Geoffrey Benjamin. Introduction ..... from place) is fundamental (Benjamin, 2016: 513). True indigenes carry out .... Vail (2007) describes one such example, the ...
20 Indigenous peoples Indigeneity, indigeny or indigenism? Geoffrey Benjamin
Introduction The tem1s 'indigenous people', 'indigenousness' and 'indigeneity' are most commonly understood to refer to tribal or endangered minorities suffering political, cultural, legal or economic disadvantages that are not borne by the majority sectors of their countries' populations. Typically, the question of who is 'indigenous' and who is not arises with regard to land-rights claims, but the label is also employed on occasion by members of dominant 'majority' populations, as well as by dominated minorities, when asserting ethnic hegemony, cultural authenticity and other such concems. 1 However, the 'tribal' sense is the generally accepted default meaning of 'indigenous', even though the concepts 'tribal' and 'indigenous' actually refer to different, albeit overlapping, social realities. In the Americas, Australasia and much ofRussia, 'indigenous' usually refers unambiguously to those members of the population whose ancestors did not arrive from Europe, or from Mrica during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The 'indigenous' peoples of those regions are therefore usually distinguishable from the exogenous European- and Africandescended members by their genetic, cultural and linguistic characteristics. Regardless of the demographic facts, the indigenes normally constitute a political 'minority', with many of them following tribal or peasant patterns of social organisation. This sometimes leads the exogenous mainstream to regard them as living in a 'traditional', or even 'primitive', manner, needing enlightenment or protection. In Asia, however, and despite the colonisation formerly undergone by most of the region, there was no large-scale or persistent European settlement. Without further qualification, therefore, 'indigenous' could be applied in some of its various senses to almost all of Asia's inhabitants, regardless of their specific social circumstances. 2 (The main exceptions are people of Chinese or South Asian ancestry in those Southeast Asian countries in which they form a significant part of the population.) Consequently, the distinction between presumed indigenes and the dominant population is less clear in Asian countries than in other parts of the world. The two sectors have shared so many millennia of interlinked history that the differences between them cannot easily be captured simply by the term 'indigenous'. Thus being 'indigenous' in Asia often has less to do with purportedly distinct origins than with processes of deliberate dissimilation between different patterns of social and cultural organisation within the same overall framework - although this is not to deny that distinct origins may also play a part. Moreover, Asian polities differ in the uses they make of the 'indigenous' concept and in the extent to which they accord official recognition to 'indigenous' status. Sometimes, the term 'indigenous' is applied officially to sections of the population other than the relatively disadvantaged people who would normally be so labelled elsewhere in the world.
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Clearly, 'indigenous' and its relatives are multiply ambiguous terms, which suggests that a more careful vocabulary is required, especially in relation to Asia. This chapter aims to clarify the issues by proposing a more appropriate way of discussing the various social circumstances that are currently described as 'indigenous' and the different senses in which a population may therefore be referred to as an 'indigenous people'.
Who gets to be called 'indigenous'? In Asia and elsewhere, there are at least six different senses in which individuals or populations might come to regard themselves or be regarded by others as 'indigenous' : 1
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those whose familial ancestors have always, as far as is known, inhabited the specific places that their present-day descendants still live in, the distinctive cultural consequences of which circumstance are discussed shortly in terms of 'indigeny'; those who have resisted incorporation into centralised states by organising themselves into autonomous segmentary social formations, which is discussed below in terms of 'tribal' or 'tribality'; those claiming protection of traditional land rights that have been denied to them in the modem political sphere - currently the most widespread self-ascribed use of the label 'indigenous'; those regarded as having arrived earlier into a territory (however defined) that later also came to be inhabited by populations regarded as originating elsewhere- although this is not a homogeneous phenomenon and such populations cannot be described simply as 'indigenous', largely because of the varying time-depths that would have to be taken into account; 3 those who are regarded as members of the self-declared 'definitive' founding population of a national political tradition, which sometimes overlaps with circumstance 4, and is discussed later in the chapter as an example of 'indigenism'; and those who are regarded as the ancient originators of a distinctively named archaeological 'tradition'. (To avoid confusion with present-day usages of 'indigenous' or with present-day populations - always difficult to determine - such 'traditions' are better referred to as 'endogenous'.)
Since each of these circumstances generates its own set of political and legal consequences, they are clearly not all 'indigenous' in the same sense or to the same extent. Despite a degree of overlap, they should therefore not be placed under a single undifferentiated label, especially if the concept 'indigenous people' is to be the object of judicial deliberations. Unfortunately, current social-science practice regularly disguises these distinctions by applying the newly coined term 'indigeneity' to all or most of the meanings listed above, 4 thereby dissolving away the distinction between true place-linked indigeny (an unself-conscious condition of life) and territory-based in.digenism (a self-conscious political stance) , perhaps on the post-modernist grounds that both are supposedly just rhetorical constructs. 5 Indigeny, however, is not a rhetorical construct of any kind, being constituted of the historically maintained connections of particular individuals and families to particular places. It should therefore not be treated in the same way as the rhetorically asserted indigenist connections of whole populations to whole territories - especially when those populations are defined 'ethnically' .
