The irony of being indigenous and the imagination of social time

Abstract

This essay deals with an old issue: The elaboration of the notion ‘indigenous’ in the context of its temporal uses. The classic reference is Johannes Fabian’s book Time and the Other (1983), and the field of application is, in this case, the uses of the word ‘indigenous’ in some forms of identification among our contemporaries in North Scandinavia. The basic argument in this essay is that the notion ‘indigenous’ is usually embedded in a play of ironies, due to its detemporalized orientation to the agents in the enunciation acts. In dealing with this problem, this essay criticizes the persistent formulas of exotization in contemporary anthropology, and underlines again the radical coevalness with those people whose practices we represent in our analytic discourses. A distinction is proposed between sensibility towards alterity and preference for exotism, and Brown’s idea of an ironic ethnography (Brown 1999) is taken as an agonistic and collaborative effort to give some intelligibility to our contemporary world.