Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

Reparations
and the Trajectories of Indigenous
Citizenship in La Guajira, Colombia
By

Pablo Jaramillo
Universidad de los Andes

Resumen
del estado en la simultanea marginalizacion,
atencion
y cuidado de las
La participacion
poblaciones e tnicas invita a re-examinar las condiciones, formas e implicaciones de las
ciudadanas indgenas contemporaneas, caracterizadas por Postero (2007), para el caso

de Bolivia, como post-multiculturales. Este artculo se centra en como

la reciente
de vctimas indgenas, resultado principalmente de violencia paramilitar
reparacion
del discurso sobre la
en el norte de Colombia, fue el escenario de una radicalizacion
ciudadana indgena entre las personas y organizaciones implicadas. El artculo presta
a las preocupaciones expresadas por personas directamente involucradas en la
atencion
entre reparacion,
poltica social y ciudadana, quienes han visto
creciente articulacion
y vulnerabilidad. Los datos en los cuales se
su indigenidad asociada a victimizacion
basa este artculo son resultado de trece meses de trabajo de campo etnografico entre el
ano 2007 y 2008 con indgenas vctimas de los paramilitares en La Guajira colombiana.
[Colombia, conflicto armado, pueblos indgenas]

Abstract
Strategies to include indigenous populations in Colombia are often regarded as solutions for historically preestablished exclusion. Yet the participation of the state in
the simultaneous marginalization, attention to, and care of ethnicized and racialized
populations invites an interrogation of current formations of indigenous citizenship,
characterized by Postero (2007) for Bolivia as post multicultural. This article is primarily concerned with novel articulations of multicultural policies together with other
strategies of social inclusion and the radicalization of indigenous citizenship discourses
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 335353. ISSN 1935-4932, online
C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1935ISSN 1935-4940. 

4940.2011.01161.x

Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

335

among the actors involved. It delves into the concerns of people directly involved in
the growing articulation of human rights reparations, social policy of the poor, and
citizenship, who have seen their indigeneity increasingly associated with victimhood,
vulnerability, and claims of care. As a result, the subjects of indigenous citizenship
experience it as an object of exchange and consumption. This article is based on a
13-month period of ethnographic fieldwork (20072008) in La Guajira, Colombia.
[Colombia, armed conflict, indigenous peoples]

This article seeks to analyze novel articulations of multicultural policies alongside social programs to the poor and reparations to indigenous victims resultant
from paramilitary violence in northern Colombia. These articulations imply a new
branding of indigenous citizenship, which carries with it the capacity to elicit
what are termed here anxious ethnic subjects. I first heard of the anxiety experienced
by people undergoing processes of social inclusion through Senora Helena during
many hours of conversation in her kitchen in a ranchera (traditional indigenous
hamlet) called Campamento, only a few miles from the Colombian border town
of Maicao.1 It was during the visits of her neighbors and family that Helena would
complain insistently: Nothing for Campamento! Nothing! I always regarded her
comments as unjustified in the face of the inclusion of the ranchera in several
development projects funded by international nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs). Eventually I found the opportunity to share my views and suggested
the possibility of declaring Campamento a resguardo (a type of Indian reservea
juridical arrangement intended to recognize and protect indigenous territories),
which would pave the way to getting money for the population as indigenous.
Resguardo no! Senora Helena replied emphatically. Why not? I asked, clearly
confused. I dont know, I dont like it, she finally replied.
If Helena wanted inclusion, this meant something I had not suspected thus far:
to state it bluntly, she wanted subsidies related to her status as indigenous, but
subsidies that would not put her in the same bag as people positively discriminated for by the multicultural policies that marked the period after the National
Constitution of 1991. More clearly, she wanted access to Familias en Accion Indgena
(Indigenous Families in Action), the indigenous version of a nationwide conditional cash transfer program (CCT), a program that delivers subsidies to childrens
mothers to advance the formers development and to which the continuity of the
Indgena is part of an
inclusion is conditioned (Latorre 2007). Familias en Accion
experiment in governance and social care in Latin America (IDB 2007), and the
fact that the initiative was being piloted in La Guajira during my fieldwork in 2007
and 2008 resulted in a privileged opportunity to grasp the subtle shifts in strategies
to manage indigenous populations in a country like Colombia. By analyzing the

