Global flows or global flaws: indigenous peoples in the modern global conjuncture

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

University of Oklahoma

Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

Global flows or global flaws: indigenous peoples in the modern global conjuncture

Chudak Aleksandr Y.

Norman, OK, United States

The present essay is an attempt to consider the place and role of indigenous peoples in the modern world of global flows and shifting social, political, economic, and cultural environments. I discuss some strategies, developed by the Native communities in order to adapt themselves to the new conditions, yet maintaining their ethnocultural identities. Special emphasis is placed on the autochthonal North American nations' multifaceted response to the ongoing globalisation, colonisation, and cultural assimilation, concomitant with these processes. I consider, in particular, the pan-Indian movement in the context of these processes. But some examples of the indigenous communities from other parts of the globe are provided in order to illustrate and substantiate the argumentation as well.

I utilise the Western--non-Western dichotomy, albeit its evident flaws as an essentially homogenising and oversimplified framework, intentionally for convenience. Different levels of identity, related sociopolitical discourse, and cultural mobilisations, from local to metacultural and transnational, various means of «resistance» and response to the global processes and their consequences, and the influence of these processes on the indigenous communities, both positive and negative, are considered.

Key words: indigenous peoples, modernity, globalisation, identity, sovereignty, colonialism and decolonisation

Чудак Александр Юрьевич - магистр, антропология и этнология; магистрант, антропология. Студент магистратуры, департамент антропологии, Университет Оклахомы, Норман, Окла-хома, США; ассистент-исследователь, департамент археологии, Музей естественной исто-рии Сэм Ноубл, Норман, Оклахома, США

Коренные народы в современной глобальной конъюнктуре

Настоящее эссе - попытка рассмотреть место и роль коренных народов в современном мире глобальных течений и постоянно изменяющейся социальной, политической, экономической и культурной среды. Обсуждаются некоторые стратегии, которые используются коренными сообществами, чтобы адаптироваться к новым условиям, при этом сохраняя свою этнокультурную идентичность. Особое внимание уделено автохтонным народам Северной Америки и многостороннему механизму их реакции на продолжающиеся процессы глобализации, колонизации и культурной ассимиляции, сопутствующей этим процессам, в частности паниндейскому движению; также приводятся примеры коренных сообществ в других частях света, чтобы проиллюстрировать и дополнить аргументацию.

Ключевые слова: коренные народы, современность, глобализация, идентичность, суверенность, колониализм и деколонизация

We live in a strange world. Unstoppable technological progress, increasing networking on various levels and of various scales, and high mobility of modern people expand our knowledge of world yet shortening the distances. The boundaries are being blurred and «as transnational migration and connections brings distant worlds into immediate juxtaposition, the production of meaning can no longer be understood in terms of the classic distinctions: here/there, self/other, similarity/difference» (Landzelius 2002: 42). The modern world is rapidly changing and globalising. This process is inexorable, and it is not willing to wait for the «retarded». Historically, it has been established that the role of the «retarded» is often assigned to the indigenous peoples. But does it reflect the real state of things? Unlikely.

The necessity to take interests and voices of the indigenous peoples into consideration has been discussed thoroughly and is beyond doubt. Such a necessity regarding the specific context of the modern global environment appears to be self-evident as well. A rather extensive body of literature and longstanding critical anthropological studies have demonstrated that we need to abandon the view of Native communities as necessarily retrograde and resisting what Western people are used to labelling as «progress» and «civilisation». In general, indigenous peoples are willing, to a greater or lesser extent, to take part and to determine their locus in the constantly and inevitably changing and globalising world. Another question is how they want to participate. Rather than being merely assimilated, yielding to the «global flows» that spring from the Western world, Native peoples want to keep up with the times yet preserving their cultures, values, historical experiences, and asserting their inherent rights to land and self-government (Champagne, Goldberg 2005: 49). As Champagne and Goldberg point out, «the challenges of the future are both exciting and dangerous. Native communities may develop many... ways to preserve their communities and cultures, while accommodating to the intensity and globalization of the world economy, culture, and technology. On the other hand, the forces of markets, globalized culture, technology, and information may threaten to undermine the institutions and values of Native communities» (ibid.). Indeed, the shifting environments - sociopolitical, economic, and cultural - of the twenty-first century present the challenges for indigenous communities, because self-isolation and dropping out of the global game is hardly a good choice (and it will hardly even work due to the scope and rate of changes), and thus, in order to not only adapt but to persist and survive, they need to develop the kinds of strategies appropriate to keep on playing.

