The Musahar community in Bihar, the subject matter of the present study, seems to have a thriving community structure as well as myths, legends, folkways, community specific epics and modes of self expression that provide mutual support in times of crisis. Through an analysis of these cultural resources this essay highlights political agency among those marginalized by development. It argues that it is their distinctive, historically and culturally situated practices that enable the Musahars to struggle survive and resist.

American mainstream identity constructs itself through symbolic purification from polluting and feared qualities which are falsely attributed to marginalized Others. Imperialist American identities have constructed external Others-- ranging from the 1950's paranoia about 'Communists' to the contemporary Otherization of Islam. However, the symbolic purification of the American mainstream has also constructed internal Others—categories of people who are marginalized both culturally and economically. This paper examines stereotypes about the Appalachian Mountains -- an economically underdeveloped region of the USA which has served as an important internal Other to the American mainstream. This paper argues that the persistence of subsistence livelihoods in Appalachia has threatened dominant American ideologies of 'progress'. Therefore, the region has been stereotyped. Appalachians have been stereotyped as 'hillbillies' and 'white trash'-- symbolic icons of rural people who are portrayed as white savages, biologically degenerate, overly fecund and sexual, violent and politically unruly. The stigmatization of rural subsistence has served corporate power. These stigmas have created the illusion that only 'losers' live within ecological cycles that embed human communities within the enabling limits of bioregions. 'Caste' and 'class' are often opposed in theories about US national identity. Class is often understood economistically. Metaphors of caste are sometimes used to describe American status systems of race and ethnicity which put native born whites at the peak of achievement. According to these theories, the caste-like nature of racial and ethnic dominance is maintained through codes of purity and pollution which police symbolic boundaries between status groups. This paper, however, examines the often covert codes of purity and pollution which are hidden behind the overt economism of American class ideologies. It looks at the history of polluting images of 'hillbillies' and 'white trash' in American popular culture. It argues that these iconic images were consolidated in historical periods when corporate power needed to undo the allure of subsistence agriculture. It ends by calling for a positive political agenda to reclaim these marginalized voices and values within American political culture. Dynamic anti-globalization movements within the USA, are attempting to link with global social justice movements to re-regionalize and re-localize agriculture and community forestry. This paper argues that the USA cannot turn towards ecological sustainability unless it can undo its long history of stigmatizing 'hillbillies' and 'white trash'. 'America' can not free itself from its destructive addiction to endless 'progress' unless it breaks the codes of pollution iconized in 'white trash' 'hillbillies' as well as other internal Others.

In beginning this paper, I want to join Ramachandra Guha in giving proper acknowledgement to the pioneering contributions of Radhakaml Mukerjee. Several decades ago, Mukerjee demonstrated the importance of a regional sociology informed by social ecology. As Guha himself has pointed out, even in recent years social scientists have been caught unaware of a growing global ecological crisis. North American social scientists by this time might have taken some important cues from Ashis Nandy, Rajni Kothari, and Vandana Shiva with regard to the more oppressive aspects of modernity and the failures of Western developmentalism. It is in this context that we are challenged to take up critical evidence and emerging ideas pointing toward a social and political ecology movement, global regional publics, and a post-development theory that, among other matters, consolidates the contributions of politics of cultural marginality to values and practices of dignity and empowerment. I want to provide some evidence from the Appalachian region of the USA that complements D.L. Sheth's observation that, in the Indian context, "almost all grassroots activists are...in search of an alternative to the present model of development..." Social scientists, especially among scholars, should know that instead of the "growing amnesia" for development problems Kothari described over 10 years ago, we need work on both cross-cultural, global regional and culturally specific, localized grounds for new forms of political participation and action for more sustainable ways of life. In my work I have not hesitated to state that the American corporate state system of political economy is deplorably weak in commitment to sustainablity and that the extent of academic complicity in this state of affairs is scandalous. My paper will include considerable attention to the political and cultural dynamics of Appalachia's marginalization but in terms of an unflinching assessment of a retarded globalization discourse in the USA as a whole. For example, UNICEF in its "Progress of Nations 2000" Report pointed out that "Mexico and the United States now top the list of OECD countries where children live in 'relative' poverty..." The obstacles to getting serious, sustained mainstream media and political attention to the role of the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the ongoing migrant labor debate is all too familiar to me as a senior scholar contributing various critical studies of Appalachia's marginalization in our increasingly transnational Corporate State.

