Collaborative Anthropologies in Transition

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Charles R. Hale

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Anthropology, more than any of the other social sciences, relies centrally on field research, which in turn .creates an inherent dependence on collaboration between researcher and subject. Collaboration is a tricky noun. It can signal treachery, as in my dictionary's second definition ("to cooperate treasonably, as with an enemy occupying one's country"), and it also can refer in a straightforward way to a mutually agreed upon relation of collective work. I want to keep the ambiguity in place, at least at the outset, and begin with this general question: what conditions make it possible for anthropologists to convince their research subjects to collaborate with them? There is, of course, no single answer in the present, and less still if we historicize the question. One might even interpret the successive crises that have afflicted anthropology since the 1960s as expressions of collective discomfort with previous generations' accepted and largely unexamined notions of collaboration.

I approach this broader inquiry - into the terms of collaboration - through a more focused lens, which allows me to draw directly on my own experience over the past 25 years. What are the conditions of possibility for white anthropologists from the United States to research and represent contemporary indigenous politics in Latin America? By conditions of possibility I mean the historically given ideological and material relations which permit and facilitate a given set of practices. The best way to begin answering this question is to historicize, asking when current conditions arose, what preceded them, and at least speculatively, how they might tare in the future. Even this bare-bones formulation of the problem brings a third identity category into the picture: dominant culture mestizos (or ladinos), who are both analysts and political actors in relation to indigenous peoples of their societies. My argument, in synthesis, is that the conditions of possibility I have experienced over the past two decades have their roots in a particular cultural-political moment in Latin America, in US universities, and in global political-economic relations in the hemisphere. These conditions, which have encouraged the development of collaborative relations between white US

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anthropologists and indigenous peoples, in the egalitarian and reciprocal sense of the term, are now beginning to change. This incipient change entails the relative displacement of white US anthropologists, and the increasing centrality of mestizo Latin Americans, amid the persisting assertiveness of indigenous peoples themselves.

Three specific conditions of possibility constituted the emergence of reciprocal relations of collaboration between white anthropologists and indigenous peoples: rising indigenous militancy in national level struggles for collective rights; racial tensions between Indian- and mestizo-led political initiatives; and changes in the sensibilities of US based anthropology toward a special emphasis on dose, horizontal relations with "subaltern" research subjects. In the making since the 1960s, these conditions came fully to fruition by the end of the 1980s, when revolutionary and nationalpopular politics in Latin America had lost their salience and appeal (for contrasting depictions of this shift, see Castaneda 1993 and Grandin 2004). We are witnessing the first glimmers of another shift today] as Latin American states proceed in granting partial recognition of indigenous cultural rights, and neoliberal capitalist development generates ever more entrenched forms of social inequality. Neoliberal multiculturalism does not eliminate racism and racial hierarchy] but it does produce growing sectors of both Indians and mestizos who face basically similar forms of class based marginalization. At the same time, left-aligned political movements may finally be shaking free of the stubborn racialized legacy whereby mestizos insist on speaking for Indians] insist on knowing how to liberate Indians, insist on denying their complicity with anti-Indian racism. Research relations under these emergent conditions, I suggest, will be more firmly grounded in mestizo-Indian coalition politics, which in turn will pose new challenges for white US anthropologists who seek to carry out research in accordance with collaborative principles.

I develop these propositions by examining three successive phases of anthropological collaboration, and the forces that produced the transition from one to another. These phases are: (1) the immediate postwar period (1945-65), when white VS anthropologists worked with mestizo power-holders as their unacknowledged allies; (2) the rise ofleftist and revolutionary politics, when mestizo intellectuals took the lead in protest against this academic division oflabor (1965-85); (3) the most recent period when indigenous politics has taken on a distinctly national character (1985-present). My concluding reflection, that we are on the eve of a new phase, in part is based on empirical observation, in part extrapolation from these observable trends] and in part, admittedly, a positioned argument for changes that I would like to see happen.

Two caveats are in order. First, this entire chapter focuses on socially constituted categories that do not fully or definitively characterize the subjects they name. All of these categories - white, mestizo, indigenous, Mexican, Maya, etc. - are contingent, contested] and fluid. A second, more substantive caveat follows. My attempt to think broadly about structured relations among these categories of people follows a "racial formation" approach] which directs us to explore the role that race has played in the creation and reproduction of relations of social inequality, as well as in the contestation and transformation of these relations (Winant 2001; Williams 1991; Smith 1995; Gordon 1998). To identify people by the racial categories they occupy (e.g. a white anthropologist) is not to suggest that race is the only relevant facet of our social position, only that this is a crucial, and relatively neglected, facet of the triad that I seek to understand. My approach is both to explore these structural relationships, and to allow

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ethnographic or historical particularity to disrupt them. For example, in tile rest of this chapter I work with the category "white anthropologist" without the qualifier "US." In part this is a matter of parsimony; in larger part, however, I do this intentionally, to push the structural-racial analysis as far as it can go, while also allowing ethnographic particularity to push back. I view the category "white anthropologist" as both crucial and inadequate: it directs much-needed attention to tile racialized facet of research relations, which might otherwise fade unnoticed into the background; at the same time, it is disrupted by white anthropologists who are Latin American, by US anthropologists who study indigenous issues and who are not white, and by white US anthropologists who defy some feature of this category] even while continuing to occupy it. Such disruptions complicate structural analysis of racial categories] but do not undermine their analytical usefulness; to the contrary, we can best understand both the structural relations and the disruptions by reading them together, in tension with one another.

