Intercultural Utopias

“Intercultural Utopias is extremely useful for thinking comparatively about indigenous movements, particularly the sections on bilingual education, the role of the national left, implementation of customary law, and dealings with transnational religious authorities.” - Diane Nelson, Journal of Anthropological Research

“[A] complex and nuanced ethnography. . .[T]he book also reflects a particular kind of engagement: collaborative research with the indigenous intellectuals whose discourses and practices she describes.” - Nancy Postero, American Ethnologist

“In this path-breaking book, Rappaport describes and analyzes the work of ‘intellectuals’ that have during recent decades informed and shaped the indigenous movement in the province of Cauca (Colombia). . . . One of the book’s major insights is its challenge to the idea that Colombia’s indigenous movement is monolithic, with a homogenous set of actors.” - Esteban Rozo, Comparative Studies in Society and History

“Required reading for anyone interested in indigenous cultural activism and its relationship with the nation-state. . . . Rappaport’s book is a rich, sophisticated and much-needed ethnography of how a ‘social movement’ works in practice.”
- Peter Wade, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

“Joanne Rappaport takes engaged anthropology a whole step further in this brilliant experimental ethnography. Through intercultural dialogues involving new generations of Nasa intellectuals and their nonindigenous collaborators in Colombia, we witness creative tactics to decolonize knowledge and produce novel hybrid political culture. Intercultural Utopias offers a rigorous, indigenously inflected analytical approach to issues such as indigenous politics, autonomy, and conflict ‘inside the inside’ of highly fluid arenas of indigenous activism.” - Kay Warren, author of Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala

“This book is a major intervention in discussions of interculturalism among scholars and activists committed to indigenous movements. Joanne Rappaport’s theoretical and methodological innovation and politically engaged practice model the transformative power of horizontal conversation between and among intellectuals from distinct linguistic and cultural traditions.” - Florencia E. Mallon, author of Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001