Uprootedness, exile and forced displacement, be they due to conflict, persecution or even so-called "development", are conditions which characterize the lives of millions of people across the globe. The condition of uprootedness, regardless of its cause, is unlikely to go away in the 21st century. Globalisation, with its accompanying acceleration of international capital flows and economic liberalisation, as well as growing conflict are both likely to increase the circumstances that lead to the forced displacement of marginal populations.

While a large academic literature considers placelessness and mobility to be a key feature of the human condition, it is problematic when they take place due to coercion and are accompanied by gross human rights violations. Conventional development policies and practices associated with displacement and resettlement usually tend to focus on meeting physical needs and often border on social engineering. They have lead to the impoverishment of millions of displaced people and as well as tremendous socio-cultural and livelihood loss. This is part because most programmes fail to embrace local definitions of cultural loss, risks and rights. Consequently, resistance to forced displacement is common.

By drawing on a range of displacement situations in India and elsewhere, the paper explores conceptual and practical alternatives to conventional understandings of citizenship, loss, cost-benefit analyses, risks/ rights and the ‘common good’ that characterize and legitimize current resettlement programmes and approaches. The paper argues for reimagining development practices and policies by taking on board the perspectives of displaced people such as 'development' oustees and refugees. Only such a re-imagining can provide social justice to the growing millions confronted by forced displacement.

In the 1970s, in the name of beautifying and developing the capital of India, Sanjay Gandhi evicted a large number of slum dwellers out of the main city and banished them into “resettlement colonies” in what were then the outskirts of Delhi. A section of the resettled people who thus came into possession of small house sites were Sikligar and Labana Sikhs. These communities are offshoots of the erstwhile nomadic Banjara community, members of which travelled over the length and breadth of India as itinerant traders even prior to the British period. Though some branches are still nomadic for want of land to settle in, many have settled down to a sedentary existence in a variety of occupations. Sikligars and Labanas are two such communities, which came from different neighbouring states to settle in Delhi over the last several decades, mainly from Punjab and Rajasthan.

This paper looks into issues of survival, citizenship and identity of these two communities of people, living a precarious existence in some of the ‘resettlement colonies’ of Delhi. These acutely marginalised and brutalized communities are susceptible to invention of new dangerous identities in addition to those generated in the past by the state and society’s practices and laws. Such identities are highly fluid and changeable, and the people in question have learnt to negotiate their complex and very vulnerable situations through switching from one to the other for survival, manipulating any which way a relentlessly hostile system. The paper describes the horrific trajectory which is under way, a direct result of the skewed city development policies of the state, which at a particular political juncture cost many of these community members their lives.

Moralistic ideas of combating corruption at the heart of good governance debates force people to separate personal agency from the state. This paper moves beyond this bureau-centric view of corruption by exploring the nuances of morality and legitimacy around 'corrupt' transactions in rural state development construction schemes in Jharkhand, Eastern India. While the state is an abstract idea, in rural Jharkhand it is widely acknowledged to be formed by the personal agency of those that make it and shape it. As such the moral set up of everyday life in rural Jharkhand does not always agree with official norms. A local discourse on rules and norms in implementing development construction schemes is prevalent in which monetary aspects of 'corrupt' activities may be eclipsed by a whole range of other motivations, governed by a set of moralities, for engaging in those activities. Moreover, concepts of morality and legitimacy are not 'natural' and do not have some separate cultural existence. Village hierarchies may be maintained through the astute management of favourable circumstances in which misrepresentations of people's moralities may play a role. As such moralities are shown not just to be cultural but also political.

