Let us start with the simplistic but well documented statement that we are individually and socially caught up in a globalized system that is rushing towards its destruction. Global warming, sixth extinction, illiberal transitions… are a few of the warning signs contributing to the general and dark mood of our times. With a sense of simplicity, we may call the mental vehicle of this morbid journey by the name of Modernity. Grossly, I define Modernity with four main axioms. (1) The radical divergence between culture and nature, opposing humans and non-humans, both legally and ontologically (famously embodied by Hobbes’ political philosophy). (2) The technical domination of a purely deterministic and material nature (a project that was founded by Descartes and Bacon). (3) An optimistic and somewhat religious concept of History permeating the contemporary messianic faith in technology and Progress (finding its blueprint in Hegelian philosophy). (4) The notion of a rational and egoistic individual seen as the ultimate and only relevant “atom” for social and economic intelligibility, in comparison to whom the relationships appear as secondary connections (a view that is found in early economists’ works, such as Adam Smith). This mindset is like the locked car in a horror movie, riding at high speed towards a ravine, without brake pedal nor steering wheel. Collapsology often uses a similar metaphor to describe how we are crossing irreversible thresholds, leading to positive feedbacks that will push the situation out of control. Subsequently, we might consider ourselves in the position of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause: the only way out is to jump out of the car. I invite the reader to consider the present attempt as an invitation to jump out of the car before it’s too late. But we need first to open the door, that is the modern mindset.
The modern mindset is a guarantee for the dominant economical project that it will keep on accumulating profit for the few, generating growth through exploitation, monetization and optimization of virtually everything on earth and in our lives. Capitalism in the neoliberal mode. A project with history. I will not go into the details of this history (this would require discussing sedentarism, monotheism, feudality, enclosures, the emergence of the State and much more), since many authors have already contributed to the untold narrative behind the success of capitalism. Still, I will stress one historical fact that has been crucial for the booming of global capitalism. The accumulation of profits at a global scale being only conceivable if one assumes that resources are (virtually) infinite, we must acknowledge that it was historically made possible, or at least easier to conceive, by the discovery of the so-called New World and the expansionism of civilization through colonialism. Quite ironically, the origin of global modern capitalism is thus associated with the arising of a “second world”, reversely echoing the contemporary slogan that “there is no planet B”. In a way, one could diagnose that this machine of destruction was unleashed by a traumatic shock: the sudden burst of a seemingly unending flow of gold, forests, meadows, fertile soil, slaves, lazily waiting for their appropriation and exploitation. Was capitalism a response to this shock? The haunting dream of colonizing space supports the hypothesis.
But the “New World”, although unappropriated, was not uninhabited. Consequently, the global society of capitalism and the promise of a universal well-being through continuous growth and technical progress has a counterpart in the oblivion of native peoples, and most often their deletion. Whether they were an anomaly or an anachronism, a raw material to be civilized, lost souls to be saved or half animals to be domesticated, this view varied across time and place. The point is that they just had to clear the set! Surprisingly enough, a few of them are still there several centuries later, facing the destructive expansion of the “modern world” with this perplexing and somewhat scandalous ability to refuse what they were expected to be blessed with, standing on the edge of the last wild forests, and at the same time on the edge of our own lost past, which we scornfully throw back in the obscurity of Middle Age. For the self-confident superiority of the Moderns is always directed both towards the non-modern and the pre-modern. What they are and what we were.
First urged to save their soul through conversion, later expected to dissolve in the universal progress through mass consumption and the laws of the market, the Indigenous turned to be the last islets of collective resistance against global capitalism and ecological destruction. And a source of hope and inspiration for those who seek paths for escaping the raging flow in the valley of entropy. Therefore, I will not address them as the relic of a golden age or the weak victims of imperialism, but rather as a powerful intellectual and ethical resource in dangerous times, the teaching workforce in a masterclass on how to resist in the face of our enemies. The aim is not to propose a piece of proper anthropology or to claim scientific accuracy, but to outline a few modes of resistance, the pragmatics of Indigeneity, and a series of “indigenous imperatives”, all of which are pleading for a decentralized ecology, promoting local creativity in a multiplicity of ecosystems, instead of a new world order, albeit a green one. The attempt is grounded on the belief in the greater potential of this plural and situated ecology – and that is the Indigenous Principle.
Indigenous imperative #1. Extending one’s people beyond humans (a symbiotic Umwelt)
In the works of early anthropologists, it was a recurrent subject of perplexity that indigenous society seems to “ignore universality”. Cliché number one. Indeed, it has been a much-discussed trait of these social groups that they do not use a special word for human beings in general, aside of that referring to their own cultural identity. Through the glasses of our triumphant modern monotheism, it looked like an incomplete development had deprived these people of the glorious concept of “Humanity”. A more pragmatic approach leads to a quite different view. When you don’t secretly plan to rule the world, you don’t need such a global concept. And indeed, universalism was none of their business, until it comes as a side dish with western expansionism and economic imperialism. In other words, Inuit people in the Arctic or Amazonian Jivaros simply make no use and take no advantage in a general concept of Mankind. On the other hand, they are deeply engaged into creating and maintaining fruitful and enduring relationships with the many living beings around them: the plants that heal them, the animals that nourish them, the ground and the rivers and the forest, other people and deities and spirits standing for the many powers with whom they negotiate and strike alliances through art, myths, dreams, sorcery, rituals.
