About this Research Topic

Background

Indigeneity in politics is a deeply contested terrain, with a wide range of positions over its desirability and possibilities. The perspective of understanding and of attributing meaning to the global south, postcolonial politics and even the post-Soviet countries is often presented in terms and concepts constructed in the West, based on the specific social and cultural experiences considered as universal. This facilitates the process of othering, whereby agency and the intellectual capacity to self-perceive and self-represent one’s own versions of what takes place in the realm of politics in one’s day to day life as well as on a longer-term basis is denied. The West’s ‘other’ is thus condemned to remain at the receiving end. This is the categorical mistake of imposing the knowledge and discursive terms of the self on the experience and thinking of the other.

There is of late a growing literature on the so-called ‘politics of indigeneity’ in which the focus has been on the aboriginal peoples across the continents, and their specific land rights and resources, and their groupism as something specific to them as well. There is in such understanding an apparent recognition of the indigenous peoples’ identity and self-determination, which is, however, framed within the liberal democratic concern for the ‘politics of recognition’. Such research is deeply embedded in the same Western episteme and does not question that the indigenous peoples’ self-understanding is not to be simply explained away as akin to the Western notion of self-determination, development, or identity. Beyond such notions, there is a need to look at indigeneity in politics at the macro level, where a colonial/post-colonial people tried to understand themselves in terms not in accordance with the received understanding from the West but going against the West considering the latter as the ‘other’. The existing knowledge on the politics of indigeneity narrows down our understanding of real indigeneity by confining it to the most vulnerable sections of society. By seeing the indigenous peoples’ approaches to issues of citizenship, ethnic identity, rights etc., as reconfirmation of many precepts of Western liberal theory is integrationist at the cost of neglecting a large intellectual terrain of indigeneity in the colonial, post-colonial and post-Soviet contexts.

In this Research Topic we seek to underline the multi-layered phenomenon of indigeneity, and the critical dimensions of indigeneity not simply by looking at it as an aboriginal, or tribal thing, but a much more complex phenomena. We seek to develop a macro perspective on indigeneity in politics; to develop a critique of Western centric concepts and theories from the perspective of larger indigeneity to bring out the indigenous attempts to self-understand, self-define and to critique the West as the ‘other’. This is not an uncritical defense of indigeneity of the larger people on long durée, but to highlight the critical edge of indigenous approaches to politics, broadly understood. The specific areas of our focus will be political thought, democratic participation, citizenship, statehood, multi-level governance, gender, representation and development, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), food sovereignty, notably in the context of the current climate emergency.

Keywords: Indigeneity, politics of indigeneity, indigenous peoples, self-deternimation, identity, ethnic identity

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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