The paper makes an attempt to understand the process of environment regulation and the trajectories of livelihood of the marginalised by situating the tribal communities in Kerala. The environment regulation is one among the different forms of Government interventions leading to different forms of institutional innovations and implementation of environmental policies. The study focus on the regulations aimed at forest conservation and management and their influences on people living at different localities. The analysis of livelihood trajectories are more of an analytical construct, which tries to understand into a deeper layer of beliefs, need, aspirations and limitations in relation to power and institutions. The study addresses, how their environmental entitlement; access and ability to use the resources and assets, and livelihood are reallocated due to the 'development processes over the period. The question of 'occupied space' of marginalised groups in the process of development and the network of their different forms of capital in the pathway of 'development' are largely unaccounted in scholastic studies. The study also looking into the question of 'assets' on the basis of agent's power to act and to reproduce, challenge or change the rules that govern the control, capability to use and transformation of resources rather than in terms of survival and poverty alleviation. The difference in the social, cultural and political space of the policy makers and the 'communities' often acts as a constraint and adds to the vulnerability of the marginalised community. The study also tries to problematise the different levels of perception, complexity of the social structure and power relations among the agents and actors, who are directly involved in the implementation of the regulation and the livelihood of the marginalized, and how they are related to their access and control over resource/assets. The study is based on the data generated in the course of primary survey among the forest dependent communities in Kerala, relying mainly on qualitative research methods. This method is enriched with the informal discussions held with the different agents and actors involved to understand their strategies, negotiations and relationships. The study uses the theoretical understanding of alternative development; 'development from below', the epistemology of which validates local knowledge of the marginalized, and insights from social theory to analyse how and why the deprived communities fail to negotiate with policy makers in sustaining their entitlement on forest resources. The study emphasis that the role of different forms of capital of the dependent communities is decisive in the decision making process, capacity strengthening, and livelihood strategies of the forest dependent communities.

The paper, theoretically and empirically explores paradoxical aspects of the fashionable, and much hyped doctrine of social capital to argue that conventional liberal notions of reciprocity, obligation and trust may not produce democratic outcomes especially in a hierarchical caste society. The paper also challenges and punctures a widely popular and also legitimized strand of thinking on state-civil society relations that associational life is always a source of robust democracy. Using evidence from violent social conflict between Dalits especially those mobilized by various groups of so-called Naxals and caste armies of upper castes in Bihar, the paper suggests that both liberals and communitarians need to be wary of a romantic conception of social capital. In an environment of predatory state, ruthlessly corrupt politicians and self-serving bureaucrats, severe intra- caste solidarity among historically dominant and politically powerful castes leads to uncivic and virulent forms of social capital. In such context, the practice of democracy flourishes yet exclusion; intolerance and violence continue against historically oppressed communities. On the contrary, challenging aggressively existing principles and norms of hierarchy and asserting their cultural autonomy, the upsurge of New Dalit politics offers an emancipatory discourse of rights, freedom and justice in India. The paper concludes that the idea of “ multiple picnics” alone will not promote democracy if it does not recognize Dalits as equal and active citizens at par with others. In short, civic engagement is not a neutral social, cultural and moral resource.

The capability approach, which was first developed by the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, is increasingly used as a theoretical framework for alternative thinking about the quality of life and development, whereby people are put central. However, the approach is mainly used for policy design at the macro level, for example in the well-known Human Development Reports by the UNDP. The question that I will address in this paper is how the capability approach can be used to serve people at the grassroots level, and more specifically how it can serve marginal communities. What are the promisses and pitfalls for the use of the capability approach by grassroots organisations? And how can people who are committed to improving the quality of life of marginal communities use the capability approach to advance that goal?

The paper is a brief account of Mirs, a community of hereditary musicians from Pugal region in north- west Rajasthan and their musical tradition of Sufiyana kalam. It is a narrative of a valiant attempt by a marginal community, living in the interiors of the fragile ecology of the Thar, to engage with their cultural resource in an attempt to transcend the shackles of conservative, exploitative and debasing elements in their tradition, to reach out to new horizons, to claim for themselves and their children a life of freedom, dignity and well being.