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introduction of Familias en Accion in La Guajira, this article looks at the shifting

place of indigenous identities in current schemes of neoliberal governance. The
case illustrates the contradictory nature of contemporary state inclusion in
Wayuu
Colombia, which inflicts terror to build upon relationships of dispossession and
dependency (Gill 2009; Sanford 2004).
This article, however, is not limited to stating the obviousthat ways of including indigenous peoples are ever-changing and Janus-faced phenomena. Instead, it highlights the ways in which the expertise, techniques, and objects that
define the interface between the state and indigenous people imply reckoning
indigeneity as an objectified element that can be exchanged for inclusion. This
configuration of indigeneity tends to be accompanied by ever-growing anxieties
felt by targeted populations, which are linked in turn to a sense of loss of the
selfproduced by the central element in the whole formula: a trade-off between
inclusion and objectified notions of identity.
Recent analyses of the fate of multicultural policies have pointed to important
changes either effected by their direct beneficiaries or that have come into reality as
part of broader transformations on behalf of the state. Postero (2007), for instance,
has recently stated that in Bolivia, state multiculturalism and neoliberal reforms
have had unexpected outcomes as they have radicalized discourses on citizenship
and civil resistance, while also displacing ethnicity as the primary defining element
of indigeneity. Indigeneity has consequently come to imply something else beyond being simply an expression of ancestral descent and genealogical links with
pre-Hispanic traditions (cf. de la Cadena and Starn 2007). These formations are
dubbed by Postero as post-multicultural and this article explores the possibility
of reaching a similar outcome in Colombia, in a context where the language of
rights and inclusion was produced by violent and sovereign exclusions in which
demands for rights and citizenship were nested. In a different context, French
(2009) delves into the impossibility of distinguishing between politics of recognition and politics of redistribution in the de facto application of multicultural
policies. In the Brazilian Northeast, French asserts that quilombos [slave descendant communities (2009:104)] and newly recognized indian tribes suggest
the convergence of ethnoracial claims to recognition and class-based claims to
redistributive justice (109). Similarly, there are signs of a blurring in the contours of multiculturalism in Colombia. In other words, it is increasingly difficult
to pinpoint what kinds of things do, in fact, comprise multicultural policies. This
blurring of what counts as a politics of identity and what does not has, at least,
two apparent outcomes. First, the identification of indigeneity with notions of
vulnerability has emerged as a central trope to formulate a relationship of care and
protection between indigenous people and the state. Second, the intermingling
of programs for the poor, human rights reparations, and multicultural policies
entails specific ways of experiencing indigeneity through material objects (e.g.,
Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

337

ID cards and survey forms, among other things) that stand for and authorize the
identity of the holder, and which can be exchanged for inclusion. These two axes
constitute the basis for the emergence of anxious ethnic subjects who reckon their
indigeneity as something inherently alienable.