In sum] advances in the development of horizontal collaborative research relations between white anthropologists and indigenous peoples - advances which I strongly endorse and to which I have attempted to contribute - have been predicated on a conjuncture of sociopolitical conditions that now may be corning to an end. On the one hand, these relations will run an ever greater risk of being complicit with statedriven initiatives of managed multiculturalism, which grant limited rights in hopes of staving off more expansive demands (Hale 2002). On me other hand] with Indianmestizo coalition politics on the rise, white anthropologists will have to pay greater attention to the particular critiques and needs that these coalitions bring to the fore. While it may be too early fully to discern the contours of this shift] we have much to learn by historicizing tile preceding phases, and in so doing, to begin thinking about what comes next.

WHITE ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THEm. UNACKNOWLEDGED MESTIZO ~Lrns(1945-1965)

Although the general affirmation that anthropology has its roots in colonial power relations is uncontroversial, not so for the question of when (or if, or to what extent) the discipline has broken with this historic legacy. To specify such a break it is not enough to establish when white anthropologists began to sympathize with Indians] to defend their cultures against accusations of inferiority] or even] to defend Indian people against abuse and opprobrium. Rather, one must find practices of an thropological knowledge production directly aligned with efforts to transform the systemic conditions that made and continue to reproduce this racial hierarchy. This more stringent reasoning leads me to suggest that the first key shift in relations between white anthropologists and indigenous Latin Americans came not with me "Boasian revolution" of the early 20th century, but rather, with the rise of left and revolutionary politics in tile 1960s. Prior to that historical moment, beginning at least in the 1950s and in some cases going back as far as the 1920s] white anthropologists in the Boasian tradition of cultural relativism attacked me precepts of racial inferiority still common in tile social sciences, spoke eloquently and acted energetically against all forms of doctrinal racism, and argued that all cultures, even small, isolated and powerless ones, merit respect, equal treatment, and understanding in their own terms. But in general] those

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who studied indigenous Latin Americans in this era did not, and perhaps could not, align themselves with forms of political mobilization that would transform the prevailing (neocolonial)racial hierarchy.

A number of factors limited these potential alignments. First, within the emergent postwar Latin American area studies paradigm, anthropology continued to be primarily responsible for what Trouillot famously dubbed the "savage slot": the study of small scale, relatively peripheral or isolated social groups (1991). While some Latin Americanist anthropologists of the era refused this assignation from the beginning (e.g. Adams 1967; Wolfl957), it was not until the onset of revolutionary upheaval and militancy in the 1960s that they found a collective voice as analysts of nationallevel political processes. Until that time, they were disinclined to think critically about the kinds of national-level political transformations necessary to address the persisting neocolonial relations that afflicted indigenous peoples. Second, white anthropologists of this era viewed themselves as scholarly advocates of Indians, within a mestizodominated political, economic and ideological system that they.left unchallenged, and largely unexamined. Third, the social relations of research tended to reinforce this ideological alignment. Specifically, white anthropologists of the postwar generation tended to enter Indian America with the mestizo state, mestizo intellectuals and local mestizo interlocutors as an often unacknowledged source of support and collaboration. Mexico is the paradigmatic case in this regard (Barre 1983). In keeping with indigenista policies of the day, mid-level mestizo professionals and functionaries served as bridges between their own modern social milieu and Indian communities. In keeping with the commonsense endorsement of national mestizo ideology, white anthropologists logically and to some extent necessarily conducted their fieldwork with the help of local mestizo power-holders - school teachers, merchants, provincial professionals, local politicians - both for pragmatic reasons (a comfortable house to stay in, a smooth achievement of research access), and because this positioning was consistent with the Indian-to-mestizo historical change assumed to be inevitable.

A perusal of key works of this era amply confirms the ideological convergence, while substantiation of my assertion regarding the material relations of research would require more detailed scrutiny (e.g. of papers, diaries, notes and the like) beyond the scope of this chapter. John Gillin, a Latin Americanist anthropologist of the early postwar generation, laid out the basic mestizo-centric position with exceptional clarity. Gillin taught at universities of North Carolina and Pittsburgh, served as president of the American Anthropological Association, worked in both Guatemala and Peru. "We shall endeavor to show," he wrote in a 1949 essay, "that the Latin American culture is, or is on the point of being, a vigorous expression of the aspirations of the mestizo race" (Gillin 1949:164). Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris, two pioneering anthropologists of that generation, shared Gillin's deeply seated belief in the inevitable ascendancy of the mestizo, and by extension, enthusiastically endorsed Mexico's indigenista policies of the day as politically progressive and scientifically grounded (Harris and Wagley 1958). These scholars, like Wolf, Adams and others, had adamantly refused "savage slot" anthropology by studying, from early on, the structural inequalities of Latin American societies from a historical perspective. Yet they still operated largely within a mestizo-centric ideological frame. In some cases, such as anthropologists' close association with Guatemala's Serninario de Integraci6n Social, or Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the institutional counterpart to this

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ideological frame was upfront and explicit; in other cases, the association may have been deceitful and surreptitious, as Sullivan (1989) documents for successive generations of anthropological research in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. I am most interested, however, in the ties that were viewed as normal, unremarkable, and unquestioned. This meant that mestizos themselves - as material props for anthropological research - rarely became sustained objects of ethnographic attention, just as national mestizaje ideology was rarely subjected to full critical scrutiny. These were the conditions of possibility for white anthropologists to sympathize with Indians, while conceiving both research and advocacy through a mestizo lens.