Mirs, more respectfully addressed as Mir-i-alam by some of their listeners, have been known for their passionate and intimate renderings of the sufiyana kalam of Sufi mystics of the north- west Indian subcontinent. The kalam of Baba Sheikh Farid, Sain Bulleh Shah, Hazrat Shah Hussain, Hazrat Sultan Bahu and Khwaja Ghulam Farid are intrinsic part of the repertoire of this musical tradition. These are mostly sung in Siriaki, a dialect of West Punjab having strong affinity with Sindhi and Punjabi. Most of these compositions stress on love as the basis of the relationship with other living beings, nature and God, are deeply iconoclastic in their denunciation of mindless rituals, disregard religious boundaries and lay emphasis on an ascetic withdrawal from extravagant and indulgent worldly pursuits in favor of communion with the higher reality through mystical experience. In addition to this soul stirring singing, the Mirs are deft players of been (a kind of bagpipe) and algoza (a double barrel wind instrument) whose reverberating and lilting melodies form part of the ethereal music of the Mirs, setting the mood for mehfis that steadily unfold in the majestic serenity of the star lit desert nights.

This musical tradition developed in a predominantly ‘pastoral’ context of survival in the desert of north-west Rajasthan, Bahawalpur and Multan in late medieval and early modern times. Vast stretches of sandy plains and extensive grasslands interspersed with dunes merging into limitless horizons dotted with long lines of caravans form the geographical backdrop in which this musical tradition developed. Ecstatic mehfils during marriages, at dargahs during Urs and in the solitary rendezvous of nomadic encampments in grasslands during seasonal transhumance of pastoralists have been occasions that have sustained this musical tradition.

In the past few decades this tradition of sufiyana kalam singing has been on the decline owing to a complex of interrelated factors. Dwindling of traditional patronage aggravated by socio-cultural bans on their performances imposed by the religious clergy in the region, changing notions of leisure with the advent of mass culture of the modern entertainment industry and lack of opportunities for new performances, dissolution of pastoralism as a dominant natural resource use and sharing strategy in a context of a new material economy of the Indira Gandhi canal based on cash and competition have been some of the main reasons for the waning of this tradition of the Mirs. To these could be added a heightened sense of individual alienation, despair, pathos and travails of insularity that grips many in the Mir community.

Originating as a response to this cultural dissipation the process of reinvigoration has been an attempt by the Mirs to engage with their tradition by re-inventing representations about themselves and their tradition.

The proposed paper has four parts. The first part is a brief discussion about the different senses in which margins and marginal need to be understood in the context of this discussion. The Sufi traditions forming the repertoire of the Mir musicians have been traditions of dissent par excellence and have always flowered on the margins of mainstream life. The tradition of the Mirs developed as a little tradition, a marginal off shoot to the great sufi traditions of Sind and Punjab. Mirs and their musical tradition have been marginal to the dominant discourse about ethnomusicology and representations of ‘folk music’ of western Rajasthan and Mirs remain marginal musicians in urban musicscapes. In the contemporary context of survival in the Thar the Mirs are marginal to most of the processes and rhetoric of modern development by the state. The second part attempts to sketch out the contours of this little tradition with a focus on the lives of the traditional listeners and the bearers. Drawing on the experience of the old listeners and musicians of the region the section describes the pastoral context of the splendor of this tradition. The third part is devoted to a discussion of ecological imagination in the kalam of Khwaja Ghulam Farid, who lived in the later part of the nineteenth century. He is known to have spent many years in the blazing deserts between Bahawalpur and Pugal. Khwaja Ghulam Farid was a great desert fakir and a peoples’ poet whose compositions form the core of this musical tradition of the Mirs. For communities whose lives revolved around mobility on trade routes, trails of caravans and free ranging pastoralism with its seasonal routes of transhumance, the compositions of Ghulam Farid mostly based on symbols of everyday life of the pastoralists had an immense appeal. These compositions, while reaffirming the intimate ties communities had with nature, articulated the deep veneration they had for it. Tale of musical times, the fourth part, talks of the recent efforts of the Mirs to invoke the resilience and adaptability of their tradition in their attempts to carve out a liberative discourse in the modern context.

This paper will contribute to one of the main themes of the conference, around the perspectives of marginalized communities. Focus will be the interaction between the public policies that have affected marginalized groups, and processes of socio-economic development and identity formation amongst such groups. Affirmative action will be central to this analysis, and this will be seen in the context of other elements of public policies, and the Indian experience will be put in an international perspective.

