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Chapter Nine: Indigenous People, Ethnic Groups, and the Nation–State At the present time indigenous societies that believe it is immoral not to share with one’s kin or with those less fortunate than oneself are . . . considered backward, for this surely hampers capital accumulation and therefore “progress” as the modern world defines it.
Official statements frequently justify the extension of government control over tribal populations as an effort to bring them peace, health, happiness, and other benefits of civilization . . . But, undoubtedly, the extension of government control was directly related to protecting the economic interests of nonindigenous peoples moving into formerly exclusive tribal areas.
There is a museum exhibit in Jakarta, Indonesia, of a Javanese wedding; the guests are arranged around the bride and groom, each dressed to represent a different Indonesian ethnic group, of which there are hundreds. The exhibit is reminiscent of a early nineteenth-century painting we mentioned earlier by the British painter Sir David Wilkie, Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo,in which all the various groups that made up the British nation–state and empire—Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Black, and so on—are depicted together reading of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon. Indonesia is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. It is also one of the most officially tolerant toward ethnic diversity. Ethnic tolerance is incorporated into education programs and "hate speech" is a crime. But it is a tolerance with definite limits. Java is the dominant island in Indonesia, and the museum exhibit suggests, said Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1993:24), that minority groups are "invited" into the nation, but only as long as they bow to Javanese standards. One of the casualties of the expansion of the culture of capitalism is cultural diversity. As noted in Chapter 4, one of the functions of the nation–state is to integrate, peacefully if possible, violently if necessary, the diverse peoples within its borders into a common culture. At best, minority cultures are integrated into the larger culture in superficial ways—dress, art, dance, music, and food are maintained and represented as the culture itself. At worst, however, policies of the nation–state may lead to ethnocide, the destruction of culture, or, in more extreme instances, genocide, the destruction of a people. The dilemma of minority groups in the modern nation–state is particularly evident in Indonesia because it officially recognizes and celebrates diversity but this does not stop the nation–state from systematically destroying the culture of indigenous peoples. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in her book In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, described the fate of the Meratus Dyak, who subsist on swidden agriculture and gathering and hunting, and, while relatively isolated in the Meratus mountains, frequently trade with other groups. Their culture requires that they frequently move to establish new garden plots. Individuals also travel to maintain political contact with other Meratus groups, travel being a source of prestige. However, according to Tsing (1993:41), the Indonesian government sees the Meratus as uncivilized, stuck in a timeless, archaic condition outside modern history. Furthermore, the government attribute condition to their mobility and travel across the forest landscape. From the state’s perspective, Meratus mobility constitutes "seminomadism" and labels them as runaways from state discipline and a threat to national security. For the Meratus, however, mobility is a sign of personal autonomy. In Indonesia, there are over 1.5 million members of what the government calls "isolated populations." Most, like the Meratus, live in small, scattered mountain settlements. To transform these societies into forms acceptable to the Indonesian government, they established the Management of Isolated Populations, a program that operates, to quote one official document, to guide "the direction of their social, economic, cultural and religious arrangements in accord with the norms that operate for the Indonesian people" (Tsing 1993:92). To meet the goals of the project the government devised various strategies that amount largely to attempts to discipline these populations and bring them under government control. One strategy is resettlement. The government builds clustered housing and moves isolated populations to them. The state justifies this housing by saying it is more modern, but in fact it makes everyone visible, keeps them in one place, enables government control, and in some cases creates settlements designed specifically for military securities. The Meratus quickly caught on to the government’s game and built their villages with clustered housing so they would "look good if the government comes to visit" (Tsing 1993:93). The government also initiated nutrition programs to reorganize the eating habits of isolated populations. The Meratus were given a demonstration in which locally unavailable meats and vegetables were prepared "the right way." The Meratus were considered unordered in their eating habits; as one village head explained: "[Indonesians] drink in the morning," referring to the typical morning diet of coffee or tea and a pastry, "and then have two meals during the day. We [Meratus] sometimes eat five times a day and sometimes once a day. It’s not ordered." (cites Tsing 1993:93) But eating habits are dictated by work schedules, and in farming or hunting communities one can eat at very different times. For government planners even the way food is prepared is supposed to follow national standards; one government official complained that the Meratus butchered a chicken but cooked it without sour spices or chili peppers. To please government authorities the Meratus leaders now see to it that the chickens are cooked "properly when authorities visit." The government also exercised control over isolated populations by introducing family planning programs. Once again, there was a distinct difference in how the government saw the program and how the Meratus viewed it. The program was essentially an attempt by the nation–state to discipline the population into following state-mandated views of family form and reproductive practices. In the early 1980s the state began a program to encourage women to use IUDs or take birth control pills. To advance the program the government encouraged a local male leader, Pa’an Tinito, to enroll women in the program. He signed up women, but it became apparent that they had little idea of what the program was about, and expressed shock when Tinito explained to the men the purpose of contraception. The men were shocked; how could the government possibly want them to limit the size of their population? Weren’t communities already too small and weak? The program was ridiculous and there must be some mistake. Pa’an Tinito responded that the government only wanted a list of women; nothing was said about limiting reproduction. When the supply of oral contraceptives arrived some months later, Pa’an Tinito brought them back to his house and hung them in the rafters, where they stayed (Tsing 1993:109). In developing relocation, nutrition, and family planning programs, the nation–state was, in effect, imposing standards of social structure and family authority. There should be a fixed and stable "village" consisting of individual families, each with a family "head," generally a man. For the government, to get to women one must go through men. But this is not the way the Meratus were organized, nor was it the way the Meratus saw the situation. Their view of the world differed significantly from that of the nation–state in which they are subjects. The dilemma faced by the Meratus, as well as other indigenous and ethnic groups, is whether one can be simultaneously outside and inside the nation–state. As Tsing (1993:26) put it, Marginals stand outside the state by tying themselves to it; they constitute the state locally by fleeing from it. As culturally “different” subjects they can never be citizens; as culturally different ‘subjects,’ they can never escape citizenship. In this chapter we will examine the dilemma of minority cultures—indigenous and ethnic groups—in the nation–state. We need to ask why were indigenous cultures destroyed? How did their destroyers justify their actions? What is likely to be the fate of the indigenous cultures and ethnic groups that remain in the world? What is the cause of ethnic conflict?
The difficulty with this definition, said David Maybury-Lewis (1997:7), is that it assumes that should indigenous people gain control of the government they would no longer be indigenous; however, it is clear they are native to the countries they inhabit and that they claim they were there first and have rights of prior occupancy to their lands. They also have been conquered by peoples racially, ethnically, or culturally different from themselves; they generally maintain their own language and, most important, “are marginal to or dominated by the states that claim jurisdiction over them.” That is, indigenous peoples are defined largely by their relationship to the state. Maybury-Lewis (1997:55) concluded that Many people are stigmatized as “tribal . . . because they reject the authority of the state and do not wish to adopt the culture of the mainstream population that the state represents. They are in fact stigmatized as being “tribal” because they insist on being marginal. Maybury-Lewis estimated that approximately 5 percent of the world’s population fit the description of indigenous peoples; these are the descendants of peoples who have been marginalized in the global capitalist economy. One of the problems faced by indigenous peoples, as we saw with the Meratus, is that their cultures often conflict with the culture of capitalism. Consequently, the first question we need to explore is how is the culture of indigenous peoples incompatible with the culture of capitalism? |