The present essay is an attempt to consider the place and role of indigenous peoples in the modern world of global flows and shifting social, political, economic, and cultural environments. It is also a brief summary of some of the studies in the field of critical indigenous theory that have been conducted during the last several decades since the first formulations of postcolonial theory began to appear. I will focus particularly on those studies that have been conducted since the late 1990s and early 2000s, when different aspects of indigenous life («including struggles for rights, resources, recognition, and language vitality in both the national and international arenas; the repatriation and sovereignty movements; the development of tribal casinos, tourist complexes, cultural centers, and media outlets; continued social and economic marginalization of many indigenous peoples; and challenges posed by neoliberalism and globalization to tribal governments and economies» [Strong 2005: 255]) as well as the «research sites and topics, research methodologies, theoretical orientations, and forms of representation» in indigenous studies (ibid.) have undergone the most drastic changes. Identity, sovereignty, the processes of federal recognition and acknowledgement, and the collaborative research methodologies have become principal topics in the contemporary ethnographic literature. In this essay, I discuss some strategies, developed by the Native communities in order to adapt themselves to the new conditions, yet maintaining their ethnocultural identities. Special emphasis is placed on the autochthonal North American nations' multifaceted response to the ongoing globalisation, colonisation, and cultural assimilation concomitant with these processes. I consider, in particular, the pan-Indian movement in the context of these processes. But some examples of the indigenous communities from other parts of the globe are provided in order to illustrate and substantiate the argumentation as well.

Before moving on to the discussion, I need to clarify the key terms, one of which is «indigenous». Pauline Strong (referring to Ronald Niezen) points out that «indigenous peoples» is a relatively recent designation in the United States and Canada, where it reveals an identity that is connected to the growing global movement (Strong 2005: 255; Niezen 2003), which makes the term «indigenous» the integral part of global discourse per se. It is not, however, an identity shared by all Native North American nations since for majority of them fundamental sense of their collective identity is local - on the communal, tribal, or national level. Strong accentuates the fact that both the study of the emerging indigenous identities and their interrelations with local identities, and ongoing processes of globalisation, are still in their initial stages; moreover, most of these studies are historical or legal rather than ethnographic (Anaya 1996; Barsh 1983; Hanson 2004;Morris 1992; Mu-ehlebach 2001; Strong 2005: 255). Nonetheless, the necessity of anthropological scrutiny of globalisation and place of indigenous peoples in globalising world has been acknowledged as well (see Appadurai 1996; 2000; Tsing 2000). Moreover, since the early 2000s, when both the term «indigenous peoples» and the studies of the emergent Native identities were relatively recent, indigenous studies have flourished and developed into a significant and substantial part of social science in whole and of anthropology in particular. And while the early indigenous studies were influenced heavily by Western scholarship, more recent tendencies demonstrate that «Native studies is capable of developing its own analytic and methodological frameworks outside those determined by traditional disciplines or the Western academy» (Simpson, Smith 2014: 22). A growing body of literature by Native scholars is an illustration of this trend; furthermore, some of these works reassess and reconceptualise such critically important notions as sovereignty and identity (e.g., Cobb 2005; Ramirez 2007; Cattelino 2008; Carpio 2011; Perley 2011; Simpson 2014).

It is necessary to specify that the term «indigenous» is being homogenised and utilised here intentionally as opposed to «Western» in order to take into account the phenomenon of indigenous identity in the global context as such, to provide an outline of modern issues faced, to a greater or lesser extent, by many non-Western societies. Nonetheless, one should acknowledge that the real state of affairs cannot be reduced to this simple binary «Western and non-Western», as it used to be in some of the early postcolonial studies (e.g. Said 1978; for critiques of this generalisation see, e.g., Spivak 1988 Said's work and the changes it provoked were, however, a positive turn from older practices of ethnographic cross-cultural representation towards an acknowledgement of necessity of devel-oping new methodologies and addressing the problematic nature of ethnographic authority in the context of portraying “others” while realising that “ethnographic writing cannot entirely escape the reductionist use of dichotomies and essences” (Clifford 1988: 23).).

Let us now pass on to the discussion of indigenous globalisation. In 2000, Aijun Appadurai, one of the most prominent social theorists in the fields of modernity and globalisation, published the article where he introduced a new view of global processes and the phenomenon he defined as the «grassroots globalisation» (Appadurai 2000). The central idea is the necessity of studying the globalising world from a broader perspective than it has been studied hitherto. Appadurai promoted the notion of a double apartheid taking place nowadays. The first form of the apartheid is the crescent distinction between the vernacular discourses about the global and those found among the academia.