In fact, indigenous “national” identity is so far from being a particularism that it is based on the idea that the notion of a person includes other species, any natural or religious entities, living communities, ecosystems or even landscapes such as a river or a mountain. In his effort toward shaping an “anthropology beyond the human”, Eduardo Kohn uses the generic term of “self” for this extended concept of person, which he considers as a general feature of the living beings in the view of the Amazonian Runa’s. And it is indeed a basic property of life that it emerges from a multiplicity in the shape of a self-bearing though transitory entity. Kohn insists that the name “Runa” is not so much that of a tribal identity as it refers to a certain mode of being in a given situation, a way of engaging in a living world, a world which makes sense and is full of relationships from end to end. “Runa” qualifies all the selves involved in this extended people of living things, among which humans have the difficult mission of reading the signs and maintaining the fragile balance, cautiously collecting plants and hunting animals, avoiding to offense the spirits in the forests, taking care of the symbiotic ties sustaining the ecosystem. Therefore, being Indigenous consists in standing together with one’s own environment, being part of a human + non-human people. This could be a pragmatical definition of animism. Philippe Descola calls “nature-culture” this kind of bio-eco-symbolic Umwelt (“surroundings”*). And he underlines how this imperative of keeping up humans and nature together endows people with the ability to resist the destructive exploitation of their environment. When a mining plant project threatens a hill in India, Descola relates on a radio broadcast, the local native people immediately and unanimously stand up as if one of their most dignified members had been offended. For the hill is not just a hill, but also a goddess, and the house of the goddess, and a place where she is honored, and a present that she gave to her people, and an ancestor of the group… The hell of a modernproof thinking! No need to compute a calculation of the loss and profit, or to enter a conflict on “property” and the “common good” – making you lose before starting the fight. For the hill is not a “resource” nor an “estate”. She is one of us. The first imperative consists in an enlarged conception of one’s “identity” as a people, including humans and non-humans; it works as an efficient immune response to the modern process of splitting people and nature apart, to govern the former in order to exploit the latter.
Indigenous Imperative #2. Folding time, disarming progress (metabolic assemblages*)
Another case of fascination for modern anthropologists is best expressed in the general theory that the “primitive” peoples do not have the notion of a linear time. Cliché number two. Pleasant storytelling illustrated this theory. I remember an anecdote by the French anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl. During a mission he conducted in Africa in the first decades of the 20th century, Levy-Bruhl left a dog in a village, but when he came back several years later in the same village, native people would say that the dog had always been there. Arguably, something was lost in translation, or maybe the people said so because they feared that the white men take the dog back. But that’s not the point. The point is that by reacting this way, Indigenous people efficiently protect and stabilize their natural-cultural Umwelt. A similar process described by E. Kohn about the Amazonian Runas will make it even clearer. In their mythology, the Runas curiously describe an ancestral, original Runa as wearing modern manufactured clothes, while the traditional half naked version of the Runa is seen as a late transitory, “fallen” Runa. Here, Runa people dress up their non-modernity with a modern outfit. Literally. Of course, a serious academic anthropologist could invoke the process of building a social memory in oral cultures, where the constant recording of history through writing does not exist, as Vernant did for archaic Greece. But once again, we think at a much more down-to-earth level. Here, the indigenous is basically celebrating the enduring health, the resilience of their nature-culture: “Yes, our jeans trousers and branded t-shirts are now a proper way of being Runa, we have successfully been through the challenge of digesting the novelty. We have sailed through dangerous waters full of new commodities, habits, animals and food, and we successfully found our way back to our own world.” On the pragmatic level I am trying to stick with, this way of bending or curving time gives indigeneity its unique ability to resist the disruptive corrosion of the modern black magic of progress. In the modern religion, everything that comes as “new” carries a sacred aura and is accompanied with the silent mention that “nothing will ever be the same” (see axiom 3, above). Indigenous mythology patiently disarms, deactivates this sorcery.
At the biological and ecological level, this process of incorporating novelty as part of one’s identity is associated with the process of metabolizing a foreign body or a new species into the living fabric of one’s own organism or ecosystem. More generally, “curving time” is a good definition of the antientropic gesture of life, its heroic attempt to evade the thermodynamic fatality of dissolving into elementary particles. The foreign body introduced by the western man carries a power that can break up indigenous culture. This obscure power needs to be tamed, the poison needs to be digested. And the whole reaction is like that of a resilient ecosystem facing a stress. It adjusts all necessary parameters so as to restore a balance and avoid shifting to a different state. Compare this with industrial agriculture: here, the whole ecosystem is erased, simplified, so that only the desired crop will grow. But the crop is unable to survive and protect itself, so it requires the constant use of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, meaning the submission of life and requiring its reconfiguration. I see this as a good metaphor for modern capitalism, perpetuating itself through the constant control and repression of indigeneity, complexity and ecosystems. The second imperative, which consists of folding time upon itself, is the indigenous metabolic reaction to the destructive pretention of the religion of Progress and its messianic promises.
