The legal imaginary of "indigeneity"

Abstract

This article analyzes how the most important Peruvian legal-political institution with jurisdiction over indigenous issues, the Ministry of Culture, has constructed “indigeneity” since its creation in 2010 and until 2020. To achieve this aim, the article uses the cultural analysis of law as its main theoretical-methodological approach, which proposes the study of contextualized spatio-temporal subjects. These subjects are created by legal categories and narratives found in the Ministry’s legal documents and materials. The inductive and interpretative analysis of these documents and materials show that the Ministry of Culture constructs four types of “indigeneity”: i) generic, “indigenous peoples”, ii) natural, indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact, iii) organized, community indigenous peoples, and iv) citizen, urban indigenous individuals. These findings demonstrate that the Peruvian Ministry of Culture has constructed different types of “indigeneity” and that this diverse and often discordant types of “indigeneity” create a complex relationship between the indigenous peoples and the state.

Keywords

• Indigeneity
• indigenous peoples
• Ministry of Culture
• legal imaginary
• interpretative anthropology
• anthropology of law