Indigenous
Peoples Specialty Group Selected Sponsored sessions, |
|
|
|
Joel Wainwright, University of Minnesota “Finishing the critique
of cultural ecology: a postcolonial reading of Many contemporary studies concerning indigenous people fall within the purview of political ecology, which is indebted to cultural ecology for key methods and concepts. Recent interest by political ecologist in the ‘counter-mapping’ of indigenous knowledge and resources can be seen as an extension of cultural ecological premises about culture areas and nature-culture systems. I argue that the critiques of cultural ecology which coincided with the rise of political ecology in the 1980s must be taken up again, through a concerted reading of postcolonial theory, to rethink indigeneity and ‘counter-mapping’. To make this argument, I read the work of the late Barney Nietschmann, a major figure within geography, cultural ecology, and ‘Fourth world studies.’ In particular I examine his last major project, the Maya Atlas (1997), and its effects on the politics of indigenous organizing in southern Belize. By situating the Atlas within a genealogical reading of Mayanism and the history of British colonization in Belize, I offer a postcolonial critique of cultural ecology. Keywords: indigeneity, cultural
ecology, postcolonial, Belize Email: wain0012 (at) umn.edu
|
|