Lecture with Prof Andrew Canessa

We are all familiar with the image of the Indigenous person in forests or mountains living close to and in harmony with the natural environment enjoying a traditional lifestyle distant from the realities of a modern world. The reality is that a clear majority of Indigenous people today live in urban areas. They are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterise life for most of us in the 21st century.

This paper explores some of the challenges and opportunities posed by this 21st Century reality – both practical and theoretical. Being a very small minority in a very large urban area unavoidably entails more frequent and closer contact with the dominant society and inevitably becomes more hybrid. In that context, maintaining Indigenous identities requires awareness and mobilization—in other words, a conscious political act. Indigenous peoples are also less visible in cities, vulnerable to the pressure to conform but also made invisible by dominant societies unwilling to recognize them. There is, however, nothing determinant about urban migration for Indigenous peoples. It may, indeed, result in erasure or it may very well provide the opportunities for the recovery of presence and memory. This presentation explores these and other issues, drawing on examples from across the globe.

Andrew Canessa is a social anthropologist and has worked for many years in highland Bolivia and has published widely on issues of indigeneity, race, gender, and sexuality. More recently he was the PI in an ESRC funded project looking at the evolution of a British Gibraltarian identity over the course of the 20th century.