Shipwrecked Identities

Front matter

NAVIGATING RACE ON NICARAGUA’S MOSQUITO COAST

BARON L. PINEDA

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

The Setting Nicaragua’s Two Coasts

From Bilwi to Puerto Cabezas: Mestizo Nationalism in the Age of Agro-Industry

Company Time Neighborhoods and Official Ethnicity

Chapter 1

Don Paco MENDEZ owns and operates a store among the strings of general stores that line the calle commercial (commercial street) of Puerto Cabezas—the port and capital of Nicaragua’s recently formed North Atlantic Autonomous Region (la RAAN as it is known locally). One afternoon I stopped by his store to do an informal interview with him about his life.! He told me that his family was one of the founders of Puerto Cabezas during the period that is known locally as “company time”—an idealized period from the 1920s to the 1970s in which US and Canadian banana, lumber, and mining industries operated on a large scale in the region.* His Costa Rican mother and Nicaraguan father migrated from the Pacific side of Nicaragua to establish a general store in the burgeoning Caribbean port city that in the 1920s was converted from a small Indian village called Bilwi to the Nicaraguan headquarters of the largest employer in Nicaragua, the Standard Fruit Company.

He was quick to remind me that although he had been born and raised en la costa, on the Mosquito Coast, he was, in an existential sense, profoundly del Pacifico, from the Pacific. Although he referred to himself as an indigena and an indio, he explained to me, with more than a trace of prejudice, the fundamental superiority of the Pacific Indian vis-a-vis the Moscos de aqui (literally, flies from here), as he perjoratively referred to the Miskito Indians.

Don Paco explained that he had spent some time in the campesino (small-scale agriculturalist) villages of the mountainous Nicaraguan interior that he regarded as being part of the Pacific Coast, an important distinction in the context of Nicaragua where all Nicaraguans regard the country as being divided into two fundamentally different halves: Atlantic (Mosquito Coast) and Pacific. In the Segovian Mountains he had witnessed the vigor and skill with which the Indian campesinos coaxed harvests from marginal and relatively dry lands. In his opinion the land’s suitability for agriculture and the climate of the Pacific interior were far inferior to that of the Mosquito Coast, Nicaragua’s relatively sparsely populated and heavily forested Caribbean lowlands. Don Paco’s perception of the absence of ideal geographical, climatic, and social conditions for agriculture in the Pacific vis-a-vis the Atlantic stood in sharp contrast to his perception of the disparity in productivity between the inhabitants of each region:

If the Indians [of the Pacific] have a little piece of land, they plant green peppers, onions, tomatoes . . . everything . . . but here the damn Moscos are lazy. They just plant their cassava and banana and then sit back in their hammock, real easy. They just cultivate in order to live and as long as they are eating, they don’t worry about getting ahead . . . no progress. In the Pacific they plant corn, beans and bust their asses taking care of the crops .. . they will walk ten kilometers to get water. Every day there they are cleaning and taking care of the crops, but for the Moscos from here that is too much work to do. They don’t want to grow corn, the damn Moscos, because they are lazy.

Unfortunately, the sort of prejudice against Costeños, people of the Mosquito Coast, reflected in this quotation is not uncommon, even among some natives such as Don Paco.? Indeed, more generally, the projection of negative qualities such as laziness and ignorance on marginalized out-groups, however defined, is common throughout the world. What stands out about this particular expression of prejudice is the way in which perceptions of land and geography—in other words, environmental ideologies—intersect with ideologies of race and group difference. Don Paco’s belief that the Miskito Indians are lazy was confirmed in his mind by the fact that the agricultural production of the region had historically been low. But he also found this supposed laziness to be particularly disturbing in light of what he perceived to be the distinctive natural abundance of the region. This abundance and the agricultural opportunities he believed this abundance offered stood in contrast to the situation of the relatively arid and more heavily populated Pacific Coast.

In the minds of many Nicaraguans the region’s natural abundance serves to explain the human poverty of its inhabitants. This luxuriant natural world is thought to lead to a diminished industriousness among the inhabitants of the region.

Few people in contemporary Nicaragua question the widely held notion that the Mosquito Coast is a rich land with tremendous natural abundance. However, the region is also popularly regarded as the country’s poorest and least productive—its people suffering from an acute lack of infrastructure, social services, and employment. Since the late nineteenth century, Nicaraguan governments, while decrying the country’s inability to harness the exploitable natural resources, have encouraged foreign companies to operate extractive mining, fishing, and lumbering industries in the region.

