Contemporary issues for indigenous peoples in Central America (and elsewhere)
Control over territory
Control over resources
Respect for human rights
Achievement of equal rights from the State
Recognition and respect for cultural/ethnic identity
Semi-autonomy in decision-making (i.e., recognition by the State of the right to make own choices, especially regarding development and resource utilization)
How have indigenous peoples addressed these issues? Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, a Mexican anthropologist, in a critique of indigenismo (indigenism), has described the forms of resistance that indigenous peoples have used in their battle for cultural survival.1The indigenista (indigenist) view is that of the dominant society. Indigenists believe that it is their obligation to impose changes that will improve the situation of the Indian. The ultimate goal of indigenists is acculturation and integration in other words, the destruction of indigenous cultures and their absorption into the Nation-State. This is the antithesis of cultural survival. Yet, despite the efforts of people with this perspective, and this includes most development agencies and agents, indigenous peoples and their cultures have survived. Bonfil Batalla suggests how this has been possible.
He points out that while armed rebellion has certainly been one form of resistance that indigenous peoples have used on numerous occasions, it has not been the most important or the most successful. He argues that ordinary everyday forms of resistance have been responsible for cultural survival. These take many forms, e.g., from the clandestine practice of prohibited rituals to apparent conformity to norms imposed by the dominating culture.
Daily resistance in its various forms is what explains the so-called conservatism of indigenous communities. Adherence to tradition, to custom even when there is no longer a general memory of the original significance of the custom, establishes and maintains a space for ones own culture. Rejection on principle of any changes initiated from outside obeys the same principle of resistence a rejection of attempts to reduce cultural control.
Bonfil Batalla divides these ordinary forms of resistance into three interrelated categories: reinterpretation, innovation, and appropriation.
Reinterpretation of alien cultural features to conform to the framework of meaning/significance of the indigenous culture. This does not eliminate the cultural imposition but it does mediate the disorganizing effects upon the native culture of such impositions. Much of what has been described as syncretism in the anthropological literature is better understood as the result of this process of reinterpretation, according to Bonfil Batalla.
Innovation. Refers not to the grand innovations that mark historic changes but to the accumulation of small innovations (we could also call these adaptations), sometimes almost imperceptible, that occur in the daily routine, in social relations, in the system of meaning.
Appropriation. A necessary accompaniment of innovation in any culture contact situation. This is the process by which a culture utilizes foreign cultural elements (which may be objects, ideas, ways of doing things) and controls them even without having the capacity to produce or reproduce them.
Bonfil Batalla says:
In these three processes of resistance reinterpretation, innovation, and appropriation rest the indigenous responses to indigenismo and acculturation, in daily life as well as in the political battle or open rebellion. (1990:208)___________________________The indigenous response is not and never has been a mere reaction to imposed domination. It goes way beyond that: It is an historic strategy [emphasis added] manifested in different tactics depending on the conditions of the moment that points not only to resistance but, fundamentally, to the basic civilizing project implicit in every culture. I think that only from this perspective can we understand five centuries of endurance. Not a static, inert endurance, but a constant battle, vital in the most profound sense of the term. (1990:209)
1. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo 1990. "Aculturación e Indigenismo: La Respuesta India." [Acculturation and Indigenism: the Indian Response] In Indianismo e Indigenismo en América Latina, [Indianism and Indigenism en Latin America] ed. José Alcina French, pp. 189-209. Madrid: Alianza Editorial
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