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living in harmony with nature, an idea considered no longer applicable to industrialized societies.
Once global models are recognized as legitimate they begin to function as
scripts
, which the actors of
the
world polity
must adhere to if they seek recognition and wish to have a voice.
In this way indigenous peoples get the status of an acting subject. Judith Butler (1997) elaborates the
idea in her book
The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection
that an individual becomes a subject
through a process of subjection or subjectivation: ―‗Subjection‘ signifies the process of becoming
subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject‖ (Butler, 1997: 2). The subject
―is the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic
condition of its existence and agency‖ (Butler, 1997: 11). This means that subordination is the
condition of possibility for agency. This subjugation does not signify submission to the will of
another but a process in which an individual or an actor becomes a specific subject by means of
performative ‗recognition‘ of specific relations of power and domination.
Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are
not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in
a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify
subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of
existence is subordination. Precisely at the moment in which choice is impossible, the
subject pursues subordination as the promise of existence. This pursuit is not choice,
but neither is it necessity. Subjection exploits the desire for existence, where existence
is always conferred from elsewhere; it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other in
order to be (Butler, 1997: 20-21).
In my view these ideas can be also transferred to collective actors. Indigenous people must succumb
to the existing relations of power and domination in a
world polity
. 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 UN system indigenous peoples were given new options to articulate themselves if
they adopted the roles allocated to them. In return, the social construction of the global model of
indigeneity guaranteed rights to indigenous peoples such as the Greenlandic Inuit. Generally the
rights are related to using the natural resources of their land, which in this case concerns the
legitimate right to continue whaling and tied to the indigenous-people status: ―[b]y adopting the role
that was originally attributed to Greenlanders by Europeans, the former have attained recognition in
the global power struggle. This is especially the case in the political arena where the Greenlandic elite
connects the history of the Greenlandic Inuit with contemporary environmental discourses‖ (Sowa,
2013b) and which can be followed by many self-articulations of Greenlanders (Hammond, 2008; A.
Lynge, 1993; F. Lynge, 1998) and Inuit (Inuit Circumpolar Conference, 1993, 1995, 1996). For their
part in the self-image they articulate, the Greenlandic Inuit take up images established in Western
societies at the level of political self-description, adopting ultimately the image of the ‗noble eco-
savage‘ and thereby the projected image of the Europeans and Americans. As a ‗respecting primitive
people‘ or ‗bearers of a respect culture‘ (Sowa, 2013b) they represent a self-image that underscores
their living in harmony with nature. In the context of an assumed collective cultural identity of those
suppressed in hegemonic discourse, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaks of a ―a strategic use of
positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest‖ (Spivak, 1988: 205). This strategic