Indigenous peoples today are enmeshed in the expanding modern economy, subject to the pressures of both market and government. This book takes indigenous peoples as actors, not victims, as its starting point in analysing this interaction. It assembles a rich diversity of statements, case studies and wider thematic explorations, primarily from North America, and particularly the Cree, the Haudenausaunee (Iroquois) and Chippewa-Ojibwe peoples who straddle the US/Canadian border, but also from South America and the former Soviet Union. It explores the complex relationships between indigenous peoples, civil society, and the environment. It shows how the boundaries between indigenous peoples' organizations, civil society, the state, markets, development and the environment are ambiguous and constantly changing. These complexities create both opportunities and threats for local agency. People resist or react to the pressures of market and state, while sustaining 'life projects' of their own, embodying their own local history, visions and strategies.

A World of Many Worlds is a search into the possibilities that may emerge from conversations between indigenous collectives and the study of science's philosophical production. The contributors explore how divergent knowledges and practices make worlds. They work with difference and sameness, recursion, divergence, political ontology, cosmopolitics, and relations, using them as concepts, methods, and analytics to open up possibilities for a pluriverse: a cosmos composed through divergent political practices that do not need to become the same. Contributors. Mario Blaser, Alberto Corsin Jimenez, Deborah Danowski, Marisol de la Cadena, John Law, Marianne Lien, Isabelle Stengers, Marilyn Strathern, Helen Verran, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

A World of Many Worlds is a search into the possibilities that may emerge from conversations between indigenous collectives and the study of science's philosophical production. The contributors explore how divergent knowledges and practices make worlds. They work with difference and sameness, recursion, divergence, political ontology, cosmopolitics, and relations, using them as concepts, methods, and analytics to open up possibilities for a pluriverse: a cosmos composed through divergent political practices that do not need to become the same. Contributors. Mario Blaser, Alberto Corsin Jimenez, Deborah Danowski, Marisol de la Cadena, John Law, Marianne Lien, Isabelle Stengers, Marilyn Strathern, Helen Verran, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

When the UN adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples in 2007, it brought the negative effect of globalization on the
lives of Indigenous peoples to the centre of public debate.The
contributors to this innovative collection extend the discussion by
asking "what can Indigenous peoples' experiences with and
thoughts on globalization tell us about the relationship between
globalization and autonomy and the meaning of the concepts
themselves?"

"Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy" brings together scholars
from multiple disciplines and backgrounds who seek answers to this
question in grounded case studies. Whether the focus is on sea
rights among Torres Strait Islanders, James Bay Cree co-governance, the
transformation of East Cree spirituality, or the co-optation of
linguistics by Mayan activists, each chapter opens a window to view how
indigenous people are engaging with and challenging globalization and
Western views of autonomy.

Taken together, these insightful studies reveal that concepts such
as globalization and autonomy neither encapsulate nor explain
Indigenous peoples' experiences. This book will play a critical
in role in public debate as non-state actors take a more prominent role
on the global stage.

For more than fifteen years, Mario Blaser has been involved with the Yshiro people of the Paraguayan Chaco as they have sought to maintain their world in the face of conservation and development programs promoted by the state and various nongovernmental organizations. In this ethnography of the encounter between modernizing visions of development, the place-based "life projects" of the Yshiro, and the agendas of scholars and activists, Blaser argues for an understanding of the political mobilization of the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples as part of a struggle to make the global age hospitable to a "pluriverse" containing multiple worlds or realities. As he explains, most knowledge about the Yshiro produced by non-indigenous "experts" has been based on modern Cartesian dualisms separating subject and object, mind and body, and nature and culture. Such thinking differs profoundly from the relational ontology enacted by the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples. Attentive to people's unique experiences of place and self, the Yshiro reject universal knowledge claims, unlike Western modernity, which assumes the existence of a universal reality and refuses the existence of other ontologies or realities. In "Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond," Blaser engages in storytelling as a knowledge practice grounded in a relational ontology and attuned to the ongoing struggle for a pluriversal globality.

For more than fifteen years, Mario Blaser has been involved with the Yshiro people of the Paraguayan Chaco as they have sought to maintain their world in the face of conservation and development programs promoted by the state and various nongovernmental organizations. In this ethnography of the encounter between modernizing visions of development, the place-based "life projects" of the Yshiro, and the agendas of scholars and activists, Blaser argues for an understanding of the political mobilization of the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples as part of a struggle to make the global age hospitable to a "pluriverse" containing multiple worlds or realities. As he explains, most knowledge about the Yshiro produced by non-indigenous "experts" has been based on modern Cartesian dualisms separating subject and object, mind and body, and nature and culture. Such thinking differs profoundly from the relational ontology enacted by the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples. Attentive to people's unique experiences of place and self, the Yshiro reject universal knowledge claims, unlike Western modernity, which assumes the existence of a universal reality and refuses the existence of other ontologies or realities. In "Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond," Blaser engages in storytelling as a knowledge practice grounded in a relational ontology and attuned to the ongoing struggle for a pluriversal globality.

When the UN adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, it brought the negative effect of globalization on the lives of Indigenous peoples to the centre of public debate. This innovative collection extends the discussion by asking, what can Indigenous peoples' experiences with and thoughts on globalization tell us about the relationship between globalization and autonomy and the meaning of the concepts themselves? It presents case studies from around the world to explore how Indigenous peoples are engaging with and challenging globalization and Western views of autonomy. Taken together, these insightful studies reveal that concepts such as globalization and autonomy neither encapsulate nor explain Indigenous peoples' experiences.

Authored as a result of a remarkable collaboration between indigenous people's own leaders, other social activists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this volume explores what is happening today to indigenous peoples as they are enmeshed, almost inevitably, in the remorseless expansion of the modern economy and development, at the behest of the pressures of the market-place and government. It is particularly timely, given the rise in criticism of free market capitalism generally, as well as of development. The volume seeks to capture the complex, power-laden, often contradictory features of indigenous agency and relationships. It shows how peoples do not just resist or react to the pressures of market and state, but also initiate and sustain "life projects" of their own which embody local history and incorporate plans to improve their social and economic ways of living.