Working Group 2008-2009:
Cultural Heritage and Politics

The MLCP Working Group theme for 2008-2009 is Cultural Heritage and Politics, a theme that highlights several high-profile issues, including cultural ownership and policy, heritage management, language rights, and the folklorization of tradition. This theme productively connects research on indigenous peoples and on Afro-descendent peoples in Latin America. We plan a series of events -- talks within our core group of faculty and students, invited lectures by outside authorities -- leading up to a symposium or conference on this theme, possibly during the summer of 2009.

Working Group 2007-2008:
Indigenous politics, identity formation, language and cultural expression

--scroll down for descriptions of each of our working group meetings--

The Minority Languages and Cultures of Latin America Program includes scholars who share the aim of revitalizing subordinate languages while stimulating long-overdue dialogue between applied linguists, social scientists and policy-makers, on the one hand and historians, anthropologists and cultural critics on the other. This year, through "Working Group Meetings" we have begun these dialogues.

The interdisciplinary focus of these working group meetings creates a space for creative engagement between indigenous intellectuals and Indiana University scholars working on issues that encompass indigenous politics, cultural performance and language. The role of ethnic markers in the reproduction of local cultures in the era of globalization is especially pertinent. While global processes tend to erode local cultural forms, those same pressures frequently embolden different forms of resistance, often based on the strategic deployment of essentialized ethnic markers.

In an era of increased global flows of people and capital and the concomitant weakening of traditional forms of nation-state sovereignty, the question of how subordinate languages and cultures might survive (however transformed) becomes extraordinarily salient. Our graduate and faculty research is not limited to Latin American minority languages per se but rather probes all subordinate cultural forms and the larger political and economic frameworks in which they operate. One research focus of this group engages with the struggle for recognition of indigenous cultures and languages, one of the most pressing issues in contemporary Latin America. In the political arena this is witnessed in the region-wide expansion of social movements oriented toward indigenous rights and sub-national ethnic identity formation. Beyond the fusion of language, cultural and political studies, environmental anthropologists affiliated with the MLCP use their expertise to provide a geographic dimension to research on indigenous rights.