(This is, in fact, part of an unfortunate tendency existing in ethnography, which results, in particular, in an ambivalence toward the discipline on the part of Native people themselves. This tendency is the discipline's handling of important information that might potentially benefit indigenous people that are studied. But, filtered through the scholarly translational techniques and deliberate and conscious decisions that the ethnographers make in the process of writing ethnography, both style-wise and argumentation-wise, it often comes out encrypted, saturated with specific terminology and jargon, and often finds its place in costly books or repositories where a lay reader is just not supposed to be, which alienates this information from those who own it and whom it might benefit (Bucko 2004: 175). This is essentially a form of implicit structural power, or a reification of Cliffordian «ethnographic authority» (see Clifford 1988: 21-54), an epistemological instrument that has been utilised to create and maintain an uneven redistribution of knowledge, a disbalance in «privilege» to produce and consume it - an issue that has been covered rather extensively in postmodern and indigenous scholarship. Therefore, one of the important ethical challenges that one should address when doing ethnography is breaking up «monophonic authority» (Clifford 1988: 50) and making the process of production of ethnographic knowledge more polyphonic, or «heteroglossic».)

The second form of the apartheid Appadurai talks about is remoteness of the grassroots from the internal globalisation discourses as well as from the global debates. In both cases, the grassroots find themselves on an unenviable position of the global outsiders. However, in order to counterbalance it, the social forms emerge that aim to contest and subvert these tendencies and to create certain forms of knowledge transference and social mobilisation which are independent from the global capital and nation-state government. These social forms are labelled as «grassroots globalisation» and represent the globalisation on behalf of those who count as the outsiders, «from below» (Appadurai 2000: 3). Appadurai advocates this kind of globalisation as important for society as well as for an academic study of the social processes. The conception of «globalisation from below» is one of the leitmotifs in the present essay.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable illustrations of the grassroots globalisation in practice is the pan-Indianism (or pan-indigenism), largely associated with Native North America but widespread among other indigenous communities as well. In the present work I consider only the North American «core» pan-Indian movement.

A basic sketch of a phenomenon of pan-Indian movement was provided by James Howard (1955). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a period of augmented and often catastrophic shift in social, political, and economic systems of many tribal communities. The traditional tribal life collapsed and the native religions, providing a cultural and spiritual background for preservation of these societies, hardly converged with the changed daily realities on the reservations (Howard 1955: 215; Swan 1999: ix). Many of the Indian tribes at that time seemed to be being assimilated. Nonetheless, as Howard points out (1955: 215), this was seeming rather than real since instead of embedding themselves into the dominant culture, many Native American tribes, by means of loss of some elements of particular tribal distinctiveness, modification of other, and even invention of the new ones, coalesced into the metatribal pan-Indian culture, which has become a means of articulation of a dynamic postmodern indigenous identity in Native North America (Herle 1994: 81; Strong 2012: 32).

This correlation between dynamism and continuity in Native identities is explicitly apparent in urban indigenous communities. While having urban addresses, many Native Americans still maintain tribal identities by means of constant movement between city and reservation, or through the creation of «native hubs» (see Ramirez 2007). At the conceptual level, for many of them these specific tribal identities are still stronger than the metatribal pan-Indian identity, but it is a point of variability (Carpio 2011: xxiii). Overall, despite the tendency of the distinctions between tribes to be played down in modem Native American consciousness (Hultkrantz 1997: 123n), «contrary to acculturation theory and the beliefs of public administrators, Pan-Indianism and the return to «the Indian way» is not a retrogression but a positive advance toward full integration of... Indian groups into the larger American society» (Sanford 1971: 222). However, preservation of the specific tribal identities is significant as well.

Some notions of what was subsequently labelled as «pan-Indianism» (or at least of its historical and political prerequisites) were proposed by Alfred Kroeber as far back as the mid-1950s. Kroeber considered the concept of tribe and came to the conclusion that it is a Western colonial construct created in order to administer and negotiate with Native American peoples. It was made for convenience, for it was more practicable for Euro- Americans to deal and negotiate with representatives of one large ethnic (although not political) entity rather than with these of multitude of small, mobile, and diverse groups (Kroeber 1955: 304, 313; Leacock 1983: 264). Analyzing these notions, Eleanor Leacock suggests that since tribe can be considered, apart from everything else, as a colonial product, tribal leadership and social organization were not only obtruded upon Native peoples from outside by colonisers, but also emerged as a necessary means of resistance and contestation (Leacock 1983: 264). As for the modern world, sense of tribal identity has not significantly changed its function, still presenting a means of resistance not only in the context of colonialism, but also in the global conjuncture.

But it is important to understand the complexities of identity and sovereignty. Identity, an inherently heterogenous entity, may take different forms and be articulated via different practices and policies - tribal citizenship defined by blood quantum (see, e.g., Dennison 2012), identity exercised through language and language revitalisation (see, e.g., Field and Kroskrity 2009; Perley 2012), or even through participation in cultural and ceremonial life of a community when it becomes difficult at the political level to articulate tribal identity and sovereignty in other ways, as in case with the Yuchi tribe of Oklahoma, which is still struggling to gain federal recognition (see Jackson 2003).

