INDFØDTE FOLK OG KULTUR: Moderne billeder og bevidste identiteter

Resumé

culture - modern images and conscious

identities

Over recent years public discourse in the

West has re-focused the question of indigenous

peoples from one where indigenous

groups were seen primarily as disadvantaged,

marginalized populations to a perspective

on indigenous groups as cultures. However,

this public discourse embraces its objects

through, often distorting, images - in

the Baudrillardian sense of a hyperreality of

flowing signs. Paradoxically, indigenous

peoples then need to adopt to Western images

of „their” culture and make them look

real, in order to retain political and financial

support from the West. Support, gained in

this contradictory way, tums into a new mechanism

for social control by the West over

the indigenous Rest. It is argued that the unfinished

business of reimagining the concept

of culture often has tended (so far) to merrily

subsistute the postmodem consumerist lifestyle

notion of culture for a theoretical formulation

of a more general applicability.

While the former sees culture as a domain of

self-creation seemingly liberated from the

constraints of social and political structures,

the latter is starting to equate culture with a

human capacity for empowerment that arises

as an aspect of collective social interaction

within given political-economic contexts

and historical conjunctures. The author ends

by calling on the well-meaning advocates

who work with and for indigenous peoples

to acknowledge that it is not culture but persistent

structures of colonialism, asymmetrical

power relations, and forces of an overtly

non-cultural character such as economical

exploitation and violent repression that continue

to form the conditioning contexts of

the indigenous situation.