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Paradoxically, indigenism actually constitutes a manifestation of the covert exoge11y experienced by people who have mo ed away from the places inhabited by their presumed familial ancestors. This now characterises a high proportion of the world's population, both rural and urban. More generally, exogeny is a precondition for the generation and maintenance of societal modernity and the formal rationality on which it depends, and without which the mounting of explicitly indigenist claims would not be possible. 6 Sociologically, true place-linked indigeny should therefore not automatically be regarded as synonymous with 'indigeneity', which in many cases turns out to be a form of modern political identity characteristic of culturally exogenous contexts. The overlap between indigeny and indigeneity is, at best, only partial.
'Tribal' versus 'indigenous' The widespread use of the word 'indigenous' to label social formations that are more properl characterised as ' tribal' also generates conceptual and legal problems. Tribespeople are indeed typically indigenous (in the 'indigeny' sense discussed shortly) to the places the inhabit, 7 but most of the populations who can justifiably claim to be indigenous to their places of habitation are state-dominated peasants rather than segmentary and historically autonomous tribespeople. The two intergovernmental bodies most closely involved in this issue, the United Nations and the International Labour Organization (ILO), have differed slightly in terms of how they handle it. The United Nations declared 1993 the 'International Year of Indigenous Peoples'. In September 2007, the General Assembly followed through by adopting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A further World Conference on Indigenous Peoples was held in September 2014. No mention of 'tribal peoples' is made in these proceedings nor is any unambiguous definition offered of the term 'indigenous peoples'. Nevertheless, the text of the 2007 Declaration clearly implies that tribespeople were its intended focus, by expressing a 'concern' that: [I]ndigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests ... (UN Declaration on the Rights ofindigenous Peoples, Preamble) The failure to define 'indigenous' or to employ the term 'tribal' has allowed some Asian signatory governments to interpret the Declaration in a manner considerably at deviance from its intended purpose. The 1989 ILO Convention No. 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples attempted to ameliorate the deficit by differentiating explicitly between 'tribal' and 'indigenous' peoples. The status of 'tribal' peoples, it suggested, is regulated 'wholly or partially by their own customs or traditions or by special laws or regulations' (Article 1(a)), whereas that of 'indigenous' peoples results from their having been conquered or colonised and who, 'irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions' (Article 1(b)). The stated differences are so slight that the remainder of the Declaration 'for practical reasons' applies 'indigenous' to both categories, but adds 'self-identification' as a criterion for determining to which populations the pro ision of the Convention should apply.
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The latter requirement, however, is not clear-cut. In Asia especially, 'self-identification' leaves the question of just who is 'indigenous' open to political manipulation. Moreover, the ability to self-identify as 'indigenous' or 'tribal' depends crucially on the specific language in which the discourse is mounted. Almost always, this will be a standardised official language rather than the language or dialect that the people themselves employ in their daily lives. Consequently, such indigenist discourse will necessarily have to be carried on in the exogenist standard-language context, as too would any pro-indigene campaigns organised by non-governmental bodies. (The latter, though, are usually run by persons who are well aware of the specific local issues, including the question of language.) In this chapter, both 'tribal' and 'indigenous' are employed as far as possible with objective, sociologically verifiable meanings that do not depend on the linguistic usages of the people or peoples referred to. Most anthropologists now recognise that 'tribes' as discrete, bounded social units hardly ever occur in reality ,t~ but social formations organised on a segmentary tribal (the adjective) basis certainly have existed in many parts of Asia and continue to do so. In Southeast Asia especially, 'tribal' refers to uncentralised, segmentary societies that have organised themselves to resist the inroads of the state, which they have wished to keep off their backs. 9 Segmentary tribal formations of the kind described in the ethnographic and historical Uterature (a crucial proviso) first came into being in abreaction to the creation of centralised states. This millennia-old dissimilatory process led to the emergence of three distinct, b ut mutually defining, pre-modern forms of sociality: rulers, peasants and tribesp eople . R ulers and their accomplices placed themselves in control. Peasat1ts' lives were controlled by agencies of the state, which they provisioned in exchange for a little reflected cultural and religious glory, but no counter-control, while continuing to support themselves through their ow n subsistence activities. Tribespeople resisted the state and its rulers by organising themselves in a segmentary ('tribal') manner, and by retaining distinctive languages, cultural practices, religions and subsistence modes, rather than assimilating to the more widespread ' majority' ways oflife . Nevertheless, the character of tribal society- in Asia especiallyhas been shaped by the proximity of the state. The tribal/peasant/ruler framework is therefore not a ranked evolutionary series constituted of supposedly different types of people , but the consequence of somewhat similar people reacting in different ways to ever-shifting political circumstances. Segmentary tribal formations are thus neither primordial nor 'primitive', nor are they necessarily long-lived, for constant ethnogenetic process ensures that named 'tribal' identities last for just two or three generations before they eventually merge with some other identity. (Centralised administrations act to terminate this fluidity by instituting fixed ethnic classifications that are resistant to both ethnogenetic change and the insertion of new ethnological discoveries. 10) There has also been movement in and out of tribality by individuals and families, mostly in the majority direction through peasantisation, but also in the opposite direction through secondary tribalisation. 11 Such was the immediate pre-modern situation in most of Asia until the end of the Second World War. Subsequent decolonisation and modernisation led to the absorption of the pre-modern polities into a much smaller number of modern nation-states , with a consequent progressive dissolution of the ruler/peasant/ tribespeople distinctions in favour of a more uniform 'citizen' status, at least in de jure terms. Citizen ries are inimical to the maintenance of true indigeny: they are required to work within th e transcendental 'there and then' worldview of 'nation building' rather than the ' here and now ' orientation that has characterised most tribespeople and some peasants. Centralised