Neo-, Multi-, ParaLa Guajira peninsula constitutes the dry, arid, and northernmost tip of South
America. The location of the region has been both a factor of marginality and of
global interconnections (Guerra Curvelo 2007). The lack of gold and its agricultural
barrenness made the land only a secondary target of imperial and republican aims.
However, the smuggling of innumerable commodities in the Circum-Caribbean
area has long served as a source of power and wealth for La Guajiras indige whose elites held governmental advances at bay
nous inhabitants, the Wayuu,
until the late 20th century. Although an essential form of governmental control
prior to the 1960s and 1970s was matrimonial and commercial alliance with these
remained significantly empowelites, leading to forms of mestizaje, the Wayuu
ered through their own business and ritual bonds with subordinate indigenous
allies.2 The problematic characterfrom the perspective of the stateof the
became even more critical during the second half of the 20th century,
Wayuu
when border tensions with Venezuela and petroleum and coal exploitation in the
region made it urgent for state powers to regain control over the territory and its
population. Senora Helenas family was part of the empowered elite that faced the
aggressive project to bring control to La Guajira, involving the neoliberal commercial policies, multicultural organizations, and paramilitaries described in this
section.3
To me, Senora Helena was far more than my host in the ranchera where I
developed my fieldwork in La Guajira at the end of 2007 and the beginning of
2008. As she called me tachon, son, I felt compelled to call her macho, mother.
In her youth, Helena was what used to be called in travel literature (Bolinder
princess. The
1957; Candelier 1994; Weston 1937) and in Colombia a Wayuu
expression served to underscore the similarities in class and to underplay the
different ethnicities involved in marriages between such princesses and officers
of the Colombian army. Senora Helena often boasted about the bridewealth given
for her by her grooms family nearly half a century ago55,000 Colombian pesos
(around US$60,000 at the time, in 1958), as well as the goats, cattle, necklaces, and
other gifts involved in the transaction. The amount of bridewealth speaks about
the importance of her eirruku (literally flesh, but often translated as caste or
clan). Her family not only founded Maicao but was also a key participant in
the slow positioning of the state within the region, through opening the doors

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to the establishment of a police outpost and a local bureaucracy in exchange for

advantages granted in terms of commercial routes and status.
Our close relationship dated from prior to Helenas life as a dweller and authority of Campamento. During the first couple of months of my fieldwork, I had
been a regular guest at her house in Maicao I would hang my hammock in the
houses backyard. It was a huge corner house whose luxurious past was still visible,
regardless of years of carelessness. Not long after I met Helena, she and what was
left of the family decided to live in Campamento, the old finca (farm), and turn it
into a ranchera.
Her familys decision to re-inhabit a finca as a ranchera instantiates in a
powerful way the long history of mestizaje and class in La Guajira. Fincas symbolize
the landowning regime used by mestizos in Colombia, whereas rancheras represent
traditional Indian settlements. In these terms, moving to the ranchera was seen
as an ethnic step toward a more Indian identity in contravention of the historical
norms of Indians expected to become mestizos, especially under conditions of
social ascension. Being a part of the elite, Helenas family was the outcome of
alliances between governmental agents or private entrepreneurs (related to salt
exploitation, natural dyes, and smuggling) and apushis (families) at the beginning
of the 20th century. The alliances were mainly expressed through marriages of
nonindigenous men to princesses. These kinds of alliances were the single most
important factor in the growing use of the category Guajiro to denote a less
ethnically specific, more mixed population. Before the mid-20th century, Guajiro
was used exclusively to refer to the indigenous population. When this category
began to be used to refer to the nationalized poblacion mestiza, the word Wayuu
came to the fore to refer to indigenous people. Guajiros were less ethnically specific
but not completely so. Due to matrilineal concepts in local notions of family and
ideas of cognate descent among the men who participated in the unions, mestizaje
did not evolve as a cafe con leche, to borrow Wrights expression (cf. Wright
1990): the mixture is acknowledged but the genealogies allow individuals to claim
full membership of both families of descent.4 It is important to bear in mind
that in La Guajira, these notions of mestizaje have served the double purpose of
underpinning alliances with powerful foreign powers while also reinforcing bonds
with non-mestizo populations, as the status gained can be deployed in traditional
alliances. As will be shown below, the problematic character of Guajiro mestizaje
manifests in a fuller way with the entrance of paramilitaries.
The alliances with families regarded as more indian were important in that
those families increasingly regarded as Guajiras retained territorial control of La
Guajira peninsula and thus continued with contraband (Grahn 1997) practices
deeply rooted in the region since at least the 18th century. The territorial control of
roads and ports was especially critical in the illegal trade of marijuana and cocaine
during the 1970s and 1980s, which increased the economic and political power of
Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

