The University of Arizona Press

November 25, 2024

Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State, by Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, delves into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, showing how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.

With insights drawn from diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, this work advocates for the relevance of Indigenous studies within political science and argues for an ethnography of sovereignty in anthropology. Savages and Citizens makes a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous perspectives to understand the modern state from political theory to international studies. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The role of anthropology in exoticizing and “othering” Indigenous people has long been noted. For Franz Boas (1848–1942), widely considered to be the founder of modern U.S. cultural anthropology, anthropology was primarily concerned with Indigenous peoples of North America who had just been crushed militarily and dispossessed of their lands. His was an urgent task to collect material culture and record memory of a way of life before it was gone forever. This “salvage anthropology,” as Kahnawà:ke Mohawk anthropologist Simpson (2014) calls it, maintained a dualistic binary that kept a particular political order intact. Simpson (2018) refers to it as the grammar of Indigenous dispossession when analyzing why white people love Franz Boas. The politics of the U.S. then (as now) has little room for contemporary Indigenous peoples, and it is not without coincidence that Boasian anthropology is so much rooted in understanding an Indigenous past. The Indigenous of the past are no threat and are available to be romanticized.

British social anthropology as developed by Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) emerged in the context of a British Empire, which still sought to engage with living communities under the imperial yoke. Unsurprisingly, Malinowski functionalism looked to explain how contemporary societies continued to function explicitly not as vestiges of history. It is no coincidence that British social anthropology was concerned with the continued functioning of Indigenous peoples that it sought to absorb into an imperial state. This is not to say that both anthropologists were simply products of their time, for each was also unfashionably and explicitly antiracist as they and their students insisted on Indigenous peoples being understood in their own terms. But it would be naive to ignore the state formations in which their anthropology was produced and how it served—even when unwittingly– those state formations.

The severest critique is that anthropology was colonialism’s handmaiden (Asad 1973) and that anthropology itself produced an Indigenous subordinate alterity. However, this Indigenous alterity long predates even the earliest versions of Western anthropology. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) sees anthropology as drawing on preexisting notions of the savage and, to be sure, developing them. For him, this “savage slot” is precisely what made the West conceivable and that, indeed, is a central thesis of this book: the existence of Indigenous peoples is precisely what makes the politically modern West imaginable, whether or not this is explicitly recognized by political actors. In turn, “anthropology belongs to a discursive field that is an inherent part of the West’s geography of imagination.”

There is a long tradition of anthropologists being concerned with the ways in which the state represents itself to its subjects (Bouchard 2011), what Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2001) call the “languages of stateness.” Anthropological studies analyze how the state is perceived through specific cultural lenses—how state practices are made manifest, performed, and given meaning (cf. Gupta and Sharma 2006, 277). The discipline is increasingly shifting its focus “toward state images and representations in research and theorizing” (Thelen, Vetters, and Benda-Beckmann 2017). Some examples of this are Fernando Coronil’s (1997), Alec Leonhardt’s (2006), and Michal Taussig’s (1997) work on the “magic” of the state; Clifford Geertz’s (1980) state as “theatre”; Begoña Aretxaga’s 2000 “ghostly” state; Akil Gupta’s (1995) “imagined” state; and Bruce Kapferer’s (1988) work on “myths” of state. These approaches are summarized by Aradhana Sharma and Akil Gupta (2006) when they write, “the anthropological project attempts to understand the conditions in which the state successfully represents itself as coherent and singular.”

A quite different anthropological approach moves beyond how the state is represented to people in an imagined or abstract form to look at the ways in which it is made manifest: Serena Tennekoon (1988) looks at how the state manifests through “rituals of development,” and Anya Bernstein and Elizabeth Mertz (2011) edited a special volume of PoLAR on bureaucracies (see also Ranta 2022). Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson (1999) look at the ways in which state presence is felt on borders, Townsend Middleton (2011) offers an ethnography of state surveys, and Brett Gustafson (2009a) looks at cartography. There has, however, been insufficient theorizing of stateness from Indigenous perspectives. Some anthropologists, such as Nancy Postero (2017) and Alpah Shah (2010), have looked at the rare examples of Indigenous states in Bolivia (2005–19) and Jharkhand, India, but to date there has been little work in anthropology that considers not only what the state looks like from an Indigenous perspective but how the state creates those spaces where Indigenous cultures exist, that is, where state formation produces indigeneity as a meaningful political category.

Most studies of the state draw explicitly or implicitly on a Weberian idea of a state as a bounded sovereign entity encompassing a clearly defined territory with a monopoly of violence over that territory and governed by a rational bureaucracy (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Yet few scholars have interrogated the boundary of that (idealized) state or considered, not only what formations it produces beyond the boundary but, most importantly for our considerations, how formations beyond the notional limits of the state in themselves produce the entity we understand as being the state. This is a very different way of approaching the study of the state and departs from much of the anthropological tradition which has largely focused on representation of the state or everyday practices relating to it.

The work of James Scott (e.g., 1998, 2009, 2017) is a notable exception here, and he has shown how cultural forms and identities of people denoted as “Tribal” are themselves cultural forms of communities beyond the state, of people who explicitly reject the state and we draw heavily on his work. To express it at its simplest, our anthropological approach is not so much to see the state as a cultural form but to see how the state produces the spaces for political forms that are recognized as Indigenous. What makes them Indigenous per se is the ways in which they occupy a political space created by a particular state formation and contributed dynamically to that state formation. What we offer here is a model for understanding indigeneity not as sui generis but as cultural formations that occupy a specific political space. This avoids any kind of essentialization of Indigenous politics and sidesteps the tendency to see Indigenous cultures as historical “survivals” of a contact with Western (neo)colonization—sometimes described as living in the past, even in the “stone age”—to locate them in contemporary sovereignty-making. Indigenous peoples are neither atavistic nor static but dynamic actors in the construction of modern world politics.