The paper will discuss the following themes. First, it will summarise the basic tenants of existing policies designed to reduce disparities between social groups. Second, it will review the evidence of the impact of these policies, review the populist critique against these policies, and try to explain the reasons for their performance (including the way these are monitored). It will then look at the political dynamics that have been created by the constitutional and administrative framework, and how this has changed the circumstances under which the policy objectives were formulated (including how these dynamics have been rejuvenated after the last general election). A fourth section will focus on the question of labels, and how the official categories have interacted with processes of group and identity formation, and how this in turn is articulated in the political and (less-documented) personal sphere. A fifth section will look at relevant international experience with affirmative action and how these relate to other forms of public policies.

Between the 15th-17th centuries a radical bhakti movement swept India. The propoentnts were Dalit and low-caste men and women, and they sang of equality, rationality and a new vision of god that rejected brahmanic ritualism and caste. By the 18th century this movement had been coopted and treated as part of "Hinduism," but it was in reality a "new" religion, influenced by Sufism, Buddhism and other equalitarian trends.l it is an important cultural resource for Dalits today.

Pigs were among others a marker of Dalitness from the times of the People of India Series till present times. In those cultural discourses it has been completely overlooked to what extent the British colonial appetites andlivelihoods created the demand for pork and lead to a cultural construction of "the other" instrumentalizing the pig. Untill now it has been completely overlooked that a saecular image of respectability accompanied pig rearing which superseded the propagated abomination: That of the businessman, the bristle dealer who dealt within the "clean" field of commodity transactions. The presentation will focus on the Khatik, the bristle dealer community but it will also include other pig rearing communities (Chamar and Balmiki) and their search for livelihoods and respectability in connection with the Indian pig.

"Culture" has been at the heart of most of the principal debates since the late nineteenth century around such themes as uni versal values, cosmopolitanism, tradition, and modernity. Much of the discussion has also inescapably circulated around the ideas of difference and sameness: thus, to take one example from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's recent book, "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire" (2004), the two Italian novelists, Albert Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini, came to two starkly opposed views upon visiting India. Each wrote a book about his travels in India: "One sees in India only what is different and the other only what is the same." In other recent discussions, for example Samuel Huntington's infamous invocation of the "clash of civilizations", the argument is routed through the opposition of Western universalisms and non-Western particularisms. Many contemporary observers appear to think that we should all embrace something called cosmopolitanism, but that leads to obvious questions: Whose cosmopolitanism? What does cosmopolitanism embrace and what does it reject? Is cosmopolitanism culture-free, as is sometimes assumed? What particular class inflections does cosmopolitanism have, as the work of Edward Said suggests? In this paper, having first given weight to these considerations, I will turn to Mohandas Gandhi to see how he negotiated the idea of culture. The word "culture" does not, in fact, appear often in the writings of Gandhi, and though it is indubitably clear that he was deeply committed to the idea of multiple voices, each invested with its own history and dignity, he was also, I would suggest, not reconciled to the modern dogma of 'majority' and 'minority' cultures. In Gandhi's advocacy of what might be called the "ecological survival of plurality", I would like to suggest, there might be intimations of how we might handle contemporary debates on culture in such a way so as to ensure that marginalized people's notion of culture does not survive merely in museums but as something that contests the frameworks of modern knowledge.

After decades of failures in the promotion of development strategies and projects in the post-colonial era, it is time to take a critical look at what has been intended and at what was achieved in the name of development.

Basically there are two main types of approaches to development. One is top-down and object-oriented. The other is bottom-up, subject-oriented, and entails a people-first approach. This paper is based on the opinion that the second approach offers more positive results in terms of the authentic betterment of peoples’ lives than the former. It is more compatible with dignity, freedom and the commitment to social justice. This people-oriented approach calls for paying careful attention to the dynamic role of culture and of religion in society. Conceptual and methodological clarity is required, however, when tackling issues of peoples’ culture and spirituality. The paper presents and comments a few of the tools which have proven useful to the author and to the South-North Network Cultures and Development of which he was a member. They are based on the idea of culture as a coping system : “ culture is the complex whole of resources that a given community inherits, adopts or invents to face the challenges of its natural and social environment ”. Culture is both a patrimony (inherited from the past) and a project (suggesting alternatives for the future). To have a proper approach to culture, one must simultaneously avoid the nostalgia of the past (and its concurrent idealisation which can lead to fundamentalism), deterministic views and lastly, stereotyping and deceptive generalisations which do not take class, gender and other power relations into account.

