coherent community struggle). Fifth, communities
are rarely corporate or isolated, which means that
the fields of power are typically non-local in
some way (ecotourism working through local
chiefs, local elites in the pay of the state or local
logging companies, and so on). And not least, the
community – as an object of social scientific
analysis or of practical politics – has to be ren-
dered politically; it needs to be understood in
ethnographic terms as consisting of multiple and
contradictory constituencies and alliances.
Here I might refer to the excellent work of
Brosius (1997) and Li (1996; 1999) in Indonesia,
who conducted comparative community work in
two seemingly similar local communities to
show how the type and fact of resistance varied
dramatically between the two communities
which were in many respects identical ‘cultural’
communities, and how these differences turn on
a combination of contingent but nonetheless
important historical events. Brosius found that
the radical differences in resistance to logging
companies between two communities turned on
their histories with respect to colonial forces,
their internal social structure, their autonomy and
closed, corporate structure, and the role of
transnational forces (environmentalists in particu-
lar).The point is that some communities do not
resist (which disappoints the foreign or local aca-
demic) and may not have, or have any interest in,
local knowledge. By the same token local ‘tradi-
tions’ can be discovered (not necessarily by the
community and often driven by academic work
on local traditions drawn from elsewhere) which
can be put to the service of the new political cir-
cumstances in which villages and states find
themselves (Zerner, 1994). Indeed, we know that
some groups within communities are happy to
take on board essentialism and wrong-headed
‘local traditions’ peddled by foreign activists or
investors, in order to further local struggles.
What is striking in the critical work on develop-
ment is the great scarcity of work on alternative
movements, projects and communities which
brings the same ferocious sensitivity to questions
of power, transparency, accountability, rights
and so on that is the hallmark of its scrutiny of
formal development institutions.
Indigeneity – whether indigenous develop-
ment or indigenous alternatives – is a particu-
larly complicated word in development and
anti-development discourse. It obviously carries
the baggage of authenticity and tradition, yet
Gupta has reminded us that it is ‘the desire for
the indigenous that enables the West to construct
its own identity through alterity’ (1998: 239).^6
He argues that deployment of the term can only
be redeemed if it is recognized that indigeneity is‘an invented space of authenticity’. But does the
indigenous always resist the hegemonic, and
how does it stand in relation to the modern? The
now famous case of the Zapatista in Mexico
reveals something on both counts: Subcomman-
dante Marcos may talk the language of indigene-
ity (in a strikingly postmodern guise!) but it is
well to recall that Chiapas was unthinkable out-
side the democratic processes unfurled by the
slaughter of Mexican students in Tlateloco
Square.
In his massive biography of Mexico, Enrique
Krause notes that 1968 was ‘both the high point
of authoritarian power and the beginning of its
collapse’ (1999: 736). Second, the genesis of the
Chiapas rebellion must be traced to the mael-
strom of the 1960s, throwing together the
church, Indian movements and left activism. The
long fuse of the Zapatista Front was ignited by
Bishop Ruiz and the Catechist ‘Apostles’ move-
ment (liberated by the Medellin episcopal assem-
bly of 1968), by Maoist insurgents in Monterrey
and Chihuahua (established in the late 1960s)
who helped form SLOP (with Ruiz) and Unión
de Uniones/Asociación Rural de Interés
Colectivo (ARIC), and of course by the burgeon-
ing of Indian movements brought together in
the 1974 Indian Conference. The trail from the
Armed Forces of National Liberation to the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation can, and
must be, traced to the late 1960s even if, as
Krause (1999) rightly shows, it was the period
between 1983 and 1989, when the Diocese, the
Zapatistas (EZLN), SLOP and ARIC worked
together, that proved to be the revolutionary cru-
cible in which the events of 1994 matured and
ultimately combusted. Chiapas appears, in other
words, as a case of stunning hybridity and of
complex interscalar processes and territorialities
that, to return to Gupta (1998), allows for the
play of difference. This story could moreover be
replicated in a number of circumstances but they
are all of special significance to the cultural
geographer because they highlight the cultural
politics of territoriality, and the conflicts
between different spatialities and representa-
tional politics (see Bryan, 2001; Brysk, 2000).
Indigeneity, identity and community are, of
course, the very stuff of nation-building, and it is
one of the strengths of the cultural geographical
work on development that it has compelled us to
rethink the relations between nation and develop-
ment. The development project was, and has
always been, as much about the task of putting
reason to the service of the nation as the economy.
Agricultural policies in India, for example, spoke
powerfully to the need to construct an imagined
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