ABSTRACT
In anthropology, the term indigenous refers to the original inhabitants of a specific geographical area, a land, which has been occupied subsequently by migrants or colonists. Such later occupations and territorial disputes have, historically, been accompanied by ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic tensions. Indigenous peoples are thus synonymous with the terms aboriginal and native, to which it is now often preferred, where the two latter terms have acquired pejorative connotations. There are many historical examples and, more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, many examples that are still currently sources of dispute. These may be found in the Americas, in Africa and in Australia and New Zealand, the well known sites of European imperialism and colonial settlement in the final centuries of the last millennium. They may also be found in China, in Central Asia and also in both 'old' and 'new' Europe. They are, in both the historical and the contemporary senses, intimately bound up with the concept of local knowledge and its relationship with globalisation, which is the focus of this chapter. This is why the anthropological perspective is necessary to understanding the impact of globalisation on local cultures and systems of education. As Kate Crehan points out in a recent book on Gramsci and anthropology, it is 'an interesting vantage point from which to examine the hegemonic ... and taken-for-granted certainties of what is commonly referred to nowadays as our 'globalized' world. All too often the term globalisation seems to involve the assumption that capitalism and democracy, as these have developed in certain societies in the North, represent a telos to which every human society everywhere is (or should be) aspiring (Crehan, 2002, p. 4).
