"Primitives" and Protected Areas: International Conservation and the "Naturalization" of Indigenous People, ca. 1910-1975.

In 2012, the publishing house of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) issued a book on a hunter-gatherer population inhabiting the Philippines: the Tagbanua. The book straightforwardly glorifies the lifestyle of the group under consideration. During the book launch the Tagbanua were hailed for having ‘‘kept their forests, rivers and coasts in an almost pristine state for thousands of years.’’ The Tagbanua, so it was argued, ‘‘have shown the world how people can steward nature without destroying it.’’1 The image is a familiar one. Since the 1980s it has been common in international conservation circles to talk about indigenous people as a resource. In this rhetoric, they are ascribed elaborate ecological folk knowledge, while being represented as successful stewards of the earth. Such presentations of indigenous people (and particularly huntergatherers) have not been uncontroversial. Since the early 1990s an important number of anthropologists and ecologists have been debating whether