A corollary to these largely unacknowledged relations of collaboration was the development of strong intellectual ties and institutional affinities between white anthropologists and mestizo Latin American social scientists. We need to know much more about this facet of the social relations of research: To what extent did white anthropologists depend on local mestizos to get their research on Indians accomplished? How common was it for white anthropologists to recruit their mestizo research assistants or associates as anthropological proteges, and what kinds of policies and politics did the proteges, now informed by the best anthropological training of the time, advocate upon their return? For example, we know that Manual Gamic, Moises Saenz and Gilberta Freyre all stuclied with Franz Boas; and that more than one from the subsequent generation in Mexico and Guatemala (Alfonso Caso, Antonio Goubaud, de Dios Rosales etc.) studied at the University of Chicago. While more careful comparative work needs to be done, these students seem to exemplify the pattern: they were steadfast in their support for Indian (or Afro-Brazilian) betterment, but thoroughly mestizo-centric in their notions of how betterment would be achieved, and in what idiom it would be expressed,

One final way to characterize the anthropological literature on Indians in Latin America published before 1965 is to note that the scholars in question had little concern for what we now call Indian agency. In some respects, it would be ahistoricaL to hold them to that standard. The notion of agency itself is a Later introduction into mainstream social theory, and Indian people had not yet raised their collective voices in national political arenas, claiming coeval status with mestizos. Whatever Indians were up to during this period, the tendency would have been to downplay possibilities for autonomous cultural-political practice, and to place Indian politics within the logic of mestizo-defined initiative. For example, in a comprehensive review of the anthropology of Latin America published in 1964, Arnold Stricken (1964) places central emphasis on holistic ethnographic description, taxonomy of peoples and their cultures, and acculturation studies, all epitomized by the massive multivolume Handbooli coordinated by Julian Steward (1963). The emerging trends and topics that Stricken emphasizes include the anthropology of complex societies, social differentiation, urban studies, and the like, exemplified by the multifaceted, team researched Puerto Rico study. Topics related to indigenous politics do not enter, except in a faintly dismissive sentence on the work of Richard Patch, whose work on Bolivia, still in the throes of the 1952 revolution, focuses "only on economic, social and political rna tters" (1964: 147, emphasis added). Similarly S tickon's complaint about the extensive anthropological research on Peru is that it has focused mainly on mestizos, "people who, though possibly genetically Indian ... are to a greater or lesser degree directly involved in the social, economic, and political life of the Peruvian nation and state"

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(1964: 145). As ofl964, in sum, Latin American anthropology's proper subjects were rural Indians, the less involvement with the dominant society the better. Even if the notion of political agency had existed at this time, there would have been little need to use it.

While this image of the docile Indian research subject has been noted and critiqued many times before, it is perhaps less evident that these research relations and priorities also depended on relatively docile mestizo collaborators as well. Through participation in the anthropological endeavor, these mestizos achieved an affirmation of their dominance over Indians at the price of subservience to the white anthropologists' civilizational superiority. The first rumblings of the seismic shift in these social relations of research would come not primarily from Indians but from mestizo militants, who framed their attack in the language of anti-imperialist, revolutionary nationalism.

MESTIZO INTELLECTUALS AS REBELLIOUS SUBJECTS (1965-1985)

The spirit ofleft-inflected latinaamericanismo ran deep in the second half of the 20th century. It inspired armed revolutionary movements in many Latin American countries, and spawned nationalist, social democratic political projects nearly everywhere. It can also be associated with an especially vibrant and original flow of intellectual and artistic production - from dependency theory, to the literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, to nueva cancion (new song) - which expressed in diverse idioms the aspiration that Latin America forge a new political path: with greater autonomy from the imperial north, rooted in distinctive regional realities, broadly committed to principles of social justice. A young Argentine doctor left us with an eloquent rendering of this message:

Although we're too insignificant to be spokesmen for such a noble cause, we believe, and this journey has only served to confirm this belief, that the clivision of America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We [we one single mestizo race with remarkable ethnographical similarities, from Mexico down to the Magellan Straits. And 50, in an attempt to break free from all narrow-minded provincialism, I propose a toast [0 Peru and to a United America. (Guevara 1995 :135)

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National ideologies of mestizaje, forged in the course of the 20th century found a welcome place within left-inflected lntinoamericanismo; indeed, the two were mutually enabling. While Che's June 1952 toast was precocious (a decade early in relation to my scheme), it succinctly captures this potent convergence, and me soaring political aspirations that soon would follow.