339

the mestizo elites that had paradoxically emerged as part of the efforts to govern
the region.
The governmental response to its diminishing control over the territory, partly
resulting from the overt illegal empowerment of mixed elites, was twofold. First, the
central government imposed strong policies to keep contraband at bay through
the prosecution of the people running the business. This strategy has been extensively documented by Orsini Aaron (2007) and further detail is not required

here. The second strategy corresponded to the political engagement of the Wayuu
(the population regarded as more indian) with the state through multicultural
organizations, thus undermining the mediation exerted by Guajiro families.5
Additionally, in the mid-1990s, right-wing death-squads made incursions into
the territory in a nationwide phenomenon more generally called paramilitarismo
a scheme of private armies divided into blocks in the service of large landowners
and drug traffickers, initially interested in repelling the left-wing guerrillas. The use
of paramilitaries is difficult to categorize as a strategy, but it is even more difficult
not to do so. Paramilitaries have been a constitutive part of Colombian reality
since at least the 1950s (Taussig 2005), but they formalized in an unprecedented
manner during the 1980s, when state-sponsored organizations were set up in the
Magdalena River valley (Medina Gallego 1990). When they were outlawed by the
government in the 1990s a second wave of organizations emerged (Romero 2003).
The nascent so-called blocks set up an umbrella organization, Autodefensas
Unidas de Colombia, and divided the national territory among its members. The
Northern Block penetrated La Guajira in the late 1990s through alliances with some
Guajiro families, who invited in the death-squads to tip the balance of disputes
with other local families in their favor. The disputes had emerged as part of
governmental pressure to control contraband, which created tensions in attempts
to protect families businesses. Soon afterwards, the mercenaries developed an
independent structure and took control of the region by killing whole families and
securing strategic locations for smuggling. The army helped the paramilitaries by
providing information and assisting with actual ground operations that resulted in
killings, forced displacement, and disappearances. Powerful local families joined
allies to resist the supremacy of the paramilitaries, but
hands with their Wayuu
they were soon defeated. This part of the story is perhaps more difficult to interpret
as a strategy, as simultaneously unfolding sets of actions unveiled a more planned,
forward-looking approach to generating governance through illegal means. Thus,
for instance, the operation of paramilitary forces was underpinned not only by
members of the national Colombian army, but by the strategy of cooperativismo
(cooperativism), which was jettisoned by the government in 2002. This strategy
implied the promotion of cooperatives as part of the neoliberal agenda radicalized
by President Uribe Velez, and was intended to encourage self-management and to
create jobs with minimal state intervention. In practice, cooperatives served as a

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facade for money laundering and the running of paramilitaries businesses. It was
through this system that the paramilitaries took over control of the trans-border
business of smuggling petrol from Venezuela. The war with those people, as
the paramilitaries were notably called, was crude. Of course, the dispute with the
death-squads not only involved Helenas family, but also many others living in
different parts of La Guajira.6
Neoliberalism in trade, multiculturalism in alliances, and paramilitaries in
territorial control (neo, multi, paraa war of prefixes) were the three constituent
elements of the fall of La Guajira families, such as Helenas. The response from
the state and other germane agents (NGOs and multilateral bodies) was to solve
the crisis that this conjunction of factors had caused. As human rights emerged
as its most visible aspect, government-administered reparations for human rights
violations came to the fore. Almost overnight, a vast part of the population of La
Guajira became not only victims but indigenous victims.7 The situation also
paved the way for other kinds of palliative inclusions and the re-imagination of
what it meant to be an indigenous person, through concepts, such as rights and
inclusion.
Dependency en Accion
By the time the conflict had reached its most dramatic point, Helenas familys
livelihood was considerably affected. Some of its members maintained strong
bonds with the territorial regime upon which the idea of the Guajiro family was
based: that is, the tenure of fincas in former ranchera territory whose inhabitants
would become part of a rural proletariat, thus replacing ritually mediated alliances
with wage labor. Many of the family allies continued living in rancheras, but they
were clearly subordinated in political and ritual terms (mainly when it came to
bridewealth, the distribution of goats at funerals, and war encounters where the
poorer party would take more dangerous positions). Other members of the family,
Helena included, re-populated former fincas as rancheras and have sought ways
to re-draw old alliances in a traditional fashion. However, Guajiro families face
something of a conundrum: the precarious position they had reached by the turn
of the 21st century forced them to identify as indigenous in order to gain inclusion
in an awkward melange of multiculturalism, programs for the poor, and human
rights reparations.
Re-inhabiting Campamento meant re-fashioning alliances with more indian
allies, which, in turn, resulted in a dilemma in terms of family supremacy: being
recognized as indigenous was dangerous, as the family had enjoyed its territorial autonomy precisely by staying out of the scope of governmental recognition
as indigenous, insofar as the families were regarded as mixed and as illegal

Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

341

smugglers. This was concretely instantiated by the exclusion of the land south
of Maicao from the constitution of a huge resguardo covering nearly half of the
peninsula (in total an area similar to that of Northern Ireland) in the mid-1980s.
The declaration of pieces of land as resguardo entails the right to receive resources
in the shape of projects for the improvement of rancheras. Such resources do
not go directly to the rancheras leaders, but to the municipal government that
distributes them. To the leaders, this represents a form of auditing that the better
off do not put up with. During the last decade, the declaration of resguardos and
the expansion of existing ones halted, but this system was then replaced by the
constitution of reservas (reserves), a territorial figure that came with multicultural
reforms (Decree 2164 of 1995). Although reservas do not entitle communities
to economic transfers, they pave the way for communities inclusion in ethnicoriented programs. The lands excluded from the La Guajira resguardo were not
only the most fertile in the region, but also the most strategic in terms of borderland contraband. These particular circumstances around the constitution of a
resguardo help to unveil the blurry association between inclusion and state control
in Senora Helenas complaints.
The mestizaje of the victimized families became an object of intense debate. The
government initially declared that Maicaos people had been victimized because
of their involvement with smuggling and, therefore, they were not indigenous
victims. As one representative of the CNRR told me, they were victims for the
same reasons the rest of the Colombians were. However, when female leaders from
the families started to denounce the situation, they were welcomed as indigenous
by the state with no hesitation. This is partly to do with the emblematic place
women have in Colombia, which made their claims of victimhood more
Wayuu
indian (de la Cadena 1995). As will be explored below, the attention to gender
and women as privileged categories in human rights reparations (Bouris 2007)
played an important role. Beyond this, the ambiguity in ethnic categories became
functional in the intermingling of multicultural policies and programs for the
poor.
To cut a long story short, Helenas dilemma could be put like this: the power
and autonomy of the family had been partly guaranteed by its noninclusion in
the resguardo (and in other germane ethnic-oriented policies), but this meant
they could not access national resources as indigenousthe family did not
need such resources in any case, as they were sustained by their own business.
After the paramilitary incursion, the family lost control over the trade routes and
ports and, therefore, it started to depend upon alternative sources of income.
The familys challenge was primarily to access these resources while keeping a
margin of maneuver to rebuild part of their power, now dormant in the traditional
alliances. However, the death-squads were followed by a full set of governmental
institutions to generate inclusion in a population made vulnerable by indirect and

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direct state actions. The National Institute of Rural Development (INCODER)