From the standpoint of Pacific Nicaraguan nationalism, the historical connection that the Mosquito Coast has had with Great Britain and the English-speaking world provokes suspicion and serves to place Costeño society as a suspect internal other. Throughout the Contra War the opposition of Costefios was viewed as a problem of separatism that was the residue of the hyper-exploitation of the region by British and North American colonialism and neo-colonialism.

In my conversations with Pacific Nicaraguans, many disapprovingly assert that Costeños “se creen ingleses” (believe they are English). This perceived insistence on maintaining cultural, linguistic, social, economic, and military (during the Contra War) ties with the English-speaking world and nonintegration with Nicaraguan Mestizo nationalism is ridiculed because it is perceived to stand in contrast to the reality of Mosquito Coast poverty and marginalization from both the English-speaking world and the relatively more prosperous Pacific half of the country. In light of the perceived Blackness, poverty, isolation, and corrupted languages of Costefios, Pacific Nicaraguans ridicule the idea that they should carry the torch of the Anglo-American and Anglo- Caribbean world.

Living and working with Costeños, I found that they are well aware of the derision with which many Pacific Nicaraguans regard them. Not surprisingly, they seek to contest or invert, formally and informally, the status hierarchies in which they find themselves in a subordinate position. In many ways Costeños see themselves as cosmopolitans whose continuing ties to the English-speaking world place them above Pacific Nicaraguans. With regard to their presumed over-identification with their British and North American oppressors, they remind themselves and Pacific Nicaraguans, when they have a chance, that the Pacific Coast has a long history of subservience and humiliation at the hands of these same alleged oppressors.

They speak of their successes in finding work in the United States, which they attribute in part to their English skills, western Caribbean location, and social capital (i.e., contact with Protestant churches). Costeño men frequently work on Caribbean cruise boats, and they pride themselves for being regarded as hard workers and being paid in US dollars. In that vein, they take pride in the long-standing fact of the circulation of dollars in the regional economy, in contrast to the troubled monetary history of the Nicaraguan Cordoba. Some Costefios describe themselves as “dollar men”—an expression that refers to their positive identification as cosmopolitans.

With regard to race, Costeños do not outright reject a pan-hemispheric skin-color hierarchy that ranks light skin above dark skin, but they note that Pacific Nicaraguans are themselves often quite dark skinned. Costeños typically construct their own Caribbean Blackness as being an integral part of their cosmopolitanism.* In this sense they both invert and contest the negative stereotypes that are applied to them and their region.

Costeños typically derive optimism and hope from their unwavering belief in the richness of the region and its potential for human transformation. For them the natural wealth of the region, far from sapping the energy of the people who inhabit it, represents an underutilized asset that under the right conditions should propel the Mosquito Coast into a particular kind of material prosperity. They share a vision of a dollardriven and wage-driven prosperity that, in their minds, existed during company time. Costeños feel that in light of their natural environment and its role in their region's history, they should not be materially poor. In other words, they experience a nagging dissonance, what I call “environmental dissonance” (Pineda 2001c), between the abundance of their natural environment and the stagnation of their economies.

Notwithstanding the region’s history of armed conflict and cycles of economic boom and bust, Porteños (inhabitants of Puerto Cabezas)

find the current state of material poverty in the Atlantic Coast to be particularly appalling.? They fervently affirm their conviction that given the natural abundance of the Mosquito Coast, they should not be so poor. According to their cosmopolitan framework of viewing the world, the natural resources of the region should translate into their own material well-being. They shouldn’t be so poor because their land is so rich. This environmental dissonance that Costeños experience stands in contrast to the way that the inhabitants of the Pacific view their relationship to the environment. The Pacific is a place where, to quote anthropologist Roger Lancaster’s provocative title, life is hard (Lancaster 1992).