The convergence, in turn, had a deep transforrnative impact on the anthropology ofIndian Latin America. When mestizo intellectuals of me 1960s - steeped in latinoamericanismo and trained in the emerging critical traditions of Marxism, structural economics and Third World nationalism - confronted US anthropology on Indians] they found a target ripe for attack and refutation. Although enjoying me power of their racial, class and geographic provenance] white anthropologists were remarkably vulnerable to critique. Their studies were focused mainly on small-scale rural communities and cultures, rather than broader processes of national politics; their frameworks were generally cast in modernization theory] which posited mat societal

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development would follow a path set forth by powerful countries of the north; they were profoundly shaped by the anticommunist fervor of the 19505, which left them circumspect, if not viscerally hostile, toward analysis influenced by Marxism. A less noted factor that deepened this vulnerability, building on the argument of the previous section, was their complicity with mestizo dominance. While few could yet fathom Indian research subjects rising up and talking back, their mestizo interlocutors were another matter altogether. White anthropologists depended on mutually enabling relations with local and national-level mestizo intermediaries, yet they e~a dose-

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at-hand encapsulation of most everything that one sector of these mestizos was now

rebelling against.

This critique of white anthropology had four key elements. The first was anti-imperialism: a basic assumption that white anthropology operated within, and contributed to the advancement of, the imperial designs of the United States in Latin America. While this accusation would be dramatically confirmed in particular cases (e.g. Project Camelot - a social science research project in Peru funded surreptitiously by the US Department of Defense - see critical assessments by Sjoberg 1967 and Horowitz 1974), the general point is probably best understood in line with Talal Asad's wellknown critique of anthropology and the colonial encounter (1973). No smoking gun was necessary; ideological convergence and structural inequity were enough. Second, the mestizo critique was also antiracist, but in a peculiarly limited way, focusing almost exclusively on macro patterns of US dominance vis-a-vis Latin American national aspirations. Racism against Indians and Afro-Latins rarely entered the equation as anything more than a corollary of the broader assertion, and the problem of mestizo racism against these peoples had no place at all in this discourse. Third, the critique advanced a frontal attack on the US based anthropological theory of the day, often summarized with the gloss culturalismo, and generally juxtaposed to the Marxist inflected emphases on structure, power, political struggle and history. Fourth, and finally, mestizo intellectuals criticized white anthropologists for their lack. of political engagement on the side of the oppressed. In keeping with the spirit of the times, they argued for a "decolonized" social science, to produce knowledge aligned with the processes of national liberation underway in their societies (e.g. Stavenhagen 1971). They drew a stark dichotomy, with very little middle ground: were you aligned with W.W. Rostow's "non-Communist manifesto" (1960) or with Eduardo Galeano's Vcnas abiertas de America Latina (1971)?

The paradigmatic case here is Richard N. Adams, whose extensive work in Guatemala and Central America since the 19505 came under blistering attack in the early 19705. One ladino intellectual wrote an entire book to denounce his research methods, coining the terms adamscismo and antropologia de ocupacion, which would live on in the ladino intellectual political imaginary through the century's end (Flores Alvarado 1973). Adams was in many ways an improbable target for this venom, since his work anticipated many of the criticisms noted earlier, and he led an early effort for stricter ethical standards in anthropological research (tor a retrospective analysis of this period, by the author himself, see Adams 1994). But rather than details and complexities of individual cases, the structural relationship is key: ladino intellectuals could not envision and lead their own national-popular political projects from the position of junior partner in alliances with white social scientists from the north, Critique of this unacknowledged alliance was more muted in Mexico, where the revolution had

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been institutionalized, and the state remained committed to the indigenista policies, which mestizo intellectuals and white anthropologists alike generally shared. In some places - Paraguay, perhaps, or deep in the Amazon - the critique could scarcely be heard. But in general, I contend, the closer the contact with mestizo left intellectuals, the more intensely white anthropologists felt the heat. We were asked to substantively change our approach to anthropological research, or to get out.

In US anthropology departments and their broader university settings at this time, the same basic message already had begun to reverberate. This was an era of widespread questioning of anthropology's complicity with the powerful- from counterinsurgency campaigns in Southeast Asia (e.g, Wolf and J orgeson 1970) to the culture of poverty in the US inner city (Willis 1969; Valentine 1968). Influential voices in the discipline, including a noteworthy contingent of Latin Americanists, called for anthropology to be "reinvented" (Hymes 1969). By the early 19805, the critique of ethnographic authority had come to fore, giving white anthropologists even greater reason to question standard ethnographic practices, even though the remedies focused mainly on textual reflexivity (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986). Yet white anthropologists receptive to this reformist impulse and determined to work on issues related to indigenous Latin America faced a dilemma: Did they affirm the emerging critical tradition of mestizo-led "dccolonized" social science? Or did they opt to work directly with Indians, and steer clear of the challenge from these mestizo interlocutors? In a few places, for limited periods, history resolved the dilemma as Indians massively participated in mestizo-led movements of social change. But for the most part, white anthropology was forced to choose: to align with the mestizo left, which gave their scholarship a radical thrust, but deferred the problem of mestizo people's anti-Indian racism; or to work directly with Indians, and defer grappling with the critiques and challenges of the mestizo left.

