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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Relations of Power and Domination in a World Polity
of land use. Furthermore, with ecological discourse finding global acceptance, various political and
scientific stakeholders have succeeded in establishing an additional, non-scientific access to nature in
the interests of protecting biological diversity (Berkes, 1993, 1999; Freeman & Carbyn, 1988;
Hobson, 1992; Inglis, 1993; Johannes, 1993; Johnson, 1992). Hence, the established co-management
regimes not only recognize the validity of scientific methods but also strive to integrate the
traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous communities (Berkes, 1994; Berkes, George, &
Preston, 1991; IUCN, UNEP, & WWF, 1991; Notzke, 1995; Osherenko, 1988; Pinkerton, 1992).
At first glance such a development suggests a step forward for indigenous peoples on the road to
increased self-determination. However, this article argues that, through the acceptance of indigenous
peoples, the distribution of power of Euro-American societies and post-colonial communities
remains cemented, albeit in another language and by different means. Communities that were once
defined as ‗primitive peoples‘ by Euro-American societies now become ‗indigenous peoples‘ and, as
such, are ‗between nature and culture‘. Inherent in the global model of indigeneity (Sowa, 2013b) is
the idea that indigenes exist in a ‗natural‘ and ‗pre-modern‘ state in contrast to ‗enlightened,‘
‗modern‘ cultures that have founded their own independent sovereign states. They become captives
of the categories of the
world polity
(Meyer, 1987; Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997). In this way
they are granted specific rights, such as the authority to manage their natural resources or permission
to continue whaling, only as long as they are recognized as indigenes. And to be recognized as such,
indigenous peoples must select the appropriate mode of representing their indigeneity themselves
and this by no means ad libitum. In other words, it is only through the reproduction of preconceived
and projected images of representation accepted in Euro-American societies that indigenous peoples
and the identity politics they engage in find international recognition (Sowa, 2013b). But these
images of representation are frozen in time and space. They give rise to what I call a
museumification of indigeneity that excludes social transformation and change (Sowa, 2013b).
By accepting these images of representative, indigenous peoples must succumb to the existing power
constellations. In Judith Butler‘s words, this subjugation does not signify submission to the will of
another but a process in which an individual or a collective actor becomes a specific subject by
means of performative ‗recognition‘ (subjectivation) of specific relations of power and domination
(Butler, 1997). This thereby requires that the actors take an active part and perform accordingly by
adopting the projected images of otherness as their own. In the context of an assumed collective
cultural identity of those suppressed in hegemonic discourse, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaks of a
strategic essentialism as the ticket required for entering the game played in the global arena, ―a
strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest‖ (Spivak, 1988: 205).
The focus of this paper is the question of how indigenous peoples are affected by the existing
relations of power and domination in a
world polity
. In my view the uneven distribution of power is
becoming visible in the identity politics of indigenous peoples. Taking the continued permission to
hunt whales of the Greenlandic Inuit as an example (section 2) I will demonstrate that Greenlanders
adopt the projected images of otherness as their own because of the fear of losing the rights
exclusively reserved for indigenous peoples. I will illustrate in the following that the cultural self-
images in Greenland are currently the subject of debate. To do this I will take a look at the historic