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF BLACKNESS AND INDIGENEITY IN THE MOSQUITO COAST

Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, epic vocabulary from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral and ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and the given names of places accepted like Felicity or Choiseul. The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. (Walcott 1992, 28)

In the mid-1600s a ship carrying African slaves is said to have shipwrecked off the Mosquito Coast. The survivors of the shipwreck are believed to have joined with the inhabitants of the region, eventually leading to the emergence of two new categories of people. In the course of what Walcott refers to above as a process of renaming, and others have termed ethnogenesis, the indomitable Miskito Indians and later the

Creoles emerged at the western edge of the Caribbean Sea on the shores of the Spanish Main in what is today Nicaragua and Honduras.° Straddling this boundary between land and water, Central American isthmus and Caribbean Sea, Spanish colonies and English colonies, the inhabitants of the region relatively successfully charted an independent course that spared them much of the human devastation wrought on their neighbors by European rule.

Over time a unique and distinctive society emerged on the Mosquito Coast that was composed of the many fragments that were brought by sea to the lagoons and beaches of this tropical coastal plain. Outsiders, such as pirates, scholars, fisherman, merchants, revolutionaries, drug smugglers, Cuban counterrevolutionaries (briefly), American Indian Movement activists, diplomats, and capitalists have been attracted to the region by its natural resources and geographic and geopolitical position. In the course of history these and other visitors, as well as the local people, have debated and contested the African, Indian, and European constitution of Nicaragua’s Costeños.

For example, in the colonial period the English crowned a Mosquito King with a sworn allegiance to Great Britain in an attempt to strengthen their political and economic foothold on the Spanish Main. Spain, and later Nicaragua and the United States, opposed English presence in the area and contested the legitimacy of the Mosquito monarchy on the grounds that its people were Black Africans and therefore lacked grounds for a claim to self rule (Olien 1985). More recently, during the Contra War when Ronald Reagan famously declared himself a Miskito Indian, Costeño leaders and their US allies invoked Miskito indigeneity, in specific and distinct ways, as justification for their Opposition to the revolutionary nationalist programs of the Sandinista government.’

As illustrated in the case of Pacific-Atlantic rivalry articulated by my informant Don Paco Mendez, Costeños in their everyday affairs form and contest ideas about Indianness and Blackness in regionally specific ways that are rooted in Nicaragua’s geography, history, and political economy. These instances are among many moments in the history of the Mosquito Coast in which racial and ethnic identification has been navigated in fascinating, complex, and changing ways. This book tells the story of these voyages.

From an early date Europeans identified many of the inhabitants of the Mosquito Coast as being the product of the biological mixture of Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans. The Spanish and English consistently used terms such as Zambo (a Spanish term often used for a person of mixed African and Indian descent that was also used in English, spelled as Sambo), Mulatto (also used in both English and Spanish accounts), and Mustee (primarily in English accounts) to refer to the residents of the area. Their testimonies are full of often-contradictory reports regarding the question of whether the inhabitants were pure Indians, African slaves and their Negro descendants, or mixed Zambos and Mulattos.

In contrast, on the islands of the Caribbean indigenous populations were quickly decimated and subsequently replaced by the uprooted shards of African, Asian, and European peoples whom over time were integrated through the archetypal Caribbean process of creolization—a process that has generated order from radical displacement and disarticulation. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz described the plantation societies of the Caribbean as landmark experiments in modernity, which were populated, often forcibly, by people from other places (Mintz 1994, 295). Precociously multicultural and globalized, the Caribbean islands, when conceived of this way, have been cast as non-indigenous by definition. In contrast, post-conquest Mosquito Coast society has been typified by the persistence of systems of group identification that include both African and Amerindian categories—the use and associations of which have varied widely over time.

In the modern Mosquito Coast the official system of socio-racial categorization recognizes five groups. This system recognizes four groups that are regarded as distinctive to the region. Three of these are officially recognized as indigenous peoples (Miskito, Sumu, and Rama) and one (Creole) is defined as an Afro-Caribbean ethnic group (or etnia in Spanish). Mestizo, the fifth category, refers to the population of the dominant Pacific part of the country who reside in the Mosquito Coast. In the popular usage in the region, Mestizos are referred to, anachronistically, as Spaniards. This modern classificatory system took shape in the nineteenth century as inhabitants of the Mosquito Coast, who had formerly been identified by a variety of quasi-tribal terms in addition to the dominant Miskito, came to be identified by a reduced set of terms that included a putatively racially Black category. As opposed to the Miskito

Indian category, the term “Creole” has come to be used to refer to an Afro-Caribbean group whose ancestral ties and contemporary affiliations were with Afro-Caribbean populations of Belize, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands rather than the Indian populations of the lower Central American coast.