Che Guevara framed this dilemma in a brilliantly prescient way, in the Peruvian toast cited earlier. His call for a "United America" encapsulated the allure of latinoamericanisrno, a political project rooted in the region, radically defiant of northern influence and imposition. His invocation of the "mestizo race" as this project's collective protagonist highlighted a colossal blind spot on questions of racial-cultural diversity, which would dog these movements for years to come. For a significant period, however, mestizo leftists cut from the cloth of Guevara's latinoamericanisrno became the "native intellectuals" of the region, the authentic voices of an inspiring alternative political project that seemed to legitimately represent the interests of majority sectors in Latin American societies. Whether aligned with guerrilla movements or civilelectoral initiatives, these intellectuals acted and spoke for tile entire "mestizo race," that is to say everyone except the Indians who had not yet assimilated, and the white Latin Americans who also refused rnestizaje, and became, by definition, vtmae patrias (traitors to tile country). Better yet if these mestizo intellectuals had readily identifiable Indian features, since tile phenotype-identity conflation common to the region lent support to the assertion that they could speak for everyone. This ventriloquism would only persist as long as Indian intellectuals themselves remained marginal to national politics, and movements for Indian cultural rights and autonomy remained a distant aspiration. Once these movements congealed and Indian intellectuals began to speak out, racism and neocolonialism within the mestizo left became a central focus of their militancy. These Indianist activists and intellectuals needed allies, and given the thrust of their critique, few mestizos intellectuals would rise to the challenge.

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The signatories of the 1971 Declaration of Barbados - Guillermo Bonfil, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Stefano Varese, Darcy Ribeiro and others - are prominent exceptions to this pattern (Declaration of Barbados 1971). They disrupt the general argument presented here] in their critique of both anti-Indian racism in their own societies] and apolitical white anthropology from the north. Yet they are exceptions that prove the rule for two reasons. First] while many of the Barbados signatories went on to play key roles in the establishment intellectual communities of their home countries] their radical call to put anthropology to the service of "Indian liberation" did not, in most cases] survive the transition. Second, even these anthropologists faced serious difficulties in establishing horizontal relations with the Indian intellectuals whose movements they championed. In subsequent years, mestizo intellectuals deeply committed to indigenous politics would remain a hardy few; in contrast, for white anthropologists from the north, this solidarity would become a widespread article of faith.

INDIGENOUS ACTIVIST-INTELLECTUALS SEIZE THE lNrTIATIVE (1985-2005)

Indianist militancy] as a political project and intellectual position] often emerged from within and in reaction against] mestizo left politics. When Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1981) compiled an extensive collection of documents from Indian rights movements in 1980, this basic divide between movements still aligned with the left and those who sought cultural-political autonomy predominated. A decade later] a parallel expression of this divide - between Indianist and "p(}pular" approaches - split the antiQuincentenary campaign down the middle (Hale 1994a). Yet by the mid-1990s it was clear to most that the Indianist alternative had won the day. In addition to squaring off with the mestizo left and envisioning cultural-political autonomy for the present, Indianist intellectuals have set out to weave a collective understanding of the past that would dignify their plans for the future: recuperating lost or suppressed histories] chronicling Indian survival and resistance] connecting with intellectual forbears in order to assert continuities from precolonial times to the present (e.g. Cojti Cuxil 1997). Periodic pan-American Indian gatherings, made possible by support from large donors and powerful transnational institutions (from the Catholic Church to the Ford Foundatiou), helped to advance this collective project (Sanders 1977). The year 1992 - when Rigoberta Menchu received the Nobel Peace Prize and the antiQuincentenary campaign successfully redefined the historical meaning of 1492 - epitomizes this ascendancy. Indianist intellectuals throughout the continent seized the initiative, insisting on a central voice in all acts of representation of indigenous politics. Anything less would be a perpetuation of the colonial relations that their movements were in struggle to cast aside.

While white anthropology was at times a direct target of this critique] forces internal to the discipline already had anticipated the problem] and conditioned us to welcome the challenge. A major element in this political and theoretical conditioning focused on the need to pluralize our understanding of social inequality, adding race and gender to the central axis of class, and generally paying more attention to how all forms of inequality work through constructions of cultural difference (e.g. West 1990). At least for notions of racial or ethnic hierarchy, this shift fit neatly with a central theme in the

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indigenous collective assertion. The Pan-American indigenous movement was vehemently and invariably anticolonial: theoretically, white anthropology was included under me rubric of colonial powers, but me primary focus was on me colonizers themselves, their political heirs and ideological allies. Not one Latin American state -left, right or center - escaped the "neocolonial" epithet, and anti-Indian racism, deeply ingrained in mestizo political cultures, became a major focus of critique. Correspondingly, the history of political relations between established mestizo-led leftist projects and rising indigenous movements, across Latin America, followed a remarkably similar pattern: common cause, followed by emerging tensions around issues of hierarchy, strategy, racism and the like, eventually leading to a rupture and the establishment of autonomous organizations, visions and goals. Especially after me rupture, white anthropologists were ideally positioned to enter me breach. By taking the side of me subaltern we could give full expression to our antiracist sensibilities, while at the same time we could enjoy a certain buffer from the most stinging anti-imperialist critique of our mestizo counterparts. In this period, then, white anthropologists and leftist mestizo intellectuals drifted apart, and me former gravitated toward research topics immersed with me task of representing indigenous politics, at times in overtly celebratory terms, at times more critically engaged, but always explicitly aligned.

