Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State
Andrew Canessa (University of Essex)

Indigenous peoples have often been regarded as marginal to the nation-state, with citizenship frequently contested, reservations and territories confined to the least productive lands, or their presence barely visible in the world’s cities. Drawing on diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq argue the opposite: Indigenous peoples have not been peripheral to the modern nation-state but instead have been absolutely fundamental to its very formation.

Since the modern state was theorized by European philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, it depended on the imagination of a “state of nature” beyond the modern state itself. Indigenous peoples became the fundamental foil against which the modern nation-state was constructed. If the state was to consist of a “civilized” citizenry, it required the imagined figure of the “uncivilized savage” whose autonomy, however reluctantly admired, had to be subordinated in the service of the project of civilization.

As European states expanded, this notion of the internal savage was projected outward, extending across the globe, and diverse peoples were subsumed under the category “Indigenous.” In this sense, the state and Indigenous peoples are co-constitutive: neither can be fully conceived without the other. Far from being marginal, Indigenous peoples occupy a foundational place in state-making itself. For this reason, Indigenous studies should be recognized as central to the study of the state and more fully integrated into political science as sociology and anthropology focus more closely on how Indigenous peoples are constituted by their relationship with the state.

Andrew Canessa is a professor of anthropology at the University of Essex, a member of the University of Essex Human Rights Centre. and a “‘big issues small places’ anthropologist.” Working extensively with the Aymara-speaking people of Bolivia, he focuses on issues of gender, indigeneity, racialization, sexuality, and political mobilization. His books include “Intimate Indigeneities: Exploring Race, Sex, and History in the Small Places of Life” (Duke, 2012) “Bordering on Britishness National Identity in Gibraltar from the Spanish Civil War to Brexit” (Springer, 2019) “Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneity and the Nation-State in the Andes” (Arizona, 2011), "Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century” (edited with Dana Brablec; Arizona, 2025), and “Savages and Citizens How Indigeneity Shapes the State” (with Manuela Picq; Arizona, 2024, open access.