The Mosquito Coast represents a fascinating case of the deployment and change of discourses of being Indian, African, and “mixed” in a politically charged Caribbean context. In the Latin American context scholars have typically studied race and mestizaje (miscegenation) on an Amerindian-European axis, whereas in Brazil and the Caribbean they have studied race on African-European axis. Anthropologist Peter Wade notes that this has resulted in a general separation of studies of blacks from those of Indians such that the Black-Indian axis is rarely studied explicitly (Wade 1997, 36). This study builds on the work of anthropologists who have focused ethnographically on the constructions of race in Afro-Indian contexts in the Americas, such as Norman Whitten in Ecuador, Nancy Solien in Guatemala and Honduras, Laura Lewis in Mexico, Peter Wade and Michael Taussig in Colombia, and Karen Blu in the United States (Whitten 1974; Gonzalez 1988; Lewis 2000, 2001; Wade 1993; Taussig 1980, 1987; Blu 2001).

In the aftermath of the destructive Contra War of the 1980s, I conducted fieldwork in the port city of Puerto Cabezas, or Bilwi, as it is known in Miskitu, among people who call themselves, among other things, Porteños (Port People). What had initially brought my attention to the region was the conflict between the Pacific-based revolutionary Sandinista government and the Costefios of the Mosquito Coast. The region received a great deal of international attention in the 1980s as a result of the persistent opposition that many Costeños offered to the programs and policies of the Sandinista government. The most serious manifestation of this opposition took the form of armed Costeño groups incorporating themselves into the ranks of the US-trained and USsupported Contras.

In their international pronouncements during this period, Costeño leaders increasingly couched their aspirations and goals in the language of ethnicity and cultural difference as they appealed to their rights as minorities and indigenous peoples to self-determination. Also, in the deadlocked process of regional autonomy, which started in the mid 1980s and remains at an impasse today, appeals to cultural and ethnic differences have continued to be the very substance of the political discourse in the region. Social scientists and journalists universally interpreted the Costefio-Sandinista confrontation as a prototypical example of ethnic conflict and cultural clash between marginalized minorities and a dominant and ethnically distinct national population. In contrast, the conflict between the Sandinistas and main Contra forces was interpreted as a standard case of the Central America cycle of revolution and counterrevolution that pitted the Right and its allies against the Left.

A standard analysis of the causes of the Costeño-Sandinista crisis emerged. This standard analysis emphasized the deeply rooted cultural differences between inhabitants of the Atlantic and Pacific regions of the country. The idiosyncrasies of Atlantic Coast history and social structure, particularly with regard to the British role in the region until 1894, as well as the so-called enclave economy in which US companies exercised a de facto governmental role until well into the twentieth century, immediately were brought into focus in order to explain the nature of the ethnic and national problems that the revolution faced. Although a great deal of scholarly effort, both academic and otherwise, was dedicated to this problem, not enough attention was given to ways that these cultural differences manifested themselves in everyday practice or how they constituted part of specific regional and national ideological systems. The majority of interpretive energy was directed at positing a direct link between the ethnic particularities formed in the past and the modern predisposition to resist Pacific Nicaraguan governmental expansion.

This standard analysis placed undo emphasis on those differences that could be said to correspond to ethnic categories, while overlooking other kinds of group difference that crosscut these categories, such as those rooted in gender, class, and spatial dynamics. Analysts tended to ignore the historically forged pan-regional features that characterize Costeños as a whole regardless of their situational identification as Miskito, Creole, or Spaniard. This, of course, was understandable in a politically charged context in which Costenos themselves were for geopolitical reasons predisposed to construct and fortify the boundaries between ethnic categories. The trick for me as an ethnographer was to structure a research project that would devote attention to the

Io SHIPWRECKED IDENTITIES complexity of Costeño social life while recognizing the undeniable trend of ethnic reification.

I chose to do fieldwork in Puerto Cabezas precisely because it was, according to conventional thinking, the worst place to study one of the region’s so-called ethnic groups. Indianness within the Mosquito Coast is associated, on an ideological level, with rural origins and small village life. For this reason I found that when Costeños discovered that I was a cultural anthropologist who planned to conduct fieldwork in the region, they invariably told me that I should choose the smallest and most remote village in order to find the real Indians. Indeed, many people, assuming that as an anthropologist I should be interested in Indians, told me that I should not interest myself at all with the Miskito Indians. They suggested that I study the Sumu Indians (Mayangna) because these Indians were perceived to have most accurately retained their traditions. These suggestions speak to the extremely pervasive idea in the Americas that attributes cultural stagnation and conservatism as essential traits of Indians (Frye 1996).