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political domination is maintained by imposing the hegemony of the administrative and financial capitals over other places within the state's territory. Modern states therefore seek to destroy indigeny-based forms of consociation, often by breaking the linkage to specific places through enforced population movements euphemistically described as 'resettlement' or 'relocation'. 12 By entering the cash economy, therefore, tribespeople increasingly become rural proletarians, or even middle-class urbanites. In the process, they lose control over the land and maritime resources on which their families' subsistence was previously, and often still is, based. When this happens, they and their supporters typically adopt an explicitly 'indigenous' identity, to reinforce their land-rights claims and reject unwelcome cultural influences. The latter include restrictions against their language and pressure to undergo religious conversion, changes that their peasant neighbours succumbed to centuries ago as tokens of the reflected civilisational glory (through conversion to Buddhism, Islam or Catholicism) of which they mostly came to feel proud. Thus, although Asian tribespeople and peasants might both be thought of as 'indigenous peoples' in various respects, they inhabit different social worlds. The widespread fusing of the terms 'indigenous' and 'tribal' fails to capture this distinction. Consequently, whenever the primary reason for asserting 'indigenous' rights is to protect the circumstances of current or recent tribespeople, the label 'indigenous' may prove self-defeating. Indeed, the problems experienced by peasants are sometimes opposed to those of tribespeople and may lead to conflict between them. This is further aggravated whenever the majority population employs the label 'indigenous' to assert its political dominance over other sectors of the population: peasants usually fall religiously, linguistically and ethnically within the majority sector. Consequently, the label 'indigenous' sometimes draws attention away from the problems experienced by Asia's tribal populations.
Indigeny versus exogeny Tribespeople and some peasants in Asia regularly suffer varying degrees of disadvantage, ranging from racial or class prejudice to expropriation of their land without consultation, compensation or considerations oflegality. The latter occurs frequently, whether carried out by state agencies or by private actors with the state's compliance. However, the difficulties confronted by the removed people in attempting to remedy the situation do not result primarily from their tribality or peasant status; rather, it is their place-linked indigeny that puts them at a peculiar disadvantage when confronted by this kind of enforced social change. (In this section, 'indigenes' refers solely to those living under true indigeny and not to the other social circumstances that are sometimes also referred to as 'indigenous'.) 'Indigeny' labels the distinctive sociocultural circumstances that characterise people who continue to inhabit the places that their immediate familial ancestors lived in for as long as social memory can recall. In the strictest sense, 'indigeny' should therefore cease to characterise those who have moved away from their ancestral places. But this criterion is not absolute, because the interaction of place, time and descent ensures that the degree of indigeny is variable, relational and graded. A person can be variously more or less indigenous with respect to any or all of several features. First, place can be more narrowly or more broadly defined. Second, because indigeny attaches primarily to individuals and families rather than to whole populations considered as undifferentiated 'peoples' or 'ethnic groups', an individual's own ancestors may have lived there longer than someone else's, which leads to
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a further potential distinction of 'priority' or 'precedence', as analysed in Fox and Sather (1996), between the more and the less 'aboriginal' indigenes (Gray, 1995: 39). Third, some ancestors may be considered more salient than others, especially in the unilineal or unilaterally biased systems found in several parts of Asia. Moreover, individuals may frequently be of mixed descent with respect to indigeny. The contrast between indigeny (embodiment by place) and exogeny (estrangement from place) is fundamental (Benjamin, 2016: 513). True indigenes carry out most of their activities in the same place, with the same people, over long periods of time. Their understanding of their own circumstances is typically tacit, non-articulated and constantly sustained by the embedded practices of their daily lives, in which home and workplace are the same, and there is no distinction between family and co-workers. Under indigeny, 'place' is informal and subjective. Being transmitted primarily in families rather than through the politico-jural institutions of wider society, indigeny is therefore embedded in a web of many-stranded, multiplex social relations. In tum, this has an elective affinity with the various non-formal modes of thought that Max Weber (1978: 979-980) characterised as 'substantive rationality', exemplified especially in the informal, 'ethical' and restitutive legal procedures to which he referred as 'kadhi justice'. (Weber had practised as a lawyer and earned a doctorate in legal history.) For those living under indigeny, tribespeople especially, the land itself is a mainstay of the sociocultural framework - a 'subject', so to speak, rather than commoditisable object. 