Sovereignty, closely tied to the issues of identity and authority, is another important and rather complicated part of the contemporary indigenous studies and indigenous lives. The recent development of indigenous scholarship has allowed to reevaluate the concept of sovereignty as applied to the Native peoples and to further elaborate on the various aspects and levels of sovereignty (e.g., Cobb 2005, on theory of sovereignty in the context of Native people in the settler-state; Cobb 2008, on indigenous cultural sovereignty embodied in such project as the National Museum of the American Indian; Dennison 2012, 2017, on the politics of sovereignty, an inherently entangled nature of sovereignty, and the power dynamics in negotiations between settler-states and native peoples; Rifkin 2009, on «indigenising» sovereignty; Simpson 2014, on refusal as a powerful instrument in exercising sovereignty).

Although Howard's 1955 article is a reasoning on a particular case of pan-Indianism in Oklahoma, the features described there, including War, Stomp, and Eagle dances The revival of dance societies is a matter of special interest in the context of pan-Indianism and Native identities due to the fact that until the War dance revival among the Kiowa-Apache in Oklahoma in the 1960s, this trait had been almost forgotten, no living person knew exactly how to dance. Thus, the revived dance appeared to be a blend of ethnographic description and Indian creativity (Bittle 1962: 156; Sanford 1971: 222-223). This particular case is a demonstration of the crucial importance and necessity of cultural revitalisation among indigenous peoples in the global context. (see also

Howard 1983: 71), pow wow (see also Kurath 1957), feather costumes, and «Indian stores», are characteristic and common for the movement in general. Such trait as the peyote religion A widespread intertribal religion practiced by indigenous peoples of North America, particularly in the United States (excluding Native Hawaiians and Native peoples of Alaska) but also in Canada and Mexico, that originated in its contemporary form in the late nineteenth century in the part of the “Indian Territory” that is now the State of Oklahoma. Its roots can be traced back to the pre-Columbian ceremonial practices of Mexican cultures, particularly the Aztec, Huichol, and Tarahumara (La Barre 1989: 7, 33), but there is an archaeological evidence that indigenous peoples of North America have been using peyote since as far back as 5,700 years ago (El-Seedi et al. 2005; Terry et al. 2006). Omer Stewart, however, makes a somewhat bold assumption that inhabitants of the lower Rio Grande area and the adjacent parts of Mexico were familiar with Lophophora and its psychoactive properties for as many as ten thousand years prior to the discovery of the Americas (Stewart 1987: 17, 30). (It is unclear on what grounds Stewart makes this supposition because he does not make any references whatsoever, so this is questionable.) Legally incorporated as the organisation of the Native American Church and its various chapters, Peyotism is a syncretic faith with a Christian substratum, based on veneration and ceremonial con-sumption of peyote (a small spineless cactus Lophophora williamsii, which is known to contain several psychoactive alkaloids including mescaline), which is considered a sacrament, commonly referred to as a “Medicine”. A typical peyote service, or meeting, is an overnight ceremony con-ducted in the tepee, and it includes prayer, singing to the accompaniment of water drum and rattle, consumption of peyote (as a specially prepared powder, dried buttons, or tea), “and the completion of a series of ritual gestures under the direction of an experienced ritual leader often referred to as a “roadman” (Jackson 2004: 187) and other ceremonial officials assisting a roadman. is probably less common for the pan-Indian gatherings nowadays. However, Peyotism is still regarded as one of the most prominent traits, being the «official religion» of the pan-Indian movement (Howard 1983: 71). (See more thorough discussion of Peyotism in this context below.) Interestingly, instead of a simple adoption by one nation of a certain cultural trait or complex from another nation, diffusion of the pan-Indianism more often involves the adoption of certain components from a set of features of a generalised, aggregative «Indian» culture (an illustration of Appadurai's «imagined world» [see Appadurai 1996: 27-47]) by groups or individuals (Howard 1983: 72), namely those components which are not only capable to survive because they can be adapted and fit in with changed circumstances, but also are able to develop into a new kind of sociocultural structure, suiting the Zeitgeist.

A crucial ideological and cultural aspect of the pan-Indian movement is the aforementioned peyote religion of the Native American Church. In his dissertation on the peyote religion in 1938, Weston La Barre foretold that «the [peyote religion] may be expected to spread for some time in the future, but when its inevitable decadence and probable ultimate disappearance will have been accomplished, we may have witnessed in it the last of the great intertribal religious movements of the American Indian» (La Barre 1989: 121). Nonetheless, now we can state that La Barre's assumption was quite pessimistic and overall erroneous. The peyote religion is still alive and flourishing in many parts of the «Indian Country» in the United States (as well as in Canada and Mexico) where it initially was and still is one of the pivotal means of both decolonisation practice and adaptation of Native communities to the drastic changes in sociopolitical, economical, and cultural environment. (In the discussion of adaptation, however, one can easily fall into a trap of many modern - or I should say, postmodern - discussions, such as the studies of revitalisation movements [see Harkin 2004], taking past mistakes of the Said- influenced scholarship into account yet still not allotting enough space for Native agency.)