The reasons why culture is vital to social change are that culture is apt to stimulate self-esteem, the capacity to select between outside influences, the ability to resist to oppression (to struggle and to establish solidarity links), and - last but not least - the capacity to give meaning to one’s actions and to one’s life. When the culture of a given community lacks any of these qualities, it gradually falls into disarray : people may then regress into passivity, fatalism and «underdevelopment». The latter is looked at as a cultural and spiritual crisis, not first as a lack of material goods or of economic growth.

This paper concludes that «development» is a misleading concept. It is not as universal as it would seem. It leads to the mimicry of western modernity and therefore stifles the spontaneous growth of local culture and the ensuing “flourishing” of local communities ( a term less ethnocentric than “development”). It is time to seek alternatives to development, steeped in a new paradigm that will have to be post-capitalist, post-patriarchal, and trans-modern. By trans-modernity is understood not the total rejection of modern values but a careful choice of these elements which are really emancipatory, and the blending of those with local cultural elements.

The presentation will focus on the Tejgadh experiment of developing a group of 1000tribalvillages in eastern Gujarat during the years 2000 to 2005. I will discuss the views of the actors involved in the experiment, their struggle to sensitize the structural forms of development spread, and their difficulties with the established idiom of development while articulating their own formulations. The presentation will deal with a real time experience of engaging in development of tribal villages. I intend to use some pictorial notes during the presentation. The conclusion of the paper deals with the question of civilizational clash inherent in the context of economic globalization.

The paper focuses on the relationship between the languages of the tribal people and their poverty and shows how multiple layers of discrimination – in Indian constitution and governance, low instrumental vitality of tribal languages, exclusion and non-accommodation of minority mother tongues in education, and inequalities in the relationship between power and languages – severely restrict the freedom of choice and access to resources leading to illiteracy, educational failure and capability deprivation. While education is held to be the enabling factor for economic development, language, it is argued, is the enabling factor for access to quality education.

The tribal languages are pushed out of major domains of power and development such as official, legal and other formal use, education, trade and commerce, creating shift pressures from the dominant contact languages. In face of such threats, the speakers of the dominated languages adopt what has been characterized as ‘anti-predatory strategies’ (Mohanty 2006) to ensure survival by a passive withdrawal into domains of lesser power and visibility. While language shift does not occur; but there is considerable domain shrinkage with languages barely maintained mostly in the domains of home and in-group communication. But the cost of such survival and maintenance is identity crisis, deprivation of freedom and capability, educational failure (due to inadequate home language development and forced submersion in majority language schools), marginalization and poverty. The marginalized linguistic groups often accept the low status and exclusion of their languages as fait accompli. While their language is perceived as important for identity and integrative functions, instrumental functions are dissociated from the native languages in favour of the dominant ones (Mohanty, 2004); low vitality of their languages is perceived as legitimate by the victims of the processes of exclusion.

Thus, the so called poverty of languages, disabilities and disadvantages often associated with tribal languages are not inherent; they are socially constructed with institutionalized discriminations in educational, political, economic and other social spheres conspiring to strengthen the association between the languages and insufficiency. Sadly, the weaknesses and insufficiency of tribal languages are often cited as grounds for their exclusion from education.

A comparative analysis of educational attainment of students belonging to the Scheduled Tribes and other groups (such as the Scheduled Castes) in India is presented to show how exclusion of the tribal languages from school education is related to their ‘voicelessness’ and capability deprivation. This point is further substantiated by citing a positive instance (Saikia & Mohanty, 2004) showing the advantages of mother tongue medium schooling for the Bodo children in Assam.