While I was in Puerto Cabezas, I spent a great deal of my time learning to speak Miskitu. I found that even Miskitu-speakers in Puerto Cabezas encouraged me to go the communities of the Coco River section of the region in order to learn good Miskitu. They regarded the variety of Miskitu that they spoke as inferior because it was too mixed. These reactions that I observed illustrated that in the minds of Costeños, the communities of the Coco River represented the ideological center of Miskito culture.* In the same way that the ideological center of the Miskito people was the Coco River, the ideological center of the Afro- Nicaraguan Creoles was the city of Bluefields. Each of the region’s indigenous or ethnic groups was conceived of as if it had its own respective center in which each group manifested its own culture in its most pure form. The western half of Nicaragua was commonly regarded as the proper home of the Spaniards, the multi-valent term used by Costeños to refer to Pacific Nicaraguans. In the race-conscious landscape of the Mosquito Coast in which ideologies of group difference are inscribed in complicated ways on the regional geography, Puerto Cabezas is a thoroughly mixed city.

In this book I illustrate the ways in which the Mosquito Coast represents a single, albeit highly diverse, society with a regionally specific

The Setting II social structure that has been shaped historically by unique political and economic forces. Following a chronological framework that begins with the pre-Columbian period and ends in the aftermath of the Contra War, each chapter chronicles the construction of group identity (particularly as it relates to Blackness and Indianness) in the Mosquito Coast. The scholarship of the region relies on an analytical framework that invests socio-racial categories with a degree of fixity and cultural content that in my opinion obscures the pan-regional culture that I describe. I employ a Barthian approach to ethnic identity that heeds his call to analytically separate the boundaries of social groups from their presumed content (Barth 1969). The analysis developed here provides an alternative to other approaches that have tended to reify the socio-racial categories of the region.

I interrogate some of the main assumptions of the dominant perspective by providing an ethnographically grounded case study of the way in which ideologies of race work in Puerto Cabezas after the Revolution. Whereas other analysts have focused on so-called cultural and ethnic factors in explaining the conflict in the region and the rise of the Miskito Indian movement, the analysis developed in this book focuses on the interplay between the practice of racial self-identification and key regionally grounded political-economic shifts that occurred in the 1980s. Although this book lays a foundation for a more accurate general understanding of the nature of the recent crisis, the conclusions given here are grounded in ethnographic examples taken from a specific time and place: Puerto Cabezas in the 1990s, a city that had a unique revolutionary history.

This understanding, in turn, provides insight into the historical and modern conflicts that have arisen and which have been attributed to the racial heterogeneity of the region. The case that I make here relies on the assumption that an intensive ethnographic study of Puerto Cabezas that focuses on the racial ideologies and vocabularies of difference employed by ordinary Costeños and Spaniards can provide insight into the causes and meanings of political turmoil and social movements in the region. In the chapters that follow, I reveal the intersection of regional culture (one that exists in explicit contradistinction to the Pacific half of Nicaragua) with ideologies of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference in Puerto Cabezas.

Pacific Nicaraguans and others have conflated the region’s geography (perceived as forested, underexploited, and impenetrable) with its people, who are regarded as wild, savage, and unrefined. These associations stand in direct opposition to Costeños's perception of themselves as cosmopolitan and worldly. I label the former the primitivist view of Costeño identity and the latter the cosmopolitan view of Costeño identity.” My use of cosmopolitan and primitivist views as sets of Weberian ideal types avoids the pitfall of linking particular ideological positions to identifiable groups. While the primitivist view is far more prevalent among Pacific Nicaraguans than it is among Costeños, Don Paco’s case and others that I present in this book clearly demonstrate that this view is not confined to Atlantic Coast outsiders. To varying degrees Costeños themselves have internalized some of the premises of the primitivist view of their own nature. The competing cosmopolitan view provides an ideological counterbalance, however, against primitivist self-exoticization. In their ideal state of affairs Costeños do not envision themselves as Don Paco’s noble Pacific Indian peasants that extract subsistence crops from an unforgiving soil; rather they hark back to a time in Mosquito Coast history where wage-labor jobs and imported goods were available in abundance. The Sandinista Revolution, with its well-publicized hostility to the United States and its policy of nationalization of industries, was a large step in the wrong direction away from achieving this ideal.

