SIDSTE PAS DE TROIS I GENÉVE: En dans for tre i FN’s saloner, hvor værten fører

Resumé

Katja Kvaale: Last pas de trois in Geneva:

a dance for three in the UN saloons

with the host leading the dance

The purpose of this article is twofold. Taking

its point of departure in empirical examples

from the 1993 Session of the United Nations

Working Group on Indigenous Populations

in Geneva, the article attempts partly to analyse

how indigenous peoples operate in the

UN system, and partly to examine how this

touches on classical anthropological notions

such as peoplehood, nationhood and culture

as distinet and continuous units. It is argued

that most of the indigenous inputs at the

UNWGIP can be heard as persistent reactions

against the member states’ questioning

their peoplehood and consequent rights to

self-determination. However, it is not the

idea to deconstruct the notion of the modem

nation State altogether, nor to imply a radical

cultural relativity, but rather to establish that

the UN is confronting a global reality somewhat

more complex than individuals and nation-

states. In stating that the right to self-determination

is separate from and prior to international

law - it has been there since time

immemorial - the indigenous representatives

are tuming the legal logic of the UN upside

down. From their perspective it is thus not

a matter of being endowed with rights from a

magnanimous UN, but rather a latecoming

making up for the wrongdoings of half a millennium.

Meanwhile, in asserting cultural

continuity and distinetiveness in their politicized

self-representation, indigenous peoples

are catching anthropology off-guard and

without foothold amidst the debris of its recently

abandoned paradigms. Ironically, in

the case of indigenous peoples the discipline

is seemingly facing the incamation of the

very notions and concepts just ditched: the

exotification of the other, the radical us/them

or West/the Rest distinetions, the Levi-

Straussian „cold“ timelessness i.e. „conservative"

rejection of modemity and development,

culture as partly reified and self-sufficient

units etc. However, rather than a morally

based rejecting attitude towards this phenomenon

the discipline would benefit from

facing the great theoretical and analytical

challenge that lies behind it. Although indigenous

peoples and anthropologists are now

operating within the same frame of reference

to a far higher degree than was the case 25

years ago, it can still prove worthwhile to distinguish

between the different levels on

which culture is dealt with at different times.

Hence, a potential clash between indigenous

politieized „authentic culture" on the one

hånd and scientific deconstruction of „true

culture" on the other can be avoided.