At the same time, being a considerable part of a broader pan-Indian movement, the peyote religion is a means of globalisation as well, which is illustrated even by the names of the religious institution at different times, from the numerous small local «chapters», to the Union Church in the early twentieth century, to the Native American Church, established in Oklahoma in 1918, to the Native American Church of the United States (1944), to the Native American Church of North America (1955) (La Barre 1989: 217n). The peyote movement's centralisation and coalescence of the scattered chapters into the large institution of the Native American Church was caused and catalysed by the necessity realised by indigenous peoples to cope with the historical trauma, unite in the face of settler-colonialism, and endure not by means of warfare and an overt ideological confrontation, which was embodied in such aggressive nativistic - and unsuccessful - movements as the Ghost Dance (see Mooney 1896), but rather through smooth adaptation. It was an important step for the church that historically has faced a lot of legislative difficulties and persecution towards its incorporation as a legal organisation in 1918. However, under the banner of the Native American Church, the multitude of local chapters with various traditions and ceremonial exist (see, e.g., Swan 1999: 23-48 for a detailed account of the major ceremonial types).

Despite the existing evidence of particular tribes' religious and ideological resistance to the distribution of the peyote religion, its great strength and influence ultimately led to the separate tribes' mutual reinforcement toward a pan-Indian denomination (La Barre 1989: 293). Hultkrantz writes that «from all the evidence... it seems that pan-Indianism and Peyotism have belonged together from the very moment that the Peyote movement emerged as a brotherhood over the tribal boundaries, that is, with the organization of the Native American Church. It is probably no coincidence that this Church was formed at about the same time as. pan-Indianism became a reality» (Hultkrantz 1997: 130).

Overall, the Native American Church, since its very beginning, has probably been - and certainly still is - one of the most explicit illustrations of how the mechanisms of globalisation work in the indigenous communities. As La Barre points out, «all Indians., of whatever tribe, are welcome in the meetings of all other tribes» (La Barre 1989: 60) and «.the very origin legend of the peyote indicates a period of beginning inter-tribal contacts, and peyotism in later dates became the specific vehicle of inter-tribal friendships, when mutual warfare disappeared» (La Barre 1989: 60-61).

Another illustration of the globalist component in the indigenous discourse is the increasing Pentecostal movement among the Native Americans (one of the most recent thorough studies is the one conducted by Kimberly Marshall (2016) among the Navajo neo-Pentecostal community). However, despite the nature of the Native American Church and of the pentecostal denomination spreading among Native Americans (and other indigenous peoples in all parts of the globe [see Marshall 2016: 181-196]), which allows us to consider both these movements in the context of globalisation, there are some substantial distinctions, demonstrating in fact different mechanisms of globalisation embodied in these phenomena. Although in both cases Christianity is the clear-cut and solid substratum, the Native American Church adopted the Christian symbolism, philosophy, and theology only partially, leaving the considerable part for traditional practices as a substratum as well (and making Peyotism a syncretic religion), and thus exercising the preservation of Native identities and a resistance to the colonial process, alongside with adaptation and partial deliberate cultural assimilation. At the same time, the American Indian Pentecostals actively resist spiritual part of their «Nativeness» and traditional lifestyles, showing in this aspect much more considerable presence of Western component and reinterpreting the traditional beliefs as «flirtation with dangerous and inherently negative powers», nevertheless still retaining some elements of them (see the belief in skinwalkers, witches, and in the power of medicine bundles among the contemporary Navajo pentecostals [Marshall 2016: 1-6, 71-78]), while asserting and preserving their «Nativeness» by means of preservation of the long-held values, community identities, kinship structures, and language, demonstrating thereby the distinctive kind of indigenous globalisation, which Marshall labels as the «resonant rupture».

Pan-Indianism, as a metatribal, or «supertribal» entity, inevitably shifts the identity politics from local level to the level of the nation-state and transnational affairs, which allows to consider the pan-Indian movement as an illustration (at least partial) of what Appadurai defines as «culturalism», i.e. the conscious mobilisation of cultural distinctions in the service of a broader politics, national or transnational (Appadurai 1996: 15). Culturalist movements, counter-national and metacultural, are the corollary of the transformation of cultural distinctions in the modern global environment (Appadurai 1996: 15-16), and thus should become the subject of a special emphasis in the contemporary anthropological studies, alongside with multitude of other modern global social movements, such as indigenous and human rights, environmentalism, and feminist concerns, which extend themselves through various non-governmental organisations and, again, shift the level of a sociopolitical discourse from the local concerns to the more global affairs on the national and transnational scales (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Tsing 2000: 331). global american autochthonal

