Democracy against the grain: indigenous politics in Colombia’s southwest Andes

ABSTRACT

This article examines the southwest Colombian Andes indigenous peoples’ active participation as ‘demos’ in Colombia´s modern polity and democratic politics. Despite a long-term pattern of nonrecognition, their ‘against-the-grain democracy’ emerges from sedimented experiences of collectivism and intercultural experimentalism. The resulting indigenous politics expands the horizon of commonality and calls for new interpretations of the political. This work is based on long-term research on twentieth-century ideas and political texts by Nasa, Misak, and Pijao pueblos, on an examination of their leaders´ biographies, and on my extensive research on Manuel Quintín Lame´s twentieth-century social movement leadership. I examine the inter-dependency of popular republicanism and struggles for citizenship that began in the nineteenth century, with the dynamics of collectivism and commonality that converge in the strong grassroots, indigenous-oriented politics of the twentieth century. My analysis is enlightened by Sheldon Wolin´s interpretations of democracy, commonality, elemental politics, the liberal dilemmas of recognition, and Cristina Roja´s reflections on nonrecognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous Politics
• Nasa, Misak and Pijao peoples
• Colombia
• Democracy
• Collectivism
• Commonality

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Alex Betancourt for his insights about Sheldon Wolin’s thoughts on democracy, and the political. I also must thank the School of Social Sciences at the Universidad de Los Andes for granting me a sabbatical semester in 2016, which allowed me to complete a first draft of this manuscript. I also want to thank the great insights of anonymous reviewers and of LACES’s editorial team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Nasa is the current self-denomination used by the indigenous people previously known as Páez. On the other hand, the Misak were previously known as Guambiano. The Pijao pueblo is a composite of Natagaima, Coyaima, and Gualí peoples of south Tolima who decided to use the colonial ethnonym.

2. The Manifiesto Ibe namuiguen y ñimmereay guchá was subscribed in June 1980 by the Guambia Indigenous Council and was presented before a regional assembly of indigenous, workers, and peasant organizations, and unions comprised under the banner of ACEINEM (Cabildo Parcialidad de Guambía 1980 [I keep the document’s Namtrik orthography]). I follow Piñacué (2014) rendering of the notion of kwe´sx fsi´zenxi and his Nasa Yuwe orthography. Finally, I follow Manuel Quintín Lame’s idea of wild or untamed civilization as he elaborated it in his written piece “La bola que rodó por el desierto” (Lame 2006 [1963]).

3. The documents include memorials and petitions by indigenous communities to different provincial and national authorities, government documents such as official reports by governors and department assemblies, government communications, judicial documents including litigation processes, and magazine notes or newspaper articles found in the following Colombian archives: (1) Centro de Documentación del Río Grande de la Magdalena (Ibagué, Universidad del Tolima), (2) Archivo General de la Nación, República, Fondos Ministerio de Gobierno (sección 4, varios) y Ministerio de Fomento (sección Baldíos) (Bogotá), (3) Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas José María Arboleda (Popayán) y Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Hemeroteca y Libros raros y manuscritos (Bogotá).

4. Research is needed about the patriarchal contours of Lame’s leadership and the political role of women during La quintinada and Lamismo (Espinosa Arango 2006). Research focusing on understanding contemporary indigenous women’s participation in politics has emphasized that the model of gender complementarity prevalent among Andean communities has tended to minimize gender conflicts and gender-related inequalities within society (Espinosa Arango 2014). Recently, Rappaport has analyzed the predicaments resulting from the emphasis on the discourse of cosmovision and gender complementarity, in which women “are toted as equal to men in a ritual sense” (Rappaport 2013, 12), and the glaring inequalities endured by women in everyday family and community life, including domestic violence and the silencing of women and youth’s voices.

5. From early 2015 and until 2016, Juan Carlos Piñacué and I engaged in collaborative research on ‘conversations’ about Nasa notions of justice, Greater Right, Natural Law, and the role of the Thê´wala as spiritual authority.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mónica L. Espinosa Arango

Mónica L. Espinosa Arango´s current research interests focus on political and environmental anthropology. She has coined ‘the double ecology approach’, which integrates a political ecology of life into multi-scalar ethnographical analyses of socioecological, economic, and cultural transformations of rural communities that inhabit buffer areas of the National Natural Park Volcanic Complex Doña Juana – Cascabel (Nariño, Colombia). She also works on traditional midwifery, cosmopolitics, and sacred geography with Misak families from the Cauca, Colombia.