My own experiences weigh heavily in the preceding description. I began this line of work in the late 19705 as a young college student in Bolivia, when the rupture between Indianist and mestizo left was just beginning to reshape the political terrain. Though with sympathies on both sides, I ended up positioned squarely with the former, and fell in with a group of older (i.e. in their late twenties and thirties) white anthropologists most of whom were working closely with Indian communities in general alignment with these rising Indianist political sensibilities. A:, a neophyte anthropologist, I developed close relations with an Ayrnara Indian community based organization in struggle for empowerment. In contrast, my relationship with me mestizo left intellectual community never quite congealed, strained by a higher level of suspicion and their acute awareness of structural inequalities; I felt I had to work much harder to gain confianzn, and at the end of three years, had achieved relatively little.

I lived this same tension, even more acutely, in Nicaragua during the 1980s (Hale 1994b). In 1981, revolutionary Nicaragua seemed the ideal place to carry forward commitments with indigenous militancy, willie also connecting with a mestizo left project, dramatically brought to fruition in 1979 with the overthrow of me Somoza dictatorship. This did not turn out to be the case. Although positioned inside the revolutionary establishment, my research was marked by deepening dissent from the Sandinistas' mestizo-centric and at times blatantly racist ways. While I did gain Sandinista research clearance for fieldwork in a Miskitu Indian community, the closer the ties I developed with Miskitu research subjects, the more Sandinista suspicions grew. They wanted analysis that would help them manage the Miskitu in transition from armed conflict to negotiated endorsement of autonomy; they got some of this, but cast in an insistent analysis of structural-racial tensions mat they preferred to suppress or ignore. I remember coming back to the regional center of Bluefields after a long stint in a Miskitu community, eager to share my anthropological insights, drawing on Miskitu language skills, cultural competency, and abundant fieldwork rapport, only to have my mestizo Sandinista coworkers respond with a wry smile: "those Miskitu sure do love gringos."

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®

A similar triad of relations shaped my experience when I turned to research in Guatemala in the mid-1990s. Guatemalan society was just beginning to recover from the collective trauma of the state-directed counterinsurgency campaign, which defeated the armed leftist movement at the price of an institutionalized terror so brutal and widespread that it remains impossible to fathom (Manz 2004; Schirmer 1998; Sanford 2003; and Sanford, this volume). From the ashes emerged a vibrant Maya cultural rights movement, with one of the largest and most sophisticated cadres of indigenous intellectuals anywhere in the Americas (Warren 1998; Nelson 1999; Bastos and Camus 2003). By the early 1990s, the hallmarks of this Maya movement included its sharp break with the revolutionary left, vehement critique of ladino racism, and insistence on organizational autonomy (a precursor to the demand for political autonomy, which was still too dangerous to mention). Maya intellectuals and activists had their own critiques of white anthropology as well, but they overcame these concerns with relative ease once it became clear that we sided with the Maya, affirmed their critique of lad ina racism, and in return for this privileged relationship, were more than willing to help keep the contradictions of the Maya movement from public view. Ladino leftists viewed this alignment with a mix of bemusernent, resentment and disdain: at best naive romanticism, at worst a new phase of academic imperialism which fomented racial animus rather than common cause. The intellectual disconnect was equally palpable: white anthropologists came to terms with very little of what ladino scholars wrote (for a rare, early critique along these lines, see Smith 1987), while tracking in minute detail the emerging work of Maya intellectuals; ladino intellectuals still tended to place this white anthropological scholarship in the frame of antropologla de ocupaci6n.

My proposition, in sum, is that the conditions of possibility for white anthropologists' close identification with indigenous politics included a distancing from the mestizo left, and a relative neglect of the transnational inequities - both racial and political-economic - inherent in our role as privileged interlocutors. A related condition was the continuing tensions between progressive mestizo-ladinos and indigenous movements, grounded in mutual distrust and critique of each other's political and analytical bearings. The signs of change toward a successor phase involve all three partners in the triad: race-progressive mestizos or ladinos, who critique national ideologies of rnestizaje and endorse indigenous demands for autonomy; indigenous intellectuals who have affirmed (or reaffirmed) me class dimension of their struggle without ceding their Indianist principles; and white anthropologists who seek dual alignments with both these groups, accepting the tensions, contradictions and awkwardness that results.

These changes have been reinforced by the bitter fruits of a decade of ncoliberal multiculturalism, which should be understood both as a form of political-economic restructuring, and equally important, as a mode of governance. On me one hand, Latin American states have taken major steps toward recognition and institutionalization of indigenous collective rights, a shift often described in positive terms as "multicultural constitutionalism," or the "multicultural turn" (e.g. van Cott2000). These policies have led to unprecedented incorporation of indigenous intellectuals and leaders in high levels of government, to a few experiments of power sharing, and to a series of substantive political changes on the ground mat promise to institutionalize multicultural recognition. Yet throughout the region, most dramatically in Ecuador

COLLABORATIVE ANTHROPOLOGIES 513

and Bolivia] disenchantment with such efforts of institutionalization has been profound, leading to protest, rupture] and retrenchment in more militant and autonomous forms of political mobilization. On the other hand] the harsh social consequences of neoliberal economic policies have incited dissent throughout the region]

,~nd have given rise to an intense search for political and economic alternatives (e.g, ~Gill 2000). These social consequences have afflicted indigenous peoples and poor mestizos in similar ways] providing new incentives and context for political commonality and struggle. Ecuador and Bolivia] again] offer the most dramatic examples of this emergent Indian-centered class mobilization, but one finds echoes throughout the region] from southern Mexico to Chile and Argentina (e.g. Postero and Zamosc 2005). Not only have collaborative research methods become near imperative in the study of contemporary indigenous politics - a condition in the making since the 19805- but the collective subject of collaboration appears to be changing as well.

