Indigenous peoples in the context of cultural continuity

The article defines local and global rather as two complementary perspectives for interpreting the modernity than as two levels of social interaction - micro- and macro-. Following Latour’s new ‘anthropological matrix’ the author shows the way to move from local to global, from representations of cultural forms as authentic (premodern) to their modern interpretations. Cultural continuity is understood as a consequence of the implementation of a multiple ‘partial inclusions’, and as an outcome of the combination of multiple transitions from local to global, from inner context to the outer. One of the most important modes of this continuity constitution is the practice of translation. Regarding indigenous peoples we can speak of two collections of translation practices such as translation of oral-discursive experience of culture into the text, and a reverse translation of cultural narratives created in their being non-literate peoples. Practices of reverse translation consist of the transformation of the ideas initially formed in the outside contexts into the context of the indigenous people’s culture. Such cultural forms as ethnographic self-descriptions are important not only to identify the actual cultural references of the indigenous peoples but also in terms of their involvement in the production of new cultural reality.