Description
Book SynopsisExplores how participants in the indigenous movement in Cauca, Colombia - including indigenous, non-indigenous, scholars, and shamans - have helped define a new sense of Colombian nationhood
Trade Review“Joanne Rappaport takes engaged anthropology a whole step further in this brilliant experimental ethnography. Through intercultural dialogues involving new generations of Nasa intellectuals and their nonindigenous collaborators in Colombia, we witness creative tactics to decolonize knowledge and produce novel hybrid political culture. I
ntercultural Utopias offers a rigorous, indigenously inflected analytical approach to issues such as indigenous politics, autonomy, and conflict ‘inside the inside’ of highly fluid arenas of indigenous activism.”—Kay Warren, author of
Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala“This book is a major intervention in discussions of interculturalism among scholars and activists committed to indigenous movements. Joanne Rappaport’s theoretical and methodological innovation and politically engaged practice model the transformative power of horizontal conversation between and among intellectuals from distinct linguistic and cultural traditions.”—Florencia E. Mallon, author of
Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001“
Intercultural Utopias is extremely useful for thinking comparatively about indigenous movements, particularly the sections on bilingual education, the role of the national left, implementation of customary law, and dealings with transnational religious authorities.” -- Diane Nelson * Journal of Anthropological Research *
“In this path-breaking book, Rappaport describes and analyzes the work of ‘intellectuals’ that have during recent decades informed and shaped the indigenous movement in the province of Cauca (Colombia). . . . One of the book’s major insights is its challenge to the idea that Colombia’s indigenous movement is monolithic, with a homogenous set of actors.” -- Esteban Rozo * Comparative Studies in Society and History *
Table of ContentsAbout the Series ix
Acknowledgments xi
A Note on the Orthography of Nasa Yuwe xvii
Abbreviations for Colombian Organizations xix
Introduction 1
1. Frontier Nasa /
Nasa de Frontera : The Dilemma of the Indigenous Intellectual 23
2.
Colaboradores: The Predicament of Pluralism in an Intercultural Movement 55
3. Risking Dialogue: Anthropological Collaborations with Nasa Intellectuals 83
4. Interculturalism and Lo propio: CRIC’s Teachers as Local Intellectuals 115
5. Second Sight: Nasa and Guambiano Theory 152
6. The Battle for the Legacy of Father Ulcué: Spirituality in the Struggle between Region and Locality 185
7. Imagining a Pluralist Nation: Intellectuals and Indigenous Special Jurisdiction 227
Epilogue 262
Glossary 277
Notes 281
Works Cited 299
Index 325