IMPLICATIONS AND QUESTIONS

Relations of research collaboration in anthropology have been shaped by broad historical conditions] within which individual experiences take place and unfold. In the postwar period, for example, I argued that close and often unacknowledged relations of collaboration between white anthropologists and mestizo power-holders left their mark on early scholarship on indigenous peoples; and that the subsequent rise of mestizo dominated latinoamericanismo engendered a break] and conditioned the development of close and affirming relations of collaboration between white anthropologists and Indians. This latter argument is not meant] in any sense, as an act of dclegitirnation. I place myself squarely with this group of white anthropologists seeking to establish these new research relations] and I defend the analytical and methodological contributions that "we" have made (see also Rappaport 2005; Warren 1998; Field 1998; Graham 2002; Turner 1995). At the same time, I want to reflect on these conditions of possibility, especially their implications for white anthropologists' relations with mestizos, and for efforts of mestizos and Indians to forge closer political ties. This critique points to a process of change] already in motion, which will oblige white anthropologists to renegotiate our relations within the triad.

One further question raised by this line of inquiry involves the parallel between Afro-Latin and indigenous peoples. Some facets of this analysis of the white-mestizoIndian triad apply directly if "Indian'] is replaced by "Afro-Latin." Left inflected latinoamericanismo had the same tendency to subsume Afro-Latins as undifferentiated subjects of national-popular politics; mestizo racism toward Afro-Latins became a politicized bone of contention in roughly parallel ways. A key contrast emerges, however, in the character of white anthropologists' relations with the two peoples. White anthropologists were slower to enter the breach between Afro-Latin and mestizo intellectuals, more hesitant to champion Afro-Latin empowerment. US Black anthropologists, in contrast, have forcefully advanced these analytical-political positions] often willie affirming a identification with the African diaspora; in so doing, they have met with especially trenchant critique by mestizo intellectuals] and some white scholars as well (for a paradigmatic exchange] see Hanchard 1994, 2003; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999). These objections - that the Black scholars are "imperialist" and

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guilty of importing a US influenced idea of race - have been sharper than parallel critiques of white anthropologists' work in collaboration with indigenous empowerment. Why this contrast? If Native American scholars from the north studied indigenous politics in Latin America would similar patterns emerge?

As mentioned at the outset, the sensibilities and practices of white Latin Americans disrupt the analysis presented here in constructive ways. During the period of ascendancy of revolutionary mestizo nationalism, to identify as white (or criollov, as opposed to mestizo Or at least as a (racially indeterminate) member of a Latin American nation, was paramount to claiming affinities with US imperialism. Remember that Che Guevara, coming from the Latin American country with the strongest collective affirmation of European descent, conceived of the continent's revolutionary future as adamantly mestizo. Yet there are many Latin American intellectuals who would probably identify as white or criollo who have played important roles in the critique of US imperialism, the critique of white US anthropology, and in pioneering the politics of solidarity and alliance with indigenous peoples. This duality has led many analysts to turn away from racial categories altogether, and to frame the questions I have posed here in terms of a different triad: indigenous peoples, foreign anthropologists, and non-indigenous national intellectuals. Such an alternative formulation, I contend, obscures more than it cl~rifies. Scholars have noted for some time that the ideology of rnestizaje encompasses precepts of blanquenmienta (whitening), which assign systematically high value to the white components of the mix (e.g. Gilliam 1988); recent work on whiteness ideology has reinforced this line of argument (e.g. Gonzalez Poriciano 2004). This work affirms that the ideological precepts valuing whiteness, and the category of white Latin Americans, are both powerful forces in Latin American cultural politics. While they disrupt the facile association of "white" with the north, and complicate analysis that presents mestizos as the dominant culture in Latin American societies, this does not displace the powerful association of Latin American whiteness with privilege, wealth, political clout, modernity, and the like. The wager, then, is that to highlight the category "white (US) anthropologist" also pushes us to clarify the role of Latin American whiteness in the triad, a crucial element of this story that would otherwise tend to be downplayed, euphernized, or simply ignored.

This analysis also suggests that we should keep a special lookout for egalitarian relations between Indians and race-progressive mestizos in the production of knowledge on indigenous agency. This would be an updated expression of the political sensibilities behind the Declaration of Barbados, and the inspiring Latin America based calls for decolonizing anthropology, of more than three decades ago. When I began field research in Guatemala in the mid-1990s, few such spaces existed. There are more now, as ladino acknowledgement of anti-Indian racism reaches a critical mass, and as Mayas begin to differentiate between these ladinos and the rest (Hale 2006). This, in turn, points to a potential coalition politics with far-reaching transformative possibilities, in keeping with emergent regionwide patterns. As this trend strengthens, white anthropologists interested in continued roles in the triad will have to reformulate our position; we will have to hear and respond to a new anti-imperialism, more potent than its Guevaran antecedent because it will be voiced by mestizos who have, to some degree, confronted their own legacy of racial hierarchy, as well as by Indians. Our past efforts to achieve horizontal collaborative relations with indigenous peoples will provide a foundation for dialogue toward these ends, as long as we acknowledge that

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COLLABORATIVE ANTHROPOLOGIES 515

these efforts, even in the best of cases, never shook. completely free from the second dictionary definition, "to cooperate treasonably"; that is, these efforts inevitably suffer from a certain complicity with the very structural conditions that Indian communities find most oppressive.