13 Indigenes may therefore find it difficult to get their views across appropriately when acting within the formally rational framework required by modem exogenous institutions, including the law courts. Exogenes, in contrast, being less attached to land in this way, typically find the indigenous framework difficult to comprehend. Under exogeny, land and territory are formally and objectively defined, with home and workplace spatially separated, and family different from co-workers. Exogenes are therefore emotionally and cognitively free to take an exploitative approach to their and others' surroundings. They may even come to think of 'culture' - religion, language, music, dance, etc. - as an object ripe for exploitation. Exogeny is therefore frequently associated with religious conversion - the move from an unnamed local religion towards a named 'world' religion' - in an instrumental process that ultimately sustains a more detached view of the people's relation to land. Exogeny is thus associated with the kinds of separated, less-embedded lives typical of the relatively single-stranded, social relations that characterise socially differentiated social formations in general, and modem society especially. These have a close affinity with the framework that Weber (1978) characterised as 'formal rationality' - summarisable as the belief that one can do just one thing at a time in a calculable manner, which Weber showed to favour those who already held power or who might wish to gain power. A major factor in this is adherence to an externally imposed, bureaucratically codified judicial system based on fom1al equality before the law, rather than to the interpersonal specificities that typify the multi-strandedness of indigeny. Exogenes can thus easily think of their own and others' land as an objectified commodity open to exploitation by alteration and sale, once it is 'registered' under a modem legal system and hence viewable solely in that light. Indigenes' unregistered land, on the other hand, regardless of the immensely long periods over which it may have served as their subsistence and cultural base, is treated under the law as not belonging to them, but to the state. In the absence of 'registered' documentary evidence, such customary prior residence is hard to prove in court, regardless of
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the real circumstances. Since the phrase 'indigenous people' is most frequently invoked in relation to land rights and since land-rights cases are increasingly coming before the courts, conflict thus arises between the true indigeny-based principles underpinning 'native' land title and formal exogeny-based principles by which the courts are usually constrained to abide. Lawyers acting on behalf of indigenes whose rights are threatened thus face the problem of translating between distinct and barely bridgeable systems ofland tenure. The judges before whom such cases are argued must therefore sometimes consider judicial precedents emanating from other parts of the world, such as Canada, Australia and the United States, where issues of tribal land rights have been brought before the courts. Thus it is necessary to incorporate a concern for the sociology of indigeny when dealing not only with tribal societies, but also, under modernisation, with state-based societies and macro-economic issues. Exogenes' political and economic dominance , even when they adopt a purportedly indigenist stance, may lead them to m.isconstrue the real indigenes' difficult socioeconomic position as being the result oflaziness, or even primitivity, rather than as resulting from usurpation of their subsistence base.
Indigenism Unlike indigeny and exogeny, indigenism identifies a set of overt political ideologies. Indigenist discourse relates explicitly to politically defined territories, rather than to concrete individuated places, and is therefore necessarily espoused within an exogenous, rather than indigenous, frame of action. As Hirtz (2003), with reference to the Philippines, and Dove (2006) , more generally, have argued, mounting an indigenist campaign requires a degree of exogenous and modern life experience on the part of its proponents (which assertion is not intended to denigrate or minimise the importance of such efforts). There are several kinds of indigenism, of which two are particularly significant with respect to legal issues. First, there is the local-level 'indigeneity' or 'indigenousness' asserted by tribespeople, forn1er tribespeople and peasants when trying to protect and guarantee their land rights. Internationally, this is the type ofindigenism most commonly regarded as deserving of attention and support, as in the stances taken by the United Nations, the ILO and several non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and Survival International. Second, and in contrast, there is the overtly national-level indigenism of which the Bumiputera and Pribumi ideologies of Malaysia and Indonesia are examples. 14 Bumiputera and Pribumi are primarily political terms, relating to nation-state concerns; they are not proper tools of sociological analysis and do little to aid understanding of the specific life circumstances of the people they label. Moreover, unlike true indigeny, political indigenism - especially where it affects inter-group relations - is open to the state 's manipulation of the notions of 'place' and 'territory'. These are sometimes recategorised as 'indigenous' land reserves in the ethnic-nationalistic sense, while the people who formerly lived there under true indigeny lose their ownership rights. This is the case, for example, of several declared 'Malay reserves' in Peninsular Malaysia that were formerly occupied solely by aboriginal Orang Asli. In Asia , then, these two varieties of indigenism often lead to conflict. Advances made on behalf of the nationalist approach tend to override the wished-for advances asserted at the local level. The latter typically involves the desire for a degree of nativist autonomy from the state; the former, however, refers to a stance adopted by the state for its own purposes. 15
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A related phenomenon in Asia is what might be called the submerged indigenousness of several relatively large-scale, mostly non-tribal populations. Vail (2007) describes one such example, the Khmers of northeast Thailand, as an 'invisible minority'. These constitute points of potential indigenist agitation for autonomy or independence and their presence tends to further heighten the 'exogenous' cultural character of the more dominant sector of the population. Examples include: • • • • • • • • •
•
the Mons and other non-Burmans in Burma; China's complex history of creeping Sinicisation of originally non-Chinese populations, some of whom are still not (Han) 'Chinese'; India's complicated fusion of the caste hierarchy and occupational specialisation with graded degrees of indigeny; Indonesia's appropriation of Malay as the Indonesian national language, and the relations between 'transn1igrated' and local populations; Japan's Burakumins and Ainus (the latter not officially recognised as an 'indigenous people' until 2008); Singapore's part-indigenous Malay presence; Sri Lanka, with respect to the Veddas and Tamils; Taiwan's Austronesian-speaking Aboriginal populations; Thailand's very complex ethnic makeup, some (such as the Mons, Khmers, 'Sakais' and Karens) pre-dating the advent of Thai civilisation and others (Meos, Hmongs) post-dating it; and Vietnam, with respect to the Chams in the south and the tribal 'Montagnards' in the highlands.
