We are delighted that in Novembre we are discussing the draft paper "Confronting Development: Ethnocide and its International Revival after 1968" by Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania)
In this paper, I examine the work of anthropologists and human rights activists who revived the notion of ethnocide as a political and scientific category in the Americas from the late 1960s to 1980s. Concerned by the destruction of Indigenous cultures, these experts organized a series of symposia and conferences that produced various declarations that adopted the term “ethnocide” to condemn the forced integration of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and which began to reinterpret economic development as a form of genocide. For instance, in the 1981 UNESCO Declaration of San José (Costa Rica) experts defined ethnocide as the denial of an ethnic group’s “right to enjoy, develop and transmit its own culture and its own language, whether collectively or individually.” The 1981 Declaration also called on governments to counter “ethnocide” by implementing policies “guaranteeing ethnic groups the free enjoyment of their own cultures” and dubbed this process “ethnodevelopment”. I argue that this late twentieth century revival represents a significant shift in interpretations of violence toward Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Commentators TBC