Finally, within US anthropology departments, the increasing presence of postea 10- nial and "world" anthropologists, as well as African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, means that US anthropology of indigenous peoples can less and less be equated with white anthropology. Questions come sharply into focus in light of the increasing presence of mestizo Latin Americans, steeped in postcolonial and critical race theory, in US anthropology departments. Does this presence hasten the emergent trend I have identified here, whereby horizontal relations of collaboration between mestizo and indigenous Latin Americans displace white anthropologists, and push forward a reformulation of the triad? (Most writing by these scholar themselves would suggest that the answer is "yes"; for a contrasting view, see Dirlik 1994.) Does postcolonial theory retain its critical edge when its purveyors leave the postcolony for the metropole, to wage the struggle from within?

This brings us back, one last time, to the topic of collaboration. My analysis affirms that among white anthropologists of my generation, the move toward horizontal, collaborative relations with indigenous peoples has been an important innovation. I also suggest that this innovation has been predicated on a certain configuration of cultural politics in the region, which is now beginning to change. These collaborative relations may even have sown the seeds of their own eventual displacement: a resolute commitment to critique of transnational racial hierarchy cannot help but train a bright light on the contradictions in the research relations themselves. Our role as interlocutors of indigenous politics, even when conceived in the most egalitarian of terms, is a little tao complicit with neoliberal multiculturalism, and with the persistent power of blanqueamiento ideology, to rest comfortably for long. Successor relations of collaboration, I suspect, will have race-progressive mestizos more centrally present in the triad, with indigenous protagonists at the helm (and in some places, an increased blurring of the boundaries between these two). Since the shift is so incipient, the paradigmatic summary statement may not yet have been uttered. In my image, the speaker is a seasoned indigenous activist-intellectual, steeped in cultural particularities of her own struggle, finely tuned to the persistence of anti-Indian racism, and yet equally comfortable with class based allegiances across the identity divide. When she seizes the moment to make that spontaneous end-of-the-evening toast, which captures the spirit of the coming era, will white anthropology be ready to heed the cam

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NOTES ON CONTlUBUTORS ix

Encounters with Law and Liberalism (2008) and The Antb1'opology of Human Rights:

Critical Explorations in Ethical Theory and Social Practice (2008), and editor (with June Starr) of Pmcticing Ethnography in Law (2002) and (with Sally Engle Merry) of The Practice of Human Rights (2007), He currently serves as one of several editors of The Bolivia Reader (forthcoming).

Gaston Gordillo is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. His research has focused on the production of places, the spatiality of social memory, and the subjectivities associated with experiences of domination and resistance in me Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina. He is me author of Landscaper of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Arqentinean Chaco (2004), Nosotros vamos a estar aca pam siempre: historias tobas (2005), and En el Gran Chaco. Antropoloql«: e histories (2006).

Rosana Guber is researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET-Argentina). She chairs the Center of Social Anthropology of me Institute for Social and Economic Development (IDES) and is Coordinator of its Master Program with me University of San Martin. Her primary research areas are social memory and nationalism concerning the Malvinas/Falklands War between Argentina and me United Kingdom (1982), and me ethnography of Argentine social anthropology. She has published From Chicos to Veteranos (2004), Malvinas. De la causa justa a laguerra absttrda (2001), Historia y estilos de trabajo de campo en la Argentina (edited with Sergio Visacovsky, 2002), and two books on ethnographic fieldwork, EI salvaje mctropoiitano (1991/2001) and Et1logmfia. Mitodo, campo y reflexividtui (2001).

Charles R. Hale is Professor of Anthropology at me University of Texas, Austin. He is author of Resistance and Contmdiction: Mishieu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894-1987 (1994); coeditor (with Gustavo Palma and Clara Arenas) of Racismo en Guatemala. Abrieniio debate sabre us: tenia tab{t (1999); and coeditor (with Jeffrey Gould and Dario Euraq ue) of Memories del mestizaje. Culture. y politica en Centroanurica, 1920 al presente (2004) and '?vlds que un. indio»: Racial Ambivalence and Neolibem; Multiculturalism in Guatemala (2006). He also is author of numerous articles on identity politics, racism, ethnic conflict, and the status of indigenous peoples in Latin America. He was President of me Latin American Studies Association (May 2006-0ctober 2007).

Olivia Harris is Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She pursues long-term anthropological and historical research in Bolivia, and comparative interests in Latin America more broadly. She is completing a book on understandings of historical time in Latin America, and among her recent publications arc To Make the Em·th Bear Fruit (2000) and Qaraqam-Charlut. Mallku, Ink« y Rey en la provincia de Cbarcas, siglos XV-XVII (with Tristan Platt and Therese BouysseCassagnc, 2006).

Penelope Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at me University of Manchester. She has done research in Peru, Spain and Manchester on the politics of knowledge and communicative practice with an ethnographic focus on language, science and technology, and the modern state in everyday life. She is joint editor (with Jeanette

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