Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century by James Clifford (review)

Clifford’s aim in this volume is to consider “indigenous histories of survival, struggle, and renewal” (7), emerging in the context of “decolonization, globalization and indigenous becoming” (8). Clifford’s long career has given him a privileged perspective on how anthropology has changed over the years, especially given its increasing collaborative work with indigenous peoples around the world. Not claiming to produce an entirely coherent narrative, Clifford plays with different literary and ethnographic forms to represent the varieties of indigenous experience and its interpretation. He takes a hopeful stance, writing that indigenous people have emerged from “history’s blind spot” and that they can no longer be considered mere victims of historical forces but actors with agendas and histories of their own. He chooses theoretical approaches from cultural studies and ethnography to structure his analyses, with an emphasis on three main frameworks—multiscalar “articulations” between societies of differential power, Foucault’s ideas about “performance” and empowerment, and “translation” as an incomplete “carrying over” of ideas that permits new meanings to emerge (8, 45–48).¹

This volume is the third in a series that Clifford began with The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988) and continued with Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). It consists of three parts. Part I contains the chapters “Among Histories,” “Indigenous Articulations,” and “Varieties of Indigenous Experience”; Part II the chapter “Ishi’s Story”; and Part III the chapters “Hau’ofa’s Hope,” “Looking Several Ways,” and “Second Life: The Return of the Masks.” Bringing together these disparate chapters are a prologue and an epilogue.

In the first section of the book, which is theoretical and extremely challenging, Clifford seeks a “displaced” and “post-Western” perspective. The first chapter, for example, explores the relationship between an “indigenous cultural politics” that began to emerge the 1980s with “contemporary forms of identity and multiculturalism” (15). Clifford argues that globalization, despite all of its problems, provides new opportunities for indigenous people to gain recognition and preserve heritage. He provides examples of multiple “histories” and indigenous ways of “thinking” historically—including the Hawai’ian sovereignty movement, Australian Aboriginal Dreaming, and Northeastern Canadian Inuit activism—in his analysis of performance and the “commoditization” of identity, which he views as potentially transformative.

The second chapter in Part I pursues the idea of articulation with reference to the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, founder of the New Left Review. For Clifford, notwithstanding the great disruptions to which many indigenous peoples have been subject, cultural continuity and authenticity are by no means central issues. What is clear is that “communities can and must reconfigure themselves” in much the same manner as Hall’s “articulated lorry” ensembles sometimes hooked together or sometimes disarticulated and recombined (60).

The last chapter in this section returns Clifford to his earlier interest in diasporas. Given the extent to which indigenous societies have become mobile—members spending part or all of their time in urban centers or in other countries—while still retaining a strong connection to their homelands, Clifford rejects the assumption that such mobility or “traveling” necessarily implies a loss of indigenous identity. He argues instead that this “routing” of cultures can expand what it means to be indigenous.

The second section of this volume, “Ishi’s Story,” is a complex retelling of the life and times of a Yahi native who emerged from the California hinterlands in 1911 to become, under the tutelage of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, an employee of the Lowie museum in San Francisco. Ishi’s story, initially told by Theodora Kroeber, Kroeber’s second wife, and published under the title Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley, 1961) became a bestseller and is still in print. Cleverly interweaving Theodora’s story (drawn in large part from her husband’s memories) with discussions of its influence on the science fiction of Ursula Le...