Educational failure and illiteracy constitute integral aspects of the complex and multidimensional processes of capability deprivation and poverty and non-accommodation and exclusion of language(s) in education contributes to these processes by limiting access to resources and denying equality of opportunity. Language(s) that people speak or do not speak can and does contribute directly to poverty in many other ways of discrimination and perpetuation of inequality by deprivations of linguistic human rights, democratic participation, identity, self-efficacy and pride. In case of the tribals in India linguistic discrimination forms a core of their capability deprivation through educational neglect and in many other complex ways all of which contribute to their poverty in a vicious circle. The problem of marginalization of tribal languages is discussed from the human rights perspective to argue that we need principles and models of education which respect the Linguistic human rights of the marginalized peoples.

Fair Trade is a social movement that is growing at a very rapid rate (74% per year in the USA) in the North. Through the case study of a Peruvian Fair Traded Organic Coffee Cooperative in the High Amazon, this paper will examine to what extent the shift to Fair Trade for its products has meant the possibility of biological and cultural regeneration for the local small holder peasants, both native and mestizo. It will also investigate to what extent and in what way Fair Trade departs from capitalist trade and in what way it partakes in the capitalist market. To what extent can fair trade tame the capitalist market and be used for the purposes of marginalized groups and to what extent is it vulnerable to cooptation by big corporations.

This paper discusses some ways in which Maori cultural conceptions of the world have provided a useful platform for contesting neo-liberal reform in New Zealand and more recently notions of the knowledge economy. In particular the paper focuses on examples where cultural knowledge has been at the heart of the matter when it comes to engaging with or resisting the knowledge economy. Maori cultural regeneration began in earnest prior to the reforms of the mid 1980s and I argue that the momentum of the cultural initiatives developed by Maori provided limited but useful space for negotiation and for posing alternative solutions and compromises.

The neo-liberal project of the late twentieth century produced a challenging and contentious programme of economic and social reform that has had far reaching impacts within states, across regions and across the globe. The fundamental thesis of neo-liberal economics has been well documented by its architects such as Milton Friedman, Fredrich Hayek and James Buchanan, its advocates, for example, Margaret Thatcher, and by its adversaries and critics. Neo-liberalism presented an economic theory for addressing issues of social inequality and disadvantage and offered a promise for social inclusion and participation to various marginalised and disadvantaged communities that differed from the models of welfarism that had become a feature of post-World War II social programmes. Dismantling the Welfare State alongside major reforms in health and education were key platforms for delivering the promise of inclusion and greater equality. The New Zealand version of Neo-liberal reform has been referred to by one of its ardent critics Professor Jane Kelsey (1993) as ‘The New Zealand Experiment’ partly because New Zealand’s isolation constituted a small laboratory to test strategies that could then be applied in structural adjustment programmes elsewhere. This experiment seemed to crystallize and bring forth the economic and social ideals that came to be summed up in Britain as Thatcherism, named after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and in the United States as Reaganomics, named after President Ronald Reagan. In New Zealand the reform process is still referred to popularly as Rogernomics named after a Labour Government Minister of Finance Roger Douglas, who was its initial chief political architect. Neo-liberal reform is known for its powerful use of rhetoric and discourse that in the 1980s in New Zealand undermined leftist critiques of the state by first appropriating them and then applying them as justification for a far reaching reform programme that attempted to hollow out the state, re-regulate the economy and privatise many of the functions of government.

The economic reform programme began in New Zealand in 1984 under a Labour or centre left Government and continued through the 1990s with a conservative National Government and again under the current Labour Government. Neo-liberal economic philosophy has become the dominant and common sense approach to development. The concern of this paper is not so much the reform agenda itself but the interaction of this agenda on indigenous Maori communities and the struggles by Maori to sustain a momentum of cultural regeneration (that had been reignited many years earlier) through the darkest periods of reform during the early 1990s and the accelerated widening of socio-economic disparities between Maori and non Maori that appeared during the height of the reforms and is continuing. It is important to acknowledge that partly because of the history of colonialism and social marginalisation that was constituted by colonial processes Maori people as a group were not deeply wedded to notions of the Welfare State or to the existing models of education and health care for which New Zealand was highly regarded internationally as they had been systematically excluded from the benefits of such systems. The old system was often viewed as patronising, paternalistic and racist and was the target of activism in the 1980s. A new approach that promised less dependency on a Welfare system and more opportunity for choice and for the devolution of the state was viewed with hopeful anticipation by many Maori especially as it was initially to be delivered by a Labour Government with whom Maori felt they had some kind of compact based on a historic agreement between the Labour Party and a large pan-Maori movement known as the Ratana Church.

