The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics: Critical Liberalism and the Zapatistas

Increasingly, researchers throughout the world are having to negotiate with indigen-ous groups in order to access the areas and materials they wish to study, and in many cases this involves a lack of understanding and even confl ict. One likely outcome of the process described in the book under review is that these confl icts will become more numerous in the coming decades. It makes sense therefore that we as archae-ologists try to understand the processes and broader trends involved, so that we are better prepared. There has been a steady increase in protest and rebellion by indigenous groups since the Second World War, with a period of intensifi cation from the 1970s through to the mid 1990s (Gurr, 2000: 30). According to Minority Rights Group Interna-tional (Matheson, 2008: 162–167), there are currently more than 272 minority groups in seventy countries facing threats ranging from systematic violent repression to mass killing and genocide. Other estimates put the number of ethnic groups worldwide that are agitated and engaged in a struggle for their identity at around 3000 (Narang, 2002: 39). The Zapatistas are one such group from Chiapas, the southernmost state of