The flight of capital in the 1980s and the isolation caused by the Contra War only heightened the sense of environmental dissonance experienced by the inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast. Indeed, the opposition of Costeños to the revolutionary program in the first place should be understood not simply as a product of ethnic conflict (however defined) but also as the product of the perception that the revolutionary government would isolate the region and push it farther away from its people’s cosmopolitan ideal. This, also, is a kind of cultural clash but not the sort posited in the literature on the region, which traced the conflict to so-called misunderstandings between Sandinistas and Miskitos.

MAKING FRIENDS AND MAKING ENEMIES

This book contributes to the anthropological understanding of cultural politics—an emerging theme in anthropological inquiry. Cultural anthropologists have recently begun to take a greater interest in what is often regarded as a relatively new phenomenon: the centrality of strategic appeals to culture, tradition, and identity in social life. Whereas in the past anthropologists enjoyed greater confidence in the separation of their own concepts and those of the people whom they studied, anthropologists in the present have had to confront the fact that in many cases their analytic categories have become native categories.'” Anthropologists have increasingly placed the study of this entanglement at the center of their research projects as they specifically address what has come to be known as cultural politics, identity politics, and the cultural politics of difference. !!

Scholars who have taken up these issues have often identified and struggled with two sources of tension that arise in conceptualizing and studying identity politics, one interpretive and the other ethical. The interpretive tension has given rise to an academic “polarity” (Hale 1999, 492) or “debate” between essentialism and constructivism (Hale 1997, 578; Wade 1999, 453), as well as a similar set of issues regarding questions of strategy and questions of identity (Escobar 1992, 82), and questions of expressive and instrumental culture (Foweracker 1995, 13).2 Anti-essentialist anthropologists deploy the term essentialism, conceived as an approach that regards social groups (however defined) as bounded and internally homogenous entities, as a “dirty word” (Fischer 1999, 473) that stands in contrast to more processual and dynamic approaches to group identity and culture.!* As a result of these positions, anthropologists have increasingly called into question the value of their most traditional concepts and perspectives, to the extent that some have advocated “writing against culture” (Abu-Lughod 1991).

The tensions provoked by this shift towards anti-essentialism and writing against culture have led social scientists directly to an ethical hornet’ nest because they find themselves in the uncomfortable position of feeling obligated to render a critique of essentialism and its organic metaphors of culture (Abu-Lughod 1991, 144) in the very moment that many subordinate minority and indigenous movements are laying claims, at times using essentialist language, to culture and bounded group identity in the context of their political struggles (Friedman 1999, 1). This tension is particularly troubling for anthropologists of an activist bent who desire to serve as advocates to the communities in which they conduct fieldwork (Field 1999, 195). Gerald Sider identifies this problem as the activists dilemma (Sider 1993, xxiii). The activist’s dilemma becomes increasingly pressing in light of the fact that across the globe dominant groups increasingly adopt anti-essentialist theoretical armature from North American and European academe in order to launch post-modern salvos at subaltern movements. '*

James Fernandez places the main voices who are “writing against culture” into two camps: making friends and making enemies (Fernandez 1994, 15).!° The most striking difference between these camps, given that both foreground the conflict between epistemology and politics (Handler 1999, 492), lies in their respective posture vis-a-vis all or some of the groups and movements that they identify. These can be labeled: (1) the invention-of-tradition approach, and (2) the revitalization approach.

The invention-of-tradition approach takes the critical bait and moves forward with an anti-essentialist critique that brings attention to the penetration of misleading and potentially dangerous Euro-American elite notions of culture, race, tradition, and ethnicity (Handler 1999, 492). Within this approach, two kinds of analyses generally emerge, each focusing on one of the following issues: (1) the conscious, rhetorical or manipulative use of appeals to culture and group difference made by groups in their political wars of position within national or international contexts; and (2) the acceptance by subordinate groups of hegemonic ideologies of racial and ethnic difference that reinforce, often unwittingly, their subordinate position within the larger society, region, or world-system. 16