'Indigenous peoples' in Asia: Some examples The following selected country sketches illustrate the kinds of problem that have arisen in Asian states that have employed the idea of 'indigenous people'. The various interpretations of the phrase demonstrate that there is no generally recognised synonymy between 'tribal' and 'indigenous' throughout the region, nor is there a clear distinction between 'indigenous people' defined ethno-nationally and 'indigenous people' defined by their place-linked indigeny. Accordingly, when steps are taken to protect the rights of tribal, or recently tribal, people, employment of the term 'indigenous' without further qualification will prove insufficient. The specific details must be spelled out in each case, down to the individual, family or community level. This requires research into the people's documented local history, which is more likely to be found in administrative archives and ethnographers' notebooks than in published works. Unfortunately, the coverage of such materials is usually partial. The courts must therefore also consider the evidence of oral history and be willing to accommodate the special circumstances of people whose land-attachments are expressed in a radically different manner from that of the established law codes. Malaysia
In Malaysia, 'indigenous' has become the preferred English translation of the politically loaded term Bumiputera ('son of the soil'), which has been deployed for decades as a label justifying the provisioning of special privileges to just some of the country's citizens.
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In Peninsular Malaysia, bumiputera is normally taken to refer to the Malays - a population that has long continued to assimilate individuals of non-Peninsular origin. In his opening speech at the govetnment-sponsored International Seminar on Indigenous People in Kuala Lumpur on 29 November 1993, Anwar Ibrahim (later to become Malaysia's deputy prime minister) inserted the name Melayu ('Malay') into the middle of a long list of 'indigenous' Malaysian groups. In terms of senses 4 and 5 listed earlier in this chapter, he could be regarded as correct in doing so. But the Conference had been convened to address the problems of minority tribal societies worldwide - 'indigenous' in senses 1-3 whereas the Malays of Malaysia constitute a non-tribal political dominant majority. Further confusion has emerged since then. In his 2009 address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Malaysia's delegate referred explicitly to the aboriginal tribal Orang Asli as 'indigenous people'. In so doing, he showed that his government- or at least, its foreign ministry - understood the United Nations' use of 'indigenous' to mean 'tribal'. Malaysia, as a signatory to the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, is therefore morally bound to apply all of its terms to the Orang Asli. Within Malaysia, however, official sources, including at least two of the country's former prime ministers, have on several occasions asserted publicly that the Orang Asli are not 'indigenous'. For them, 'indigenous' identifies not the people whose ancestors have inhabited the Peninsula for the longest time, but solely the descendants of those - the Malays - who supposedly first brought 'civilisation' to the country. The deputy director of the Department of Orang Asli Development (himself an Orang Asli) reasserted this view publicly in 2012. In other words, the rhetoric of indigenism in Malaysia relates solely to the nation-state construct and has nothing to do with temporal priority. Officially, therefore, only the Malays qualify as 'indigenous' to Malaysia (in sense 5 above) -a practice that continues to relegate the Orang Asli to a historical and legal limbo, especially with regard to land rights. 16
Singapore Since the late 1980s, there have been no tribal populations in Singapore. The last such were the non-Muslim Orang Seletar living on the island's north coast, who, like most other Singaporeans, have since been resettled into high-rise apartment blocks, thereby ceasing to be tribal. Other fmmerly tribal populations were also living under place-linked indigeny until the 1950s or later. They too have now been resettled and n1erged into the so-called Malay sector of the population, all of whom, according to article 152 of the Singapore Constitution, are the 'indigenous people' of the Republic, regardless of their specific familial origins. Nevertheless, according to studies in the 1980s, there were significant cultural and socio-economic differences within the Singapore 'Malay' community between the locally indigenous ones and those who were descended exogenously from migrants. The latter displayed significantly higher degrees of educational attainn1ent and of religious (Islamic) orthodoxy (Ali, 2002) . Conversely, Malays of more indigenously Singaporean descent exhibited relatively less educational success and lower degrees of Islamic orthodoxy. 17
Indonesia
Pribumi, similar to the Malaysian term Bumiputra and regularly translated as 'indigenous', normally refers to those whose ancestors originated from anywhere within the vast
