Indigenism

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This article is about Ethnic nationalism. For Latin American policies regarding Indigenous peoples, see Indigenismo.

Indigenism, Native nationalism, or Indigenous nationalism is a kind of ethnic nationalism emphasizing the group's indigeneity to their homeland. This may be embraced by post-colonial anarchism as well as in neo-völkisch or national mysticist nationalism building on historical or pseudohistorical claims of ethnic continuity.

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Definition [edit]

While New World movements usually go by the name indigenism (notably in South America and in Mexico, "indigenismo" is a political force), the term autochthonism is encountered for Eastern European and Central Asian nationalisms.[1] The term indigenism(o) as used in the Americas was popularized by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1935-1991) in Latin America in the 1970s to 1980s, and in the 1980s to 1990s by Ward Churchill (b. 1947) in the United States (From a Native Son).

The question of who is indigenous may be less than straightforward, depending on the region under consideration. Thus, for the New World, in the Americas as well as in Australia, the question is rather straightforward, while it is less easy to answer in the case of South Africa.[2]

"Autochthonism" is an issue especially in those parts of Europe formerly under Ottoman control, i.e. the Balkans and Romania (see rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire). Originating in the 19th century, autochthonist nationalism affected the area throughout the 20th century. Writing in 1937, Nichifor Crainic celebrated Gândirea's role in making nationalism and Orthodoxy priorities in Romania's intellectual and political life:

The term 'ethnic' with its meaning of 'ethnic specificity' imprinted in all sorts of expressions of the people, as a mark of its original properties, has been spread for 16 years by the journal Gândirea. The same thing applies to the terms of autochthonism, traditionalism, Orthodoxy, spirituality and many more which became the shared values of our current nationalist language.
—[3]

Usage [edit]

Indigenism involves the suppression of certain aspects of history and the emphasis of others (to which there may be no direct continuity), as well as the selection of one of multiple sources of ancestry for a "people". It can be personal, as in W. E. B. Du Bois's black nationalism, despite his Dutch ancestry. It is also relative, since while nativists in the United States argue that European Americans are more indigenous to the United States than Mexican Americans and other more recent migrants, counterclaims posit European Americans as less indigenous than so-called Native Americans.[4]

The portrayal of the Christian wars against Al-Andalus as a Reconquista, or "reconquest" is an indigenist nationalist trope that evokes Iberia's pre-Muslim past. The Hutu Power ideology posited that the Hutu were the first, and therefore the legitimate, inhabitants of Rwanda, justifying the extermination of the Tutsi. The Arab–Israeli conflict involves competing claims to indigenity, with modern disputants to territory claiming a direct line of descent to its ancient inhabitant peoples - some of them mythical - such as the Philistines and the Canaanites.[4]

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism Pergamon Press, 1991, ISBN 978-0-08-041024-1, p. 80; Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, Central European University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-963-9116-97-9, p. 240. Karl Kaser, Elisabeth Katschnig-Fasch, Gender and Nation in South Eastern Europe: Anthropological Yearbook of European Cultures, Vol. 14, LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2006, ISBN 978-3-8258-8802-2, p. 89.
  2. ^ Lee (2006), p. 459: "As Murumbi (1994) has pointed out, the black peoples of Africa, whether hunter-gatherers, herders, farmers, or city dwellers, can all claim great antiquity on the continent. Thus any distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous must necessarily be invidious ones. A case in point: the Government of Botswana, home of over half of all the San peoples of Africa, refused to participate in the 1993–2003 UN Decade of the Indigenous People, on the grounds that in their country everyonewas indigenous (Mogwe, 1992). "
  3. ^ Crainic, in Caraiani, note 23
  4. ^ a b Zerubavel, Eviatar (2004). Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. University of Chicago Press. p. 103-106. 
  5. ^ Adam H. Becker, The Ancient Near East in the Late Antique Near East: Syriac Christian Appropriation of the Biblical East in Gregg Gardner, Kevin Lee Osterloh (eds.) Antiquity in antiquity: Jewish and Christian pasts in the Greco-Roman world, p. 396, 2008, Mohr Siebeck, ISBN 978-3-16-149411-6
  • Churchill, Ward (1996). From a Native Son. Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-553-8. 
  • Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism - Human Rights and the Politics of Identity, University of California Press (2003), ISBN 978-0-520-23554-0.
  • Richard Borshay Lee, "Twenty-first century indigenism", Anthropological Theory, Vol. 6, No. 4, 455-479 (2006)

External links [edit]
Related concepts
Ethnology
Groups by region
Americas
Asia
Multiethnic society
Ideology and
ethnic conflict
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