and the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF) advanced a first wave of
inclusion initially through the declaration of reservas.
The postvictimization context made the context of inclusions even more complex. Women belonging to Helenas family, particularly Karmen, Helenas niece,
led the denuncias (legal and political complaints) regarding crimes perpetrated by
paramilitaries in the Justice and Peace Process, an initiative to demobilize armed
actors, which included reparations for their victims (Congreso de Colombia 2005).
The Justice and Peace Process was mainly advanced by the presidency of Colombia with the support of international allies. The demobilization process adopted
the popular format of a truth and reconciliation commissiona tool-kit of democratization strategies that has become the international standard in managing
postconflict reconstruction and political transitions (Hayner 2001; Wilson 2001).
Truth and reconciliation commissions often place restorative justice as the cornerstone of postconflict stability, and this was the case in Colombia, but the legal
definition of reparations remained murky, and the resulting vagueness has been
strategic for passing state policies for the poor as part of reparations (more on this
issue below). The fact that the denuncias were advanced by indigenous women
clearly increased their visibility in the view of the National Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation (CNRR, the body in charge of running the whole process)
and the other NGOs involved, and shows the prominence of gender as a category
of intervention in this sort of commission (Dal Secco 2008).
To understand the issues that emerged in this context, it is necessary to ask
what kind of things and actions the potential beneficiaries reckon as reparations.
The answer to this question should necessarily start by returning to the vagueness
of the definition of reparations to the victims (let alone the implications of the
indigeneity of the victims). The initial issue was that law 975 of 2005, which put
forward the reparations, did not make clear what reparation meant. As a matter
of fact, the issue was being discussed in the Colombian Parliament at the time I
was carrying out fieldwork and, although a law was passed reducing reparations
to monetary compensation, at the time of writing this article the matter is still a
subject of heated debate in the Colombian Congress. This ambiguity in the law was
amplified by the fact that actions to deliver attention to the victims of the conflict
preceded law 975 of 2005although they were not officially dubbed reparations.
The Social Solidarity Network (RSS, Red de Solidaridad Social) was in charge of such
actions, and the agency was merged with the Colombian Agency of International
Cooperation in 2005. This was part of an overhaul of social welfare to the poor

accomplished by President Alvaro

Uribe Velez (20022006/20062010), which
resulted in the constitution of Accion Social (the Colombian Agency for Social
Action and International Cooperation). This newly formed agency inherited the
responsibilities of the Social Solidarity Network, which included the operation
Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

343

of attention to victims (law 548 of 1999). The consequence of this institutional

mesh and law superimpositions was that it was difficult to pin down exactlyin
theory and in practicewhat was part of the reparations and what was not.
This created the conditions for a generalization of reparation as a model of
relationships between citizens and the state. Where is this coming from? was a
common question in Campamento when things are given, as the attention is
interestingly referred to. The answer to this question increasingly became Familias
Indgena, a program operated by Accion Social that was locally framed
en Accion
as the shape of actual reparations.
In addition, in order for an inhabitant of Campamento to get things as a
it was crucial to be the holder of a cedula de ciubeneficiary of Familias en Accion
dadana (citizenship identity card, henceforth cedula). In practice, this meant that
the whole community should be represented by an officially recognized Autoridad
Tradicional (traditional authority), and belong to an Asociacion de Autoridades
Tradicionales (Association of Traditional Authorities). People cannot go by themselves to claim a cedula; they tend to so through an intermediary who arranges
the registration of whole communities, and the state body in charge (the Registradura Nacional del Estado Civil) has singled out Autoridades and Asociaciones
as responsible for doing this. The registration as a Traditional Authority takes
place in the municipal Bureau of Indigenous Affairs of Maicao, and the registered
person should produce a list of people (supported by their signatures, fingerprints
and cedula numbers) declaring their agreement with the possession. In order to
become an Autoridad Tradicional there is no need to reside within a resguardo or
reserve, and this will not entitle a community to receive the resources destined for
the populations of indigenous territories. The advantage of becoming an Autoridad Tradicional rests in the fact that other resources that formerly did not flow
into La Guajira, and which are not exclusive to resguardo and reserve inhabitants,
are only delivered to communities associated through this system as an Asociacion.
Such associations are the quintessential figures of multicultural governance and
emerged as part of the negotiations around the La Guajira salt marshes between the
families during the early 1990s (Decree 1093 of 1993), but
government and Wayuu
today have a nationwide effect. It is noteworthy that associations are the product
of normative anthropological wisdom in the configuration of early multicultural
strategies, and what we anthropologists imagined (and some still do) it meant to
be an indigenous person. The notion of the Autoridad Tradicional cast indigeneity
as something transmitted along genealogical lines. In this regard, it is unsurprising
that those in charge of negotiations on the side of the government (anthropologists
with sustained contact with indigenous organizations in La Guajira) were strongly
which
influenced by a resilient commonplace in the literature about the Wayuu,
projects lineage as the single most important idiom of social organization (cf.
Gutierrez de Pineda 1950, 1963; Wilbert 1976). According to these notions, the