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territory of the current Republic of Indonesia in contrast with those whose ancestors came from_outside Indonesia, especially China. Thus people who have 'transmigrated' from Java to Sumatra, for example, are officially still Pribumi, even though they are no longer indigenous in the place-linked 'indigeny' sense. However, local usage sometimes differs: in southern Sumatra, for example, pribumi is also used to distinguish the local, more truly indigenous, people from those who have migrated from elsewhere in Indonesia. In West Borneo (Kalimantan Barat) province, local 'indigenous' feelings led to an unexpected alliance between Malays, ethnic Chinese and tribal Dayaks in sometimes violent opposition to non-'indigenous' migrants from the island of Madura. A more traditional approach is followed in Riau Islands (Kepulauan Riau) province, where the local Malays sometimes distinguish between those who are Melayu asli ('indigenous Malays') and those who are Melayu murni ('pure Malays') (Wee, 1988: 212214). The Melayu asli are members of locally derived populations, often tribal in social organisation, but the Melayu mumi are mostly higher-ranking people of non-Melayu (usually Bugis) origin, whose n1embers have often tried to decide for the other Malays just what constitutes cultural Malayness, in yet another example of the appropriation of indigeny by exogeny for political purposes. Indonesia's many tribal populations, along with son1e other rural communities, we re forn1erly categorised in official publications as masyarakat terasing ('unintentionally separated societies') rather than indigenes (Persoon, 1998), but are now referred to officially and in the Constitution as masyarakat adat ('customary-law societies'). Masyarakat ('society') is son1etimes replaced by suku ('societal segment'), as in the distinction between O rang Suku Laut ('tribal sea people') and orang laut ('[any] sea people'). But suku is also employed more generally in relation to so-called ethnic groups, as in Malalatoa's official and comprehensive 1995 Ensiklopedi Suku Bangsa di Indonesia [Encyclopaedia of Indonesian Ethnic Groups], which treats such large-scale populations as the Javanese no differently from the nuny snull-scale and under-described tribal populations that it also describes. As Persoon (1998: 281) reports, the associated view that the population of Indonesia is predominantly indigenous justified the governn1ent's decision to ignore the UN Year of Indigenous People in 1993. Tribality, as such, therefore mostly goes unremarked in Indonesian usage. Neither indigeny nor temporal priority feature in these terminologies; rather, the implication is that the various terasingl adat comn1unities are 'separated' from the national mainstream through no fault of their own and that their problems would be solved simply by integration into that mainstream. But Li (2000: 21) reports that, in parts of Indonesia, outsiders have an interest in maintaining the tribality of certain populations because their supposed 'failure to improve (to turn nature's bounty to a profit)' can then be used to justify assigning their land and resources 'to people who will make better use of them'. This deliberate misrecognition of the special life circumstances of true indigenes has led to expropriation and damaging of their land and forest resources in favour of commercial crop estates or paper pulp enterprises. Nevertheless, the indigenes' long-established swidden farming is often blamed for generating the toxic 'haze' that envelopes the region annually, but which is actuall the product of the industrial-scale enterprises that destroyed their subsistence base in the first place. Legal solutions to ren1edy this situation have proved extremely diffi cult to establish.
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Philippines Unlike Indonesia, the Philippines explicitly recognises that its population contains many tribal/indigenous peoples. This was recognised legally by the passing of a national Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) in 1997 and is also apparent in the open presence of many NGOs concerned with their welfare. Persoon (2009: 206-214) presents a comprehensive account of the highly variable situation of the country's tribal and post-tribal populations. In some respects, however, ideas about indigenousness in the Philippines are similar to the Malaysian case. William Scott (197 4: 7) wrote that the tribal hill populations are regarded by the lowlanders as 'non-Filipinos' - hence not 'indigenous' - because the former were the only true resisters to Spanish colonialism. Similarly, Aguilar (2005: 612620) has shown that a popular Philippine version of the obsolete ethnic migratory wave theory accords indigenous status not to the various tribal populations, but to the supposedly 'third-wave' lowland-dwelling f11dios, because they were the reputed bringers of civilisation. As in the Riau-Malay and Malaysian cases, Philippine rhetoric thus fuses an ideology of 'indigeny' with the notion of civilisational purity. This, as in Malaysia and the Riau Islands, allows exogeny to appropriate indigeny to itself, thereby legitimising a proclaimed exogeny as the basis of the right to rule.
Thailand Although it displays differences from the Malaysian and Philippine examples, the Thai state's ideological underpinnings also exhibit an interplay between exogeny and indigenism. Despite the historically exogenous and suppletive character ofThai cultural traditions (although not necessarily of the people), official ideology insists that the state's rule is based on an overarching homogeneity compounded oflanguage (Central Thai), religion (Theravada Buddhism) and indigenousness (Hamilton, 1991). The Thai political domain finds it difficult to accommodate anything, such as its many tribal populations (including everal clearly aboriginal ones), that might hint at an alternative, exogenous, origin for Thai culture. Consequently, even the highly aboriginal Maniq 'negritos' of the south are commonly characterised as originating fron1 outside Thailand. Confusion also results from the dual denotation of the word 'Thai', which refers both to Thai citizenship regardless of ethnicity and to Thai ethnicity. As Dorairajoo (2009) shows, the 1.8 million Malays of the south are therefore sometimes 'Thais' and sometimes 'non-Thais', a 'problem' further complicated by their 'ethnic' adherence to Islam rather than ethnic-Thai Theravada Buddhism. (In Malaysia, the equivalent distinction is solved by talking of'Malaysians' and 'Malays', respectively.)
