Historicizing Indigeneity: Decolonization, Disciplines, and Politics

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

With calls to decolonize the study of Eurasian history, „indigeneity“ has once again become a central term in scholarly as well as public and political debate. This panel proposes to historicize the concept of indigeneity, by looking at how the age-old term has been deployed, debated, and transformed in late Soviet and Post-Soviet Baltics.

Indigeneity, the panel proposes, does different kinds of work in different disciplines. It establishes allegiances, linking post-Soviet political struggles to the struggles of late apartheid South Africa or the struggles of Indigenous peoples of North America. It makes claims about authority, when, for example, Estonian intellectuals speak in the name of their Finno-Ugric „kindred nations“ in Siberia. It creates a basis for authenticity and nation building, dividing cultural phenomena into „authentic“ and „foreign“. Often it fails to do what it claims, resulting in hybrid, perhaps unexpected outcomes and hierarchies. Being closely linked with anti-imperial activism, it activates a number age-old (and not so old) colonial regimes of knowledge and power in these new contexts.

The papers in this panel interrogate several different (though connected) disciplines: anthropology, art, and international relations, to understand why the concept of indigeneity acquired popularity in the late Soviet period. In so doing, the panel draws lessons from the case studies to argue for a more critical and historical approach to the concept in the current debate over decolonization and the future of Eurasian studies.

Sub Unit

• History: Since 1990

Chair

• Epp Annus, Ohio State U / Tallinn U (Estonia)

Papers

• Kindred Peoples: Post-Soviet Estonia on Mental Maps of Finno-Ugric Shamanism - Aro Velmet, U of Southern California

• The Estonian Indigeneity Card and Post-Soviet International Relations - Linda Kaljundi, Tallinn U (Estonia)

• Põhjarahvas, Põlisrahvas: Curating Indigenous Histories in Estonia - Bart Pushaw, U of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Discussant

• Bathsheba Rose Demuth, Brown U