More imperatives under the Indigenous Principle?
The two imperatives discussed here above should probably be augmented with a series of other indigenous modes of thought and resistance. The following list is proposed as a mere suggestion, and a first step for further discussion and investigation. Some of them may already be implied in – or induced from – the previous ones.
(1) Not taking anything as essentially “yours”, even your own body is not seen as the empire of your free will, but as involved in alliances and kinships with Earth, spirits and clans (transitivity and autochthony as a vaccination against appropriation).
(2) Considering anything as endowed with a potential, a power, rather than being a resource, a capital or a mean of production (animism as a firewall against reification and capital).
(Note: this implies considering cautiously every innovation proposed by the modern world and thinking about its potential, both as a useful tool and as a disruptive factor in the society. The toxic thing here is our purely instrumental way of thinking. We say: here’s a tool, it’s just for you to use it in your own way. But any indigenous people knows that one can be modified by one’s tools, that it can take control of ourselves. Who imagined, 25 years ago, when we used PC for typewriting and calculation, that we would become addicted to Facebook and Twitter?)
(3) Always bearing in mind that each being may be both friend or foe – what the Greeks called pharmakon, which is highly valid for healing plants, but also applicable to technology (indeterminacy, as a protection against globalism and the moral of progress).
(4) Refusing the metrics of the colonist – especially the monetary metrics – pushing people and their land into a circle of division, property and debt. Other universal metrics used for the size of a territory or the productivity of a soil, river, forest, are also rejected (polytheism and the irreducible plurality of reality, as a resistance to monetarization).
(5) Considering the religious powers as additive and connective, rather than exclusive and submissive (this was a major matter of contention between the Romans and the first Christians, the latter refusing to see their God taking place as a newcomer and an equal in an enlarged pantheon). This imperative counteracts the tricky dilemma of Monotheism, with its poisonous equivalence: “believing in God” equals “turning away from the idols” (local connectivity as a defense against hierarchy and domination). It is also useful to resist the rationale of liberal economics as well, and a reminder of Michel Serres’ definition of Power (“Pouvoir”) as a global pretention of the local. Pierre Clastres also described how the Jivaros protect themselves against the emergence of a chief in Society against the State.
Back to Indigeneity?
The authors of “The Invisible Committee” made the more general analysis that when people inhabit, collectively occupy their environment, they automatically become resistant to capitalism. That is another way of stating the Indigenous Principle. And it is indeed one premise of the present effort (that one could of course accept or refuse) that capitalism is intrinsically directed towards the destruction of any kind of situated mode of living, the abolition of the very fact of inhabiting one’s Umwelt**, which makes it a modern sequel of our historical monotheism, systematically trying to tear us apart, break us from our lands, networks, our local and collective ties. It is not haphazardly that this war on the inhabitants and their situated ecology comprises the promotion of a global “nomad” citizen, fitting with the universal interface of smartphones and the internet economy, getting served by a new local Uber-proletariat. Habitat and habits have the same Latin root. The same is worth for the Greek Ethos, that we find in ethology and ethics. So, each time we manage to make happen and survive an “ethos”, a situated way of inhabiting our world, we foster our immunity in the face of division and profit, make us stronger and smarter in the indigenous way that I have been trying to describe here.
The Indigenous Principle relies on a profound belief in this rhizomatic ecology, the conviction that a livable and creative “humanity” (collection of ethoi) will result if people are allowed simply locally live in relations with their ecosystems and collectively organize the use of their resources. An ecology that is made of utter radicalism and moral optimism.
How forests think. Eduardo Kohn, 2014.
L’arbre du monde: la cosmologie celtique. Patrice Lajoye, 2016.
Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Deleuze & Guattari, 1972.
To our friends. Invisible Committee, 2014.
La société contre l’Etat. Pierre Clastres, 1974.
Ethics. Baruch de Spinoza.
The parasite. Michel Serres, 1982.
* “Umwelt” is a crucial word here, it was proposed by von Uexküll for a semiotic and bio-ecological use. Meaning the surrounding world (which can be different for each species/individual), it refers to the world that I can sense. In the more anthropological use we made of the word, the Umwelt may extend its coverage by the means of additive vicinities and the alliances with clans, totems and spirits, but never so far that it turns into an abstraction, a Global Thing (in Indigenous peoples, the Big Unity of Earth is always thought as the origin, the Mother Goddess, but never as a global territory – which exists only in the mindset of conquerors).
** See my article (in French) Non merci, on habite ici
*** “Assemblage” (“Agencement” in French) is used by Deleuze and Guattari in “A Thousand Plateaus” as an ontological category shaped on the biological and ecological model of dynamic ensembles, enduring through their redefinition.
symbiosphere 