Abstract
Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen illuminate how the perceptions of indigenous peoples’ environmental boundedness, vulnerability and adaptation have come to circumscribe indigeneity in global politics. The chapter describes the common ways in which politics defines indigenous peoples in terms of their allegedly close relationship to nature and their historical and contemporary vulnerability even as it invokes their proven ability to adapt to changing environmental, social and economic conditions. The chapter demonstrates how these notions construct requirements of indigenous exceptionality—a peculiar otherness—that the peoples are expected to embrace in order to enter political arenas. By pinpointing the power that is exercised over indigenous peoples in assigning them a separate political ‘slot’, the analysis reveals the violence embedded in the seemingly well-meaning care of the politics that seeks to include the peoples.
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Lindroth, M., Sinevaara-Niskanen, H. (2018). Vulnerable Yet Adaptive: Indigeneity in the Making. In: Global Politics and Its Violent Care for Indigeneity . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60982-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60982-9_3
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