The politics of indigenous identity: neoliberalism, cultural rights, and the Mexican Zapatistas

Social Research, Summer, 2003 by Courtney Jung

Like millions of indigenous people elsewhere, Mexican Indians demand rights to cultural self-determination. They insist on the right to live according to traditional usos y costumbres, to self-government in accord with local practices and customs. They demand recognition as collective units, and have fought for the inclusion of the term pueblo--peoples--in the constitution. Their claims for collective rights include bilingual education, the right to local and regional autonomy, and to communal land as the basis of the cultural reproduction of the group.

These demands are seen by many as a threat to both emergent and established democracies. Demands for collective rights are in tension with the commitments of liberal democracies to individual rights. Moreover, demands for autonomy and self-determination are perceived to be threatening to the national identity of the state. If democracy rests in part on an ideal of "the people" as a cohesive group that has the capacity to deliberate together to achieve consensus, then the demands of some of the people for autonomy, and for recognition of their difference, threaten to undermine the fabric of the national culture. At an extreme, the very borders of the state are at stake, as groups make demands for self-determination and even independence.

By and large, theorists of democracy and multiculturalism have failed to develop an account of the contemporary salience of such demands for cultural recognition, focusing instead on theories of human identity to explain the politics of indigenous rights claims. They argue that demands for cultural recognition are an expression of the individual's attachment to his or her cultural group. As Will Kymlicka says, the bond between individuals and their cultural groups is simply "a fact ... whose origins lie deep in the human condition, tied up with the way humans as cultural creatures need to make sense of their world, and that a full explanation would involve aspects of psychology, sociology, linguistics, the philosophy of mind, and even neurology" (Kymlicka, 1995: 90). Charles Taylor argues that human identity is constituted by cultural group membership, and an individual's sense of self worth is thus deeply tied to the value that others attach to his or her cultural group. As a result of this "new understanding of the human social condition," cultural recognition can be construed as a necessary component of individual recognition, and misrecognition can reasonably be considered a form of oppression (Taylor, 1994: 25-26). If cultural group attachment is a feature of the human social condition, liberal theory had better deal with cultural group rights if it is to be relevant.

Against this backdrop, the contemporary emergence of cultural claims for recognition is seen as a result of the homogenizing threats of modernity, and the frequency with which previously insular cultural units come into contact with one another and with the penetrating reach of the liberal state and neoliberal economic policies. Demands for cultural recognition seem to stem from a protective instinct in defense of the familiar and the local. Taylor states, for example, that "in pre-modern times people didn't speak of 'identity' and 'recognition'--not because people didn't have (what we call) identities, or because these didn't depend on recognition, but because these were then too unproblematic to be thematized as such" (1994: 35). It is only in the present era that the possibility of misrecognition has generated the conditions of oppression. In a sympathetic vein, Seyla Benhabib argues that "the continuing subjection of tradition to critique and revision in a disenchanted universe make it difficult for individuals to develop a coherent sense of self and community under conditions of modernity" (1992: 81). The demand for cultural recognition springs from a crisis of identity as human beings are buffeted by misrecognition and incoherence in a (modern or postmodern?) world.

Deborah Yashar strikes a similar chord in her analysis of the recent emergence of a Latin American indigenous rights movement as a defensive reaction against external threat to the community. Yashar argues that corporatism, coupled with the failure of the state to penetrate the countryside in most Latin American countries, protected indigenous ways of life in a de facto autonomy of neglect. By adopting neoliberal economic policies that privatize communally held land and extend market forces into rural areas, however, the state began in the mid-1980s to threaten the coherence and traditions of indigenous life (Yashar, 1998, 1999). In general terms, Taylor, Benhabib, and Yashar argue that cultural group identity is salient because it is newly threatened by the coexistence of competing groups and commitments in contiguous spaces, and by the homogenizing drive of globalization.

While such theories seem to capture something of the human social condition in an atomized world in which we all suffer from weakened attachment to family and community, they capture little of the strategic and political context in which such claims are formulated and advanced. Using a case study of the emergence of the Mexican indigenous rights movement, I argue that indigenous claims for autonomy and collective rights are not an expression of the universal human need for cultural recognition. Nor do they reflect a retreat to the familiar realm of identity in the face of the incoherence and atomization of a globalizing world. Nor, finally, are they primarily an attempt to safeguard traditional practices, beliefs, and forms of life from the threat of modernity and homogenization.