hall, 1996; Trouillot, 1991).