India Despite a persistent belief that India was populated anciently by waves of migrants coming from elsewhere and that some Indians are therefore more 'indigenous' than others, the vast majority of the population must be considered broadly indigenous to the country. Nevertheless, in Indian (as well as Nepalese, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan) usage, the most usual word for 'indigenous', adiviisi, implying a distinctively aboriginal status, applies to only around 8 per cent of the population, but with great regional variation, from 38 per cent in Chhattisgarh to just 0.9 per cent in Bihar. The term adiviisi (from adi,
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meaning 'earliest times' , and vasi, meaning 'inhabitant') was invented in the 1930s, but it has met with opposition on the grounds that it is supposedly employed primarily by landless people as a means of asserting aboriginal priority in access to land. Also well established in official usage are the terms 'scheduled castes' and 'scheduled tribes', established by the pre-independence colonial administration and now specifically listed in Schedules annexed to the Indian Constitution. A subcategory of the latter consists of so-called Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, who are regarded as isolated and as maintaining a distinctive cultural identity. These are presumably more likely to be living in circumstances of true place-linked indigeny than the members of other 'scheduled' castes and tribes. However, these categorisations are not nom1ally understood as indicating that they are 'indigenous peoples'. Fluidity, not fixity, marks these categorisations. Just as fully Hindu subcastes are known to change their positions in the ritual purity-pollution hierarchy over the generations by altering their customary behaviours, so also do people move i11to the caste hierarchy from 'scheduled caste' or 'scheduled tribe' status by becoming more formally Hindu . Since such changes tend to alter the basis of their former endogamous practices, this also leads to the generation of new 'tribes', who break away to reinforce their local endogamy. An alternative pathway for lower-ranking people is to employ conversion to supposedly caste-rejecting Christianity or Islam as a means of getting outside the caste system altogether. While this succeeds to some extent at the individual level, especially when it is associated with improved access to formal education, it has not prevented the local groups from being considered essentially as new sub-castes in the wider all-Indian framework, at least in those areas in which th e ties of locality remain strong.
Conclusion The terms 'indigenous people(s)' and 'indigeneity' are multiply ambiguous. Their use without further qualification obscures key differences between the various real-world circumstances to which they are typically applied. This leads to confusion when the label 'indigenous' is employed in formal deliberations over political, cultural and land rights. To achieve clarity, some further distinctions need to be observed, most importantly between 'indigeny' and 'indigenism', between 'tribal' and 'indigenous', and between 'indigeny' and 'exogeny'. Indigeny (the continued habitation of the same specific places that one's familial ancestors always lived in) differs qualitatively in its cultural, economic and psychological consequences from all other circumstances that are labelled 'indigenous'. The latter usages typically make reference not to specific families and places, but to politically defined populations ('ethnic' , 'national' or otherwise) and territories (states , regions or claimed 'homelands'). Moreover, most such cases arise within the tacitly exogenous context that underpins modernity, made possible by n.ot living continuously where one's ancestors lived. The latter usages of 'indigenous' are examples of 'indigenism' in its several varieties, rather than indigeny. The exogenous framework emphasises formal rationality and codified legal systems, which makes it difficult for the 'native title ' concerns of truly indigenous people to be argued for and judged fairly in court. Without due care, therefore , indigenist arguments may sometimes act against the interests of true place-linked indigenes.
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The conventional use of 'indigenous' as a synonym of 'tribal' brings together two distinct, and sometimes antithetical, social circumstances under a single label. In Asia, tribespeople are those who have resisted incorporation into centralised states by organising themselves into culturally autonomous, segmentary social formations. Such tribespeople are indeed mostly indigenous (in the 'indigeny' sense) to the places they inhabit. However, this is also true of many peasants in the region, even though they have historically adopted the dominant cultural framework of the states in which they live. The shared indigeny of tribespeople and many peasants generates the 'traditional' character of their lives and the consequent disadvantages that they experience in the face of modernisation. However, the persisting cultural differences between tribespeople and peasants relate not to their indigeny, but to their distinct patterns of linkage to the state. Treating both of these rural populations in an undifferentiated manner as simply 'indigenous' peoples therefore misrepresents their life circumstances, with regard especially to matters of religion, language and mode of attachment to land. Examples drawn from several different Asian countries demonstrate the varying and sometimes antithetical ways in which the idea of 'indigenous peoples' has been appliedor ignored - and hence the necessity to employ it with more care than has usually been the case.
Notes
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More restricted uses of'indigenous' also appear in scholarly social-scientific and biological writing, but these are not discussed in this chapter. Bowen (2000: 13) also draws attention to the key distinction between the Old World and the New World in the differing significance of the phrase 'indigenous people'. The English word 'indigenous' is easily translatable into other European languages, but the question of its translatability into Asian languages is not so straightforward. A few examples are given later, but the issue is not otherwise discussed in this chapter. The term 'aboriginal' is employed in this sense in Australia and Canada, and was formerly employed in Peninsular Malaysia in relation to the populations now known as Orang Asli ('original people'). In all three cases, 'indigenous' is also sometimes employed in reference to these populations. The adjective 'indigenous' is well established, but the nouns 'indigeneity' and 'indigenism' have only recently entered the lexicon, with their usage limited to recent social- science discussions. 'Indigeneity' does not even appear in the 2005 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary or in the more historically orientated Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 'Indigenousness', however, occurs in both dictionaries, although it is rarely employed in the kinds of context referred to in this chapter. 