The illustration of the positive effects of grassroots globalisation, or putting it differently, of how indigenous peoples adapt and flow into the global processes yet asserting their identities and sovereignty, is the Florida Seminole gaming industry studied by Jessica Cattelino (2008). In this study, Cattelino considers this relatively new type of industry among Native Americans, and how the gambling proceeds correlate with consumption in these communities. Subverting the popular stereotype of a «good Indian» being necessarily a poor Indian, and, consequently, the claims of the nation's «sell-out», Cattelino describes the tribal projects into which these incomings are expended, including the social reproduction (cultural programmes and language revitalisation projects) and various kinds of tribal structures. The Seminole case (and some other similar cases, like the Chickasaw and Cherokee casinos in Oklahoma) demonstrates how grassroots globalisation works in practice and how the mechanisms of globalisation are utilised by indigenous peoples to adapt themselves to modern global conjuncture as well as to maintain their sovereignty The other side of the coin is a phenomenon of cultural appropriation and/or misrepresentation of “indigenous cultural traits” (or of what is supposed to be “their traits”). This negative deriva-tive of globalisation is a result of the dominant culture's exploitation of elements of a minority culture, an exercise of symbolic power or symbolic violence (Bourdieu and Thompson 1991: 163-170) which in colonial discourse emerged as a means of maintenance of hierarchy, usually without permission and with little or no understanding of what is appropriated, thus promoting misinterpretations and stereotypes (e.g., the romanticised and commodified images of “Indians” such as the Disney's Pocahontas (see Gleach 2006), the “Apache Pizza” cafe chain in Ireland, or the numerous stores all over the world selling “true indigenous” items as a tourist attraction)..

Another illustration is the Yakama people grassroots activism (Jacob 2013). Being a demonstration of what Michelle Jacob describes as «radical indigenism» (Jacob 2013: 125), her work sheds light upon the particular strategies of adaptation and maintenance of identities in a particular community. By means of different sociocultural projects, including «critical pedagogy» (indigenisation of the educational system, co-opting sharing of the pan-Indian knowledge as well as the traditional Yakama), dancing, language and food revitalisation, the Yakama community implements the strong decolonising praxis (Jacob 2013: 48) and the grassroots globalisation, exercising both local tribal and translocal pan- Indian identities.

It is important to understand that the discussion of globalising world, if looked at through the prism of indigenous peoples' place and role, goes in most cases hand in hand with the discussion of (de)colonisation. And the phenomenon of grassroots globalisation, being dual in its nature, is thus an aspect of both colonisation and resistance to it. The same statement is applicable to the pan-Indian movement. As for the Yakama, this particular case in principle is a reflection of the much broader set of processes occurring now in the Indian country.

As opposed to the grassroots and pan-Indian movements, which can be considered as a means of «indirect resistance» to globalisation, the reverse of the medal is the diverse reflections of primordialism. As Appadurai defines it, drawing from earlier anthropological works on ethnicity, primordialist thesis asserts that such senses as those of group or ethnic identity, land, or language inherently result from those sentiments binding small and close groups (frequently based upon ideas of kinship) (Appadurai 1996: 140). In other words, primordialism is founded on the arguments that people sharing a culture also share a collective identity, this identity begets strong common sentiments, which ultimately set the basis of the group political and economic interests and claims (Comaroff, Stern 1994: 38). On the other hand, there is also a constructionist thesis, treating collective consciousness as a response to the specific particular circumstances on the part of population. From this viewpoint, reflections of an ethnic or nationalist consciousness can be considered as situational phenomenon (ibid.). Primordialist notions take place even in the inter-state relations within such international organisations as ASEAN (Balasubramaniam 1999). Nevertheless, in the modern global discourse, primordialist movements reveal their fallacies and irrationality in that their notions of identity gravitate towards isolationism and retrograde rejection of modernisation. More negative derivatives of primordialism include radical nationalism and acts of ethnic violence, often identified with religious fundamentalisms as well (Appadurai 1996: 140). Therefore, in the global conjuncture, various types of «indirect resistance» to global processes, i.e. the utilisation of global mechanisms by the indigenous communities as means of maintenance of identities and assertion of rights, like the grassroots globalisation and pan-Indian movement in particular, seem to be more «appropriate» and relevant means of indigenous peoples' adaptation to the changing circumstances.

Indigenous communities' struggles for recognition and self-determination in the globalising world are the result of considerable shift in their perception of the world as well as in how the world perceives them (Smith, Burke, Ward 2000: 3). In this way, indigenising of what Appadurai defined as mediascape (i.e. dissemination of the electronic capabilities, such as newspapers, magazines, television, Internet, to create and distribute information, and the images of the world begotten by these media [Appadurai 1996: 35]) is not only a means of upholding and strengthening of indigenous communities and identities (by means of increase in public awareness of the multiplicity in indigenous cultures and lifestyles as well as of the growing public concern for Native peoples' affairs, problems, and rights), but also a powerful instrument of indigenous adaptation to the changing global environment. Growing rates of mass media consumption all over the world make it a solid factor of resistance and agency (Appadurai 1996: 7). The expressive media, being the modem form of communication, becomes, among other factors, a means of cultural and language revitalisation, maintenance of community identities, assertion of rights, and articulation of concerns (Smith, Burke, Ward 2000: 4) - an indigenous voice in the global world.

