Introduction: Rethinking Blackness and Indigeneity in the Light of Settler Colonial Theory

Racial analytics in the field, particularly those associated with theories of sovereignty and settler colonialism, have tended to obscure the common ground of Afro-descendant and Indigenous experience, such as land dispossession, political marginalization, and a shared desire for sovereignty and self-determination. In the wake of this analytic divide, even less attention is given to how blackness specifically structures or delimits Indigenous life, as blackness and indigeneity are often taken to be competing identities that cannot exist within the same individuals and communities without friction. This volume seeks to take the next step in pushing forward our theoretical conversations about blackness and indigeneity. Rather than assuming that anti-Black racism, as well as that directed against Indigenous people, are problems of the past or irrelevant to contemporary Indigenous political status, this volume engages with both critical race theory and settler colonial theory to explore how blackness intersects with Indigenous sovereignty, authority, identity, and lived experience

Blood politics: race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma

Circe Sturm takes a bold and original approach to one of the most highly charged and important issues in the United States today: race and national identity. Focusing on the Oklahoma Cherokee, she examines how Cherokee identity is socially and politically constructed, and how that process is embedded in ideas of blood, color, and race. Not quite a century ago, blood degree varied among Cherokee citizens from full blood to 1/256, but today the range is far greater--from full blood to 1/2048. This trend raises questions about the symbolic significance of blood and the degree to which blood connections can stretch and still carry a sense of legitimacy. It also raises questions about how much racial blending can occur before Cherokees cease to be identified as a distinct people and what danger is posed to Cherokee sovereignty if the federal government continues to identify Cherokees and other Native Americans on a racial basis. Combining contemporary ethnography and ethnohistory, Sturm's sophisticated and insightful analysis probes the intersection of race and national identity, the process of nation formation, and the dangers in linking racial and national identities

Comporre un mondo comune? Riflessioni intorno alla svolta ontologica in antropologia

This thematic section engages debates about the so-called ontological turn that, since the 1990s, have tried to respond to pressing ecological and socio-political needs with intensified study of the entwined modes of identification and relationality between the human and non-human world. Taking critically some of the key theoretical insights from this line of study, this thematic section aims to probe the shifting relationships between human and non-human agents that are formed in three ethnographic contexts: the world of plants in an Italian community of anthroposophists, the digital artefacts the international world of disaster management uses in an effort to view threats to the planet and render them open to human experience, and the struggle around wind energy in southern Mexico. Plumbing the depths of rapports that human collectives have with a tangle of sensitive agents, namely plants, weather, “natural” forces and digital artefacts, the authors confront the specific political challenges different assemblages between humans and non-humans face in the cases examined. In sum, proposing an “onto-political” reading based on ethnographic practice, this thematic section examines, on the one hand, the practicality of an ontological approach in different terrains of research, and on the other, its public translatability and capacity to influence political analysis.Questa sezione tematica s’iscrive all’interno del dibattito sulla cosiddetta svolta ontologica che, a partire dagli anni Novanta del Novecento, ha cercato di rispondere a urgenti pressioni di natura ecologica e socio-politica intensificando lo studio dei modi di identificazione e relazione del mondo umano con quello non umano. Riprendendo in chiave critica alcuni assunti teorici di questo filone di studi, la sezione tematica si propone di sondare le ricomposizioni tra agenti umani e non-umani che si formano in tre contesti etnografici: il mondo delle piante in una comunità italiana di antroposofi, i manufatti digitali attraverso cui il mondo internazionale coinvolto nella gestione delle catastrofi cerca di visualizzare e rendere esperibile le minacce che incombono sul pianeta, e le contese intorno all’energia eolica nel Messico meridionale. Calandosi nella relazione che i collettivi umani intrattengono con piante, agenti atmosferici, “forze naturali” e artefatti digitali, gli autori prendono di petto le sfide che diversi assemblaggi tra umani e non umani pongono su un piano politico nei casi presi in esame. In sintesi, proponendo una lettura “onto-politica” basata sulla pratica etnografica, la sezione da un lato cerca di testare la praticabilità dell’approccio ontologico in diversi terreni d’indagine, dall’altro la sua capacità di disporsi all’analisi politica e ad una irrevocabile traducibilità pubblica