This article shines a critical light on a trend in anthropology that has both mirrored, and, not inconsequentially, shaped, a broader preoccupation with rights-making and rights-claiming as the foundational strategies behind what Karen Engle called the “elusive promise of indigenous development.” The article uses recent ethnographies of legal implementation and state-capital appropriation to think more generally about the history of indigenous rights in relation to what Tania Li has aptly described as the “dynamic specificity” of global capitalism. The article concludes by arguing for the development of an ethnographic political economy of indigenous rights and aspirational politics that reflects an analytical shift from what James Scott called the “symbolic balance of power” to questions of redistribution, state-capital interdependence, and the cooptation of indigenous rights as a new form of capital accumulation.
Adcock F (2014) Rights through the United Nations: The domestic influence of the special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples. In: American Anthropological Association annual meeting. Washington DC, 5 December.
AllenSXanthakiA (2011) Reflections on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Oxford: Hart Publishing.
4.
BairdIG (2013) “Indigenous Peoples” and land: Comparing communal land titling and its implications in Cambodia and Laos. Asia Pacific Viewpoint54(3): 269–281.
5.
BorrasSMFrancoJ (2010) From threat to opportunity? Problems with the idea of a “code of conduct” for land-grabbing. Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal13: 507–523.
6.
BorrasSMHallRScoonesI (2011) Towards a better understanding of global land grabbing: An editorial introduction. Journal of Peasant Studies38(2): 209–216.
7.
CookeFMTohSVazJ (2011) Community-Investor Business Models: Lessons from the Oil Palm Sector in East Malaysia, London: International Institute for Environment and Development.
8.
DavisM (2006) Planet of Slums, London, UK: Verso.
9.
EngleK (2010) The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy, Durham: Duke University Press.
10.
FergusonJ (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
11.
FergusonJ (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham: Duke University Press.
12.
FraserN (1995) From redistribution to recognition? Dilemma of justice in a “Postsocialist” age. New Left Review212: 68–93.
13.
GlendonMA (1991) Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, New York, NY: The Free Press.
14.
(2013) Human rights after the post-cold war. In: GoodaleM (ed.) Human Rights at the Crossroads, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–28.
15.
HardtMNegriA (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
16.
JacksonJE (1995) Culture, genuine and spurious: The politics of Indianness in the Vaupés, Colombia. American Ethnologist22(1): 3–27.
KirschS (2012) Juridification of indigenous politics. In: EckertJBrianDChristianS (eds) Law Against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law's Transformations, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23–43.
19.
LeemannE (2014) Global discourse, local realities: The paradoxical outcomes of indigenous land titling efforts in Cambodia. In: Swiss Ethnological Society annual meeting. Basel, November.
20.
LiT (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, Durham: Duke University Press.
21.
LiT (2010) Indigeneity, capitalism, and the management of dispossession. Current Anthropology51(3): 385–414.
22.
LiT (2014a) What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers39(4): 589–602.
23.
LiT (2014b) Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier, Durham: Duke University Press.
24.
LiT (2015) Transnational farmland investment: A risky business. Journal of Agrarian Change. (forthcoming).
25.
LightfootS (2013) The International Indigenous Rights Discourse and Its Demands for Multilevel Citizenship. In: MaasW (ed.) Multilevel Citizenship, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 127–148.
26.
LordonF (2010) Capitalisme, Désir et Servitude, Paris: La Fabrique éditions.
27.
MalinowskiB (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
28.
Medina L (2014) Law, jurisprudence, and the production of indigenous land rights: Maya indigenous communities v. Belize. In: American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. Washington DC, 5 December.
29.
MoynS (2010) The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
30.
NiezenR (2003) The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press.
31.
PulitanoE (2012) Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
32.
RataE (2011) Encircling the commons: Neotribal capitalism in New Zealand since 2000. Anthropological Theory11(3): 327–353.
33.
RichardsDG (2004) Intellectual Property Rights and Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the TRIPS Agreement, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
34.
StandingG (2008) The ILO: An agency for globalization?Development and Change39(3): 355–384.
35.
WeitznerV (2008) Shifting Grounds: Indigenous Peoples and Mining in West Suriname, The Inter-American Development Bank: The Association of Indigenous Village Leaders in Suriname and the North-South Institute.
36.
WelkerM (2014) Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia, Berkeley: University of California Press.
37.
WenkI (2014) Indigenous land titling and post-titling challenges in Central Mindanao, the Philippines. In: Swiss Ethnological Society annual meeting. Basel, 1 November.
38.
WilsonRA (2001) The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
39.
Wolf ER (1982) Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press.
