Self-determination in practice: the critical making of indigenous media

Abstract

The article examines the notion of development as self-determination in the context of current politicisation of indigenous peoples' affairs. It looks at the links between development studies, indigenous social movements, and community media practices; and more specifically between specific views on development, self-determination, and identity, and how these terms become embodied in specific media-making (video) practices. The article summarises two case studies of indigenous media production in a transnational context: the UNESCO-funded project Information and Communications Technologies for Intercultural Dialogue: Developing Communication Capacities of Indigenous People (ICT4ID), and the emergence and consolidation of CLACPI, a network of indigenous media producers in Latin America.

Keywords:

• Civil society
• Globalisation
• Governance and public policy
• Rights
• Technology
• Latin America and the Caribbean

Notes

The crises in interpretation plaguing both development studies and communication for development was seen as a critical impasse in the 1990s, consisting of a dispersion of the notion of development into several different areas which scholars often have trouble in bringing together (Schuurman 1993; see also Blaser et al. 2004; Schuurman 2000). Some authors even argued that after 40 years of an ‘age of development’, the time was ripe to write its obituary (Sachs 1992). The balancing act of framing development post-1989 has been a critical enterprise, particularly as modernisation and dependency approaches have fallen more and more out of fashion, and the rise of post-structural critiques has gained force.

I have discussed this in more detail in relation to the transnational networks of Mapuche Internet activists working in complex local/global articulations (Salazar 2003).

This section of the paper is based on previous unpublished work undertaken as part of an evaluation team led by Laurel E. Dyson, University of Technology, Sydney, for the UNESCO ICT4ID, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO, Paris (see Dyson et al. 2006).

Summaries of the projects of phase 1 can be accessed at portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=23284&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (retrieved 29 April 2008).