'Indigeny' is an older word that was formerly employed with the same undifferentiated range of meanings currently covered by the term 'indigeneity'. However, as suggested in this chapter, it has proved appropriate not to treat this family of words as synonyms, but to deploy them separately as labels of distinct sets of social circumstances . For a critical review of some of the uses to which the term 'indigeneity' has been used, see Trigger and Dalley (2010). The term may retain some residual utility, however, as hinted at by Hirtz (2003) and Dove (2006), with reference to the image of the 'indigenous' produced by nonindigenous (exogenous) individuals concerned with environmental or traditional-knowledge issues. For a detailed discussion of the situation of 'traditional' / 'indigenous' knowledge in the modern world, see An tons (2008). The contrast between indigeny and exogeny is also a major factor underlying many of the closely related contrasts proposed in the classical social-science literature. In chronological order, these include: Karl Marx on 'species-being' ( Gatttmgswese11) versus 'alienation'; Ferdinand Tennies
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on Gemeinschqft ('community') versus Gesellschqft ('association, society'); Emile Durkheim on 'mechanical' versus 'organic' solidarity; Max Weber (throughout his writings) on 'substantive rationalities' versus 'formal rationality' ; Georg Simmel on 'subj ective culture' / 'heart' versus 'objective culture' /'intellect'; Edward Sapir on 'genuine' versus 'spurious' culture; Lucien LevyBruhl on 'participatory' versus 'discursive ' mentalities, a clarification of his earlier discussion in terms of'primitive' mentality; Louis Wirth on 'primary' versus 'secondary' social contacts; M arcel Mauss on the evolution of the various notions of the self and the person; and Robert Bellah on 'compact' versus 'differentiated' symbolic systems . 7 A few present-day tribal populations are not strictly indigenous to the places they cu rrently occupy, as they are known to have migrated there from elsewhere within the past few generations . 8 The very few possibly authentic cases in Asia include the Sentinelese and (less clearly so) the Jarawas, who both inhabit remoter parts of India's Andaman Islands. For anthropological critiques ofthe concept of 'tribe ',see Fried (1966); Godelier (1 977). 9 This approach to tribality has been examined for the Malay World by Benjam in (2002: 7-17) and Wawrinec (20 10), and for mainland Southeast Asia more extensively by James Scott (2009) . 10 In this regard, Jonsson (2011: 109) warns that 'any scientific account of human diversity in Southeast Asia that takes for granted contemporary ethnolinguistic classification serves, deliberately or not, to reinforce particular state regimes (colonial, national, etc.) of truth' . 11 Some instances of secondary tribalisation in Southeast Asia are listed and discussed by Fortier (2014), who clearly regards such cases as not especially rare. Dove (2006: 192) draws attention to the parallel process by which peasants relabel themselves as 'indigenous people' (virtual tribespeople, so to speak) to claim protection for their ' traditional' rights in the modern sphere. 12 Such resettlement does not take into account a community's resource zone: the people are treated as if they were simply moving house. As pointed out by Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson (2006), sites that outsiders see as physically abandoned may still remain connected directly with a living population through such spiritual tokens as the perennial frui t trees, spiritcharged sites and cemeteries that they leave behind to keep their indigeny intact. Urbanites' concern for the preservation of'heritage' hardly ever extends to such non-monumental remains. The traditional owners are therefore usually powerless to prevent the bulldozing that precedes urbanisation or the setting up of commercial plantations or garbage-dumping sites. 13 Laird (1979) discusses an unusually complicated Orang Asli example from Malaysia. Delang (2003 : 160-178) explicitly applies the contrast between indigeny and exogeny, and the contrast between many-stranded and single-stranded relations to his extensive study ofland-linked social and economic change among the Karens, a peasantising tribal population of northern Thailand. 14 For informed discussions of the terms Bumiputera and Pribumi, see Siddique and Suryadinata (1982), Aguilar (2001) and Nah (2006) . The Pribumi category is supposed to have been abandoned in 2006, following the passing of a national citizenship law (Wawrinec, 2010: 102) , but there has been no such relaxing of the Bumiputera concept in Malaysia. 15 A recent development has attempted to obviate some of these problems by replacing the idea of 'indigenous peoples' with that of 'fourth-world nations ', regarded as culturally distinct populations numbering in the thousands that constitute 'nations without states' . One such list (Hirch, 2007) brings together 'the Roma in Europe, pre-WWII Ashkenazi in the region of the Pale of Settlement, Kurds and Palestinians in the Middle East, and Native American N ations I First Nations, Alaskan Natives, Hawaiians and Indian peoples throughout the Americas' . Although these populations have undoubtedly suffered social disabilities of various kinds, their circum stances differ greatly. Moreover, by referring to them as 'nations', it is implied that they should eventually come to form ethnically based states of their own. However, that too would probabl lead to the further cultural and political disadvantaging of any people within their domain w ho were still living under true place-linked indigeny, tribal or otherwise. 16 For reviews of the land-rights situation of the Orang Asli and other such Malaysian populations. see Bulan (2007); Idrus (2010); Subramaniam (2013). These studies include reports on the coun cases that have passed judgments, frequently in their favour, on land- rights claims made on behalf
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of various Malaysian tribal populations. Perhaps because of the disagreements in Malaysia about the meaning of'indigenous', government agencies have usually chosen to mount appeals against these judgments, greatly delaying the eventual carrying out of the courts' decisions. Unfortunately, the Malaysian Department ofOrangAsli Development QAKOA) has hitherto lent its support not to the Orang Asli claimants, but to the parties against whom the claims were being made. 17 Like most other Singaporeans, these populations have now been resettled into standard public housing, thereby becoming more 'exogenous', with a probable loss of their former distinctively 'indigenous' characteristics. The majority population of Singapore is highly exogenous, which has predisposed it to accept one of the highest degrees of formal rationality in the world.
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