Luisa Steur, <em>Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala</em>, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3797
Recensione di Luisa Steur, Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302.
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Tommaso Sbriccoli
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Luisa Steur, <em>Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala</em>, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302
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Book reviews
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2019-07-31
2019-07-30
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Tommaso Sbriccoli
2019/07/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3797
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2239-625X
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258
Luisa Steur, <em>Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala</em>, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302
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                                        2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 255-258




                                                                       RECENSIONI
Luisa STEUR | Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and
precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala, New York, Oxford, Berghahn
Books, 2017, pp. 302.


   All over the world, the last decades have witnessed a generalized move
toward identity politics, where political affiliation has increasingly been
based on belonging to particular “cultural”, religious, national or ethnic
communities rather than on class solidarities or ideological principles.
Nationalism is everywhere on the rise, triggering the approval of
exclusionary policies, and the labelling and othering of supposed irreducibly
different groups.
   Indigenism, a peculiar kind of identity politics, has also been developing
as a form of political mobilization in many parts of the world, although, as
the author of the book under review rightly points out in the Introduction, “it
can also become the key site of resistance against the same historical
processes that formed indigeneity into an axis of dispossession” (p. 6).
Indigenist Mobilization is, in fact, a historical and ethnographic investigation
of the processes that led a particular section of workers and farmers in
Kerala, previously mostly affiliated to the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) to identify as indigenous people and politically act as such. Luisa
Steur brilliantly unpacks the trajectory of such shift in political subjectivity,
by asking “why indigenous people increasingly struggle as indigenous people
while there are potentially many other identifications open to them” (p. 11).
The book addresses the question through a Marxian theoretical framework,
which combines a critical struggles approach as advocated by Philip
McMichael with an extremely productive relational class analysis. The latter,
following Don Kalb, takes class as an analytical concept “rooted in the basic
and never frictionless ties and interdependences between people as arising
for their efforts to survive and maintain themselves” (p. 190).


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Tommaso Sbriccoli
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 255-258.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3797
256                                                LUISA STEUR | INDIGENIST MOBILIZATION


   In this way, Steur does two things that are worth being described in detail.
On one side, she contextualizes the history and practice of the Kerala
indigenist movement – mostly represented by the Adivasi Gothra Maha
Sabha (AGMS), literally the “Grand Council of the Indigenous Lineages” –
within global processes, while showing the extent to which a local social
movement can help us better grasp the current conjuncture of the world
system. Such dialectical approach allows to escape the risks of purely
structural determinist theories, which see indigenism only as the product of
wider dynamics occurring at the global level. Rather, it permits to read it as
an event that in turn “intervenes in such processes and thereby also
unsettles established histories” (p. 15). On the other side, by relying on an
expanded concept of class, Steur offers an extremely convincing analysis of
the intertwined trajectories of the Kerala’s political field, the neoliberal
restructuring of the State (a process linked to the Indian National level and,
in turn, to the global capitalist system), and the people with whom she has
been doing research. In this respect, the ethnography presented, offered
mainly in the form of activists’ biographies, narratives of past struggles, and
people’s expectations and daily life, assumes a much wider scope, appearing
as strictly interconnected to, and able to let us grasp, broader political, social
and economic dynamics. The neoliberal policies which have changed Kerala,
long regarded by many as a bastion of communism with an appreciable
performance across most development indices, are thus viewed not merely
as “an external threat to subaltern communities, but [as] a process gradually
shaping people’s everyday lives and, in doing so, triggering different
political imaginations” (p. 253).
   Zooming in to the content, the book is structured in five parts: a
theoretical and methodological Introduction and a Conclusion, and the three
central sections, each made of two chapters, forming the core of the
research. In the first section, Chapters One and Two trace a genealogy of the
categories of “tribe” and of the – specifically Indian – “adivasi” (literally,
“aboriginal”), their emergence in the scientific and public discourse and the
way they have been used as exclusionary tools. Steur thus deconstructs these
reifying categorizations in order to demonstrate how the border between
people supposedly “in” and people supposedly “out” the capitalist world
system is a false one, not allowing to properly understand the relational,
contextual and historical processes that have brought some people, and not
others, to come to be known as indigenous. The author then analyses the
rise of the indigenous movement and of the AGMS in Kerala through
accounts of particular struggles that are considered as central for the history


2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 255-258
LUISA STEUR | INDIGENIST MOBILIZATION                                               257


of the movement, and by investigating the way in which “adivasiness” has
been framed, although in contradictory ways, as a new political subjectivity
through processes of conscientization.
   The second and third sections, Chapters Three to Six, develop the idea
that the rise of indigenism is a formal rather than a substantive
phenomenon. In the author’s words, thus, “what hence needs explanation is
not why indigenous people rebel but why they have started doing so under
an indigenist political program” (p. 4). Through the biographies of five
exemplary indigenist activists, Steur makes her point that, rather than
emerging because States all over the world were forced by “international
norms” on the recognition of indigenous people previously ignored if not
dispossessed (what she calls the “democratization argument”), indigenism
arose from and in opposition to previous class-based, especially Marxist,
discourses and movements. Indeed, most of indigenist activists were
previously affiliated to the Communist Party, but started at some point to
move away from a class-based understanding of society toward a political
critique articulated more in terms of culture and caste. This mostly occurred
because in the years of the liberalization of the economy, principally led in
Kerala by the Communist Party, “subaltern groups stopped believing the
party still stood for greater social equality and emancipation” (p. 182). The
rise of indigenism in opposition to the Communist Party (although, at least
partly, in continuity with previous leftist ideals as far as it concerns the
substantial content of the political and economic critique) has meant that in
the last decades CPI(M) and AGMS have gone through “widening cycles of
political disidentification” (p. 182), whereby each other’s identity has been
framed mostly in reciprocal opposition, increasing the ideological gap
between the two.
   Chapters Five and Six analyze in detail the life trajectories of common
people both in the bourgeoisifying and in the most popular (laborers) layers
of the indigenist movement. The centrality of education and consumption
for the former, and of land for both, embedded as they are in personal stories
of marginalization, stigmatization and dispossession, points to the failure of
the Kerala model in being really inclusive. The analysis of the centrality land
has acquired within the indigenous movement and the account of the many
struggles for it also through land occupation, would deserve a much longer
space to be properly presented. But, suffice it to say, the importance of land
in the claims of the indigenist movement is linked to a complex
constellation in which the cut on social benefits, the employment crisis as
well as symbolic factors connected to the stereotyped image of what
adivasis’ occupation and way of life is, all concur.

                                        2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 255-258
258                                                LUISA STEUR | INDIGENIST MOBILIZATION


   To conclude, Indigenist mobilization is a fundamental book not only for
those interested in the Indian or worldwide indigenist movements, as it
offers extremely useful insights into the connection between local resistance
experiences and global processes triggered by the capitalist world system,
along with a deep focus on the continuities between past movements for
social justice and more recent mobilizations based on indigenous belonging.
It is also a must-read for scholars who study identity politics and the new
global rise of localisms and nationalisms at large, as it proposes a theoretical
approach and a historic-ethnographic methodology able to unpack taken for
granted identities through a meticulous work of deconstruction and an
extremely productive reading of class in its relational constituents.


                                                           Tommaso SBRICCOLI
                                                     University College London
                                                   tommasosbriccoli@gmail.com




2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 255-258
