Indigenous culture : the politics of vulnerability and survival

Indigenous' is the problematic adjective in this chapter. The noun 'culture' I am not so worried about. For the sake of starting somewhere, I follow the argument by Herriwell and Hindess (1999) that 'culture' is a meaningful category in modern projects of government. Asking why the human sciences have been so committed to the idea that humanity can be understood as a number of different 'societies' (discrete, self-regulating) and 'cultures' (the ideational unity that makes a 'society' possible), they answered in part, by pointing to the governmental ambition to make populations positive. I will begin this chapter by reporting a recent debate about the pertinence of ‘Indigenous knowledge’ to ‘development’. Working back from modern governmental project ‘development’, I will trace two ideas that emerge with Imperial sensibility since it began to make cultural different a matter of ethical consequence: a concern for the ‘vulnerability’ and for the ‘immanent temporality’ of non-European peoples. By a brief examination of the work of the International Labour Office (ILO) I will argue that notions of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘imminent temporality’ have been formative of the late twentieth-century recognition of the ‘Indigenous’. In the second half of this chapter, I will illustrate the richness of the idea of ‘vulnerability’ by reading some recent academic commentaries on contemporary Indigenous people in the Anglophone settler-colonies