Tribal Worlds by Hosmer Brian;Nesper Larry; & Larry Nesper

Author:Hosmer, Brian;Nesper, Larry; & Larry Nesper [Hosmer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3408710
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Constructing Images

While nationalism of any kind needs to create external alterity, it also needs to project and create internal homogeneity. Nationalism, the politicization of culture into ethnicity, “require[s] the active construction of a non-existent homogeneity that constructs and binds the population of a territory onto a ‘community.’ ”22 The imagined community, then, has to be created in reality, and homogeneity has to be achieved according to the basic principles underlying the imagined ideal community. Homogenous spaces are first imagined, demanded, projected, and created in language. Once this ethnic or nationalistic rhetoric exists, however, it can wield practical power if read literally. Specific language use, even if created to have oppressed voices heard, can thus contribute itself to the silencing of voices. In fact, part of every nationalistic program has to be the silencing of heterogeneous voices, to render the harmony—or, depending on the perspective, cacophony—of historically diverse voices into a repetitive monotone and monologue. In the words of Manuhuia Barcham; “In the transference of ideas of group identity to the level of policy implementation, an operational ‘politics of difference’ based on this atemporal dichotomy of being/nonbeing may lead—through the synchronic reification of community—to the exclusion and associated increase in levels of oppression among the very groups that the ‘politics of difference’ were created to assist.”23 While a valid and useful political strategy, indigenous nationalism may end up hurting indigenous communities if it emphasizes cultural alterity to the point where ethnicity excludes specific, situational community alternatives to official realities.

George Tinker delineates four categorical differences between indigenous cultures and the West: spatial instead of temporal thought, communitarian instead of individual orientation, interrelatedness instead of alienation, and finally the notion that “ownership, even group ownership, of land is a foreign concept to Indian peoples.”24 These are probably the four most commonly held parts to the perceived alterity between indigenous and Western people in general. Ironically, all of these images have their roots in the Western romantic critique of the enlightenment rather than in cultural realities. The argument of indigenous alterity that these points make, then, follows the romantic idea of the “primitive,” who is free of alienation, knows no property, cannot exist except in the group, and has no concept of time.25

The notion of territoriality and ownership has been one of the main points deployed to counter industrial alienation and capitalist economies that have exploited indigenous peoples' resources. Eric Cheyfitz writes that even “communal property, … from a traditional Native standpoint is an oxymoron.”26 Judging from students in my classes, this notion is also very popular in mainstream education. If students know anything about indigenous peoples it is that American Indians lived a communitarian existence without personal or even communal property or a sense of the individual, but with an extremely heightened sense of sacredness. I have found it almost impossible to convince both Native and non-Native students that Plains Indians owned horses, for example. Animals, they argued, simply passed through the hands of people, but could never be owned because they were sacred.

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