A very important aspect of the modern global political conjuncture is the politicisation of ethnicity and its role in global flows. That is to say, the ethnic minorities' sense of identity is often utilised by the state governments, whether of the states they live in or of the alien ones, as an instrument in the political game peripeteias. Politicisation of ethnicity is a relatively recent phenomenon, which has emerged due to the creation and development of the contemporary nation-state system with its political and geographic boundaries (Chaliand 1989). As for this latter point, in his influential work on globalism and global flows, Appadurai (1996: 27-47, originally published in 1990) tends to underestimate the role of geographic aspect in general, and the aspect of geographic boundaries in particular, in modern sociopolitical and cultural analysis. Nonetheless, the numerous examples of ethno-nationalist and/or separatist movements among the ethnic minorities demonstrate the crucial importance of geographic aspect in the context of global flows, that is to say, how flows affect the concepts of geographic space, creating and changing them, and vice versa. At an individual level, spatial factor also determines and maintains people's sense of selfhood, cultural and ethnic identity.

The phenomenon of politicisation of ethnicity can be illustrated by the examples of ethno-nationalisms in the Middle East, in particular the Kurdish movements. Being estimated to number over 35 million, the Kurds, primarily concentrated in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, with sporadic communities in Syria, Germany, and ex-USSR states, are still an ethnic minority and the largest ethnic group without its own nation-state. By the example of the Kurds, Nader Entessar (1989) demonstrates how politicisation of ethnicity and claims of the particular ethnic minorities within the boundaries of the modern nation-states have created what he calls «a mosaic of discord», retarding the political integration of states and the processes of nation building (Entessar 1989: 84).

Kurdish sense of ethnic identity and wish for sovereignty, embodied in their attempts to establish an independent nation-state, Kurdistan, has been at different times either restrained or woven into the fabric of more large-scale economic and political games, including those of the Soviet Union and Britain (Entessar 1989: 83-84). Moreover, «in Iraq, the process of Kurdish integration has been hindered by the Iraqi government's glorification of Arabism and Arab nationalism, and by the policy of relocation of Kurds from their homeland to other parts ofthe country» (Entessar 1989: 85), which demonstrates the obstacles in the process of political integration due to the mechanisms of globalisation (in this case, Arabism and Arab nationalism) - Appadurai's ethno- and ideoscapes in practice. Despite these entanglements, the Kurds maintain ethnic and cultural identity, preserving their religion, language, and historical experience as binding symbols (Entessar 1989: 86; Harik 1972: 303), and persevering in their attempts to establish a nation-state. Due to the critical importance of geographic factor, inter alia, in the Kurdish problem, as shown by Entessar, the Kurdish case also demonstrates the aforementioned significance of geographic factor in the ethnic collective movements considered in the context of broader inter-regional relationships.

Some other examples of indigenous ethno-nationalist and separatist movements, being largely the derivatives of primordialism, as a means of active resistance to the processes of globalisation and assimilation, are, to name a few, the Kosovo War, which resulted in establishment of the partially recognised Republic of Kosovo in 2008, and the infamous Chechen--Russian Conflict, especially aggravated in the post-Soviet era, which culminated in the First and Second Chechen Wars in the 1990s-early 2000s, establishment of the unrecognised Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (1991-2000, government-in-exile 2000-2007), and the active genocide of Russian population in the early 1990s.

Despite some more or less local cases, like those of Kosovo and Chechnya, the contemporary ethno-nationalist movements are mostly «complex, large-scale, highly coordinated acts of mobilization, reliant on news, logistical flows, and propaganda across state borders» (Appadurai 1996: 163, emphasis added), like those of the Kurds or the pan-Indian movement in North America, in particular. However, all the cases are unified by a spatial factor as one of the crucial factors in identity politics. By spatial factor, the concepts of both a physical place and symbolic (shaped through oral narratives, connection with ancestors, and other means) space are implied (on place and space in indigenous worldview see, e.g., Basso 1996).

