The complex relationship between indigeneity and class in South East Asia

ABSTRACT

In South East Asia, the relationship between ethnicity and class has been long, complex and at times contradictory. Throughout much of the twentieth century and especially from the 1940s to the 1980s, militant communist revolutionary movements sought to include upland ethnic minorities, citing vicitimization as racialized minorities, poor economic conditions, remote abodes and perceived egalitarian worldviews as the main reasons for targeting them. Mountain-dwelling minorities often made strong guerilla soldiers, and were attracted to the equality across races and ethnicities promised to them by communist cadres. By the late twentieth century, this had broken down, with new ethnicity-based and globalized concepts of indigeneity beginning to circulate, take hold and hybridize. While Indigenous peoples’ movements often have important class-based roots, with both Indigenous and leftist movements having similar emancipatory aspirations, Indigenous movements organize primarily based on ethnicity rather than class. Here, I consider the complex relationships between class and ethnicity/indigeneity as they play out in relation to Free and Prior Informed Consent associated with REDD+ and communal land titling in Laos. Shifts towards increasingly classifying people based on indigeneity are reorienting society, including nature–society relations, but there are also efforts underway to reclassify based on class.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous peoples
• indigeneity
• class
• South East Asia
• Laos

Acknowledgement

I thank the Mellon Foundation for supporting the ‘Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity’ writing fellowship that they funded me for during the spring of 2015 semester, via the Center for Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This fellowship provided the time to write this paper. Thanks to Richard Hackman for providing some important information about FPIC and REDD+ in Laos, and to Noah Quastel, Nicholas Zeller and Noah Theriault, and an anonymous reviewer for providing useful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Nepal is the only country in Asia that has ratified ILO No. 169 so far.

2 In 2007, four countries voted against UNDRIP: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US, fearing that the declaration would threaten national sovereignty. Since then all four have reversed their votes (Edelman 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Mellon Foundation-supported Spring 2015 ‘Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity’ writing fellowship through the Center for Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison.