Indigenous Exotic: Cosmopolitan Dingoes and Brumbies

Abstract

For historical reasons as well as strategic political purposes the deployment of indigeneity as a category of identity across the human world varies enormously. This has led to a number of confusions about what indigeneity is, and hence who its legitimate subscribers are. In some contexts indigeneity emerges as a competitive rather than a collaborative project. To complicate matters further, indigeneity is a category of identification that applies to animal and botanical subjects as well as human-animal. In this essay, a cosmopolitan and posthuman perspective is opened on the question of introduced and indigenous species. Working through two case studies of indigeneity and exoticism -the Australian dingo (wild dog) and the Australian brumby (wild horse)- the essay re-imagines indigeneity as a category of identity not restricted to but crucially enabling of what it means to be human.