So, is the problem of indigenous peoples' locus and role in globalising world an illustration of a «global flaw» (meaning that many of the colonial attempts to root out «Nativeness» from indigenous people failed, particularly in the light of development of decolonial discourse in the modern world)? The answer is - yes and no. In the modern global conditions, indigenous peoples work out different strategies in order to adapt themselves to the ever-changing sociopolitical conjuncture. This is achieved, in particular, through the creation by Native communities of the multiple nodes of interaction with different parts of a complex transnational structure, while at the same time defining their loci within it by means of maintenance of ethnocultural identities, the mechanisms of grassroots globalisation and cultural revitalisation, through organisation of large-scale transborder movements, more fitting into the modern world of hyperbole than the local tribal movements. In other words, we observe the multifaceted processes of indigenisation of the global and globalisation of the indigenous. As Aihwa Ong (2005) remarks, and it is hardly doubtful, the political and cultural mobilisations have shifted in modern world from the context of the nation-state territories to the space of the assemblages beyond the state, such as transnational corporations, religions, and non-governmental organisations (but, again, the significance of geographic factor remains, as was stated above). And these assemblages should become the subjects of special emphasis for contemporary anthropology.

References

1. Anaya, S.J. 1996. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2. Appadurai, A. 2000. Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination. Public Culture 12 (1):1-19.

3. Balasubramaniam, V 1999. Dynamics of Non-Involvement in ASEAN: Rhetoric and Primordialism.

4. Economic and Political Weekly 34 (39): 2786-2790.

5. Barsh, R.L. 1983. Indigenous North America and Contemporary International Law. Oregon Law Review 62: 73-125.

6. Basso, K.H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

7. Bittle, W.E. 1962. The Manatidie: A Focus for Kiowa-Apache Tribal Identity. Plains Anthropologist 7 (17): 152-163.

8. Bourdieu, P., and J.B. Thompson. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

9. Bucko, R. 2004. Religion. In A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, edited by T. Biolsi, 171-195. Malden: Blackwell.

10. Carpio, M.V. 2011. Indigenous Albuquerque. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press.

11. Cattelino, J.R. 2008. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.

12. Chaliand, G., ed. 1989. Minority Peoples in the Age of Nation States. London: Pluto Press.

13. Champagne, D., and C. Goldberg. 2005. Changing the Subject: Individual versus Collective Interests in Indian Country Research. Wicazo Sa Review 20 (1), Colonization/Decolonization, II: 49-69.

14. Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, andArt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

15. Cobb, A.J. 2005. Understanding Tribal Sovereignty: Definitions, Conceptualizations, and Interpretations. American Studies 46 (3/4): 115-132.

16. Cobb, A.J. 2008. The National Museum of the American Indian as Cultural Sovereignty. In The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations, edited by A. Lonetree and A.J. Cobb, 331-352. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

17. Comaroff, J.L., and P.C. Stern. 1994. New Perspectives on Nationalism and War. Theory and Society 23 (1): 35-45.

18. Dennison, J. 2012. Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation.

19. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

20. Dennison, J. 2017. Entangled Sovereignties: The Osage Nation's Interconnections with Governmental and Corporate Authorities. American Ethnologist 44 (4): 684-696.

21. El-Seedi, H.R., P.A.G.M. De Smet, O. Beck, G. Possnert, J.G. Bruhn. 2005. Prehistoric Peyote Use: Alkaloid Analysis and Radiocarbon Dating of Archaeological Specimens of Lophophora from Texas. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 101: 238-242.

22. Entessar, N. 1989. The Kurdish Mosaic of Discord. Third World Quarterly 11 (4), Ethnicity in World Politics: 83-100.

23. Field, M.C. and P.V. Kroskrity. 2009. Introduction: Revealing Native American Language Ideologies. In Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country, edited by P. V Kroskrity and M.C. Field, 3-28. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

24. Gleach, F.W. 2006. Pocahontas: An Exercise in Mythmaking and Marketing. In New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations, edited and with an introduction by S.A. Kan and P.T. Strong, 433-455. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

25. Hanson, R.D. 2004. Globalization and Tribal Sovereignty. In A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, edited by T. Biolsi, 284-303. Malden / Oxford: Blackwell.

26. Harik, I.F. 1972. The Ethnic Revolution and Political Integration in the Middle East. International Journal of Middle East Studies 3 (3): 303-323.

27. Harkin, M.E., ed. 2004. Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

28. Herle, A. 1994. Dancing Community: Powwow and Pan-Indianism in North America. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 17 (2): 57-83.

29. Howard, J.H. 1955. Pan-Indian Culture of Oklahoma. The Scientific Monthly 81 (5): 215-220.

30. Howard, J.H. 1983. Pan-Indianism in Native American Music and Dance. Ethnomusicology 27 (1): 71-82.

31. Hultkrantz, В. 1997. The Attraction of Peyote: An Inquiry into the Basic Conditions for the Diffusion of the Peyote Religion in North America. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion, No. 33.

32. Jackson, J.B. 2003. Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance,Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, in cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington.

33. Jackson, J.B. 2004. Recontextualizing Revitalization: Cosmology and Cultural Stability in the Adoption of Peyotism among the Yuchi. In Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands, edited by M.E. Harkin, 183-205. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

34. Jacob, M.M. 2013. Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.