Part of what will be argued in this paper is that the neo-liberal vision of society and the power by its proponents to implement much of that vision through the political process sought to sever and then reformulate and privatise the relationships between the Crown and state and Maori people as individuals. Maori communities, tribal entities and political activists have long argued that the Crown and Maori have a relationship as equal partners that is embodied in the Te Tiriti o Waitangi or the Treaty of Waitangi. The other part of the argument is that Maori resisted in quite complicated ways that included co-opting the promises of the reform quite literally such as, the promise of public choice or the devolution of the government bureaucracy, and making them at least mediate what were in fact quite hostile agendas. A third part of the argument is that neo-liberalism is not just a little New Zealand experiment, it is part of an ambitious agenda that has restructured the global economy through such strategies as free trade agreements and enforced structural adjustment programmes in developing countries, and that the impact on Maori communities is an important example for other communities in other reform contexts.

Maori have deployed a range of tactics for engaging with or resisting neo-liberal reform. Rather than focus on what the state has learned about reform, I focus on what Maori communities have learned partly because community resistances offer hope to others and partly also because the lessons reveal those aspects of neo-liberal reform with which communities can engage and can find ground to shift the agenda. In the New Zealand context Maori communities view themselves as active partners to the Crown and therefore engage with the state and with policy in quite proactive and often intimate ways, for example Ministers of Government attend Maori gatherings and are told in direct terms what people and communities expect from them. The Maori experience has been relatively effective when compared to the situation of other indigenous minority communities and this in some part has been due to the context of Maori as a significant minority indigenous population and the capacity of Maori people themselves.

There are inequalities in the world, among individuals and among groups, that get reproduced across generations. These can be thought of as "inequality traps." Inequality traps are similar to poverty traps in that they serve to keep people poor and destitute. But they differ from them in that they refer to a reinforcing system of economic, political and social structures that lead to what social scientists have called "durable inequality." This essay will develop this idea further - exploring the links between cultural conditions and inequality, and then examine possible policies that might improve mobility.

African socioeconomic practices have long confounded attempts by modern states to impose measures of formalization via documents, records, and bureaucratic rationality. Nowhere is the tension between pragmatically "informal" economic life and putatively "formal" state structures more evident than in the domain of poverty interventions, which typically aim to bring state institutional power to bear precisely on those who are most excluded from the "formal sector". This paper offers a preliminary analysis of some new rationalities of poverty alleviation observable in recent South African political and policy discourse. I argue that new sorts of programmatic thinking about poverty represent a new development within (and not simply against) neoliberalism, and that they seek, by abandoning the regulatory and normalizing functions usually associated with social assistance, to bring the formal and the informal into a new sort of relation.

The last ten years have witnessed a striking revolution for Native Americans in the United States. Once among the poorest, most marginalized people in the country, many groups have grown suddenly prosperous from the money from their tribally-run gambling casinos. It was once imagined that Native Americans were a dead or dying race without any future in the modern world. The casinos and their multibillion dollar revenues have instead now made tribes into powerful economic and political force in some part of the United States. What happens when the marginalized become powerful in an unexpected inversion of the social order? What have these changes meant for the politics of culture and heritage in 21st century America? And what might the case of Native Americans have to tell us about the predicament of marginality and indigenous rights in parts of the world where no such economic changes have occurred? This paper explores the casino revolution with a focus on its implications for the cultural politics of social change and renewal. It argues that these dramatic changes for Native America have been accompanied by struggles over the shape of history, memory, and modernity. A focus on this striking case of new native power helps us to better understand the paradoxes, possibilities, and unexpected directions of indigenous activism both in the United States and worldwise in the 21st century.