Inclusion through exclusion

In my thesis I examine the elite discourses on assimilation through education of the indigenous peoples in early twentieth century Norway and Peru. With indigenous peoples I refer to the traditionally nomadic Sami in northern Norway, and to the multitude of groups descending from pre-Columbian populations in Peru. Comparing the dominant discourses in a Scandinavian and a South American country is an unusual task, a pioneering project. In both countries, education became to be seen as the foremost way of assimilation at the turn of the century. My main objective is to investigate the arguments for assimilation in the discourses and to link the two countries to each other, as well as to a wider context of early twentieth century global ideologies. I study the arguments in the discourses thematically and compare my findings in both cases. I then look at the underlying ideas and ideologies leading to these arguments. My sources are texts by educational officials and intellectuals. The method I use is called “reading against the grain”. It implies attentive examination of the statements and silences of the discourse as well as analysis of the context these statements were expressed in. By doing this, I do not only establish connections between the two cases, but also come to conclusions about links to the global context. My findings suggest that there indeed were similarities and links between the two cases. I was able to track down the arguments to a common intellectual pool of ideas and ideologies. The most important ideologies were nationalism, social Darwinism, racism and positivism. In both countries, nationalism was exclusive, and constructed against (among other things) the backdrop of “non-national” indigenous populations. In addition, the dominant discourse in both countries included arguments and ideas that suggest that the nationalist discourse, at least in these two cases, is very similar if not parallel to the colonial discourse of early twentieth century. I discovered that the dominant discourse on assimilation limited the autonomy of the authors. I studied texts that criticized the assimilation policies, but even these texts reproduced the main ideas and arguments of the dominant discourse. These ideas were derived from transnational ideologies and theories, such as positivism and social Darwinism. Examining the nationalist discourse on assimilation led me to the conclusion that minoritization is the first step of assimilation in the discourse. Through minoritization a group is labeled as being different from the dominant group(s). After this minoritization, the second step of assimilation, the inclusion through exclusion, is possible. Inclusion through exclusion means that the national elite offers the minoritized group, in my case the indigenous population, the opportunity to participate in the nationalist project. However, this inclusion is only possible if everything that is considered different from the dominant culture is excluded. In my cases this meant offering the indigenous population an opportunity to be included in the nation. A prerequisite for this inclusion was an exclusion of everything that was considered “indigenous”.