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defining character of Wayuuness
is matrilineal descent. This has been referred
to in the literature repeatedly, and although the best-accomplished ethnographies
in the region have put matrilineal idioms amidst a more complex image of sociality (Goulet 1978; Rivera Gutierrez 1990-1991; Saler 1988), the anthropologists
in charge of negotiations were influenced by a genealogical image of indigeneity,
as shown in a text by one of these anthropologists, published at the time of the
negotiations (Correa 1993).
There is a tension in the current context, however: the local population is victimized and subsequently provided with reparations indirectly linked to welfare
which are intended to bring full
schemes for the poor, such as Familias en Accion,
citizenship to marginalized populations in a liberal guise. This access, however, not
only bears the tag indigenous, but also entails membership of regulated multicultural organizations underwritten in the key of biological descent and territorial
fixity. This cycle of inclusion is directly involved in the production of an anxiety
involved in identification with an indigeneity that is regarded as the only option
for inclusion, while also entailing growing control of the population. This anxious ethnic subject emerges not only as somebody insecure about his or her own
indigeneity, but also about the loyalty it entails. The Gordian knot is the tension
between what Elizabeth Povinelli (2006) has called genealogic and autologic
discourses. The former refers to discourses that allude to social determination
and constriction or, more concretely, to the force of tradition in the constitution
of subjects. By autologic, Povinelli refers to discourses that emphasize the freedom and autonomy of the individual. The latter are, thus, a constitutive element
of concepts of liberal subjecthood. Povinelli, however, demonstrates both discourses in simultaneous operation and tension in new experiments in sociality
(2006: 85).
On one hand, there is a quasi-programmatic interdependency between vulnerability, inclusion, and citizenship. This connection not only entails but also brings
about a subject realized through access to services, producing an image of the
indigenous citizen as a consumer of rights. On the other hand, the subject made
vulnerable by agents of the state or its emissaries cannot realize as such a libertybearing entity through means other than the assertion of indigenous genealogy.
Nothing for Campamento! is the subjective statement of the frustration caused
by the need to perform a sort of tradition that obliges Helena to submit herself
to auditing techniques (Asociaciones de Autoridades Tradicionales) in order to be
free.
The Means of Representation . . . and their Ends
A paradoxical outcome of the new branding of multiculturalism emerging through
new combinations of policies in Colombia is the way self-determination is
Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

345

incorporated into a formula of integration. The divide between the former (selfdetermination), represented by such progressive legal instruments as the 1989
International Labour Organization (ILO) convention 169 and recent waves of
national constitutions in Latin America, and the latter (policies targeting vulnerable populations) is increasingly difficult to sustain. Self-determination has
been articulated with a second instance in the constitution of an anxious ethnic subjectthe demand of self-responsibility. Such an instance is both necessary and a correlative to those who are ethnically fixed in order to become
free subjects: it produces subjects of policies accountable for the success of
these very policies. Indigenous peoples are responsible for participating in the
success of the policies of which they are targets, as an expression of their
autonomy, self-management, self-determination, and, in short, their autological
potential.
Back in Campamento, Helena, having registered in the municipal Bureau of
Indigenous Affairs of Maicao as an Autoridad Tradicional, obtained the desired
Indgena, which was being piloted at the
means of accessing Familias en Accion
Social 2009). In order to be included, the program
time of the fieldwork (Accion
asked every Autoridad Tradicional to carry out a census in their communities. This
way of performing responsibility was intended to be reproduced at every other
level, from household economy to political decision making (i.e., the participation
in political elections as a citizen). The functionary serving as general municipal
coordinator spelled out this connection between self-responsibility and sovereignty
during an interview:
What are we looking for with this [program]? To awaken peoples responsibility
. . . for themselves; that people understand the importance of an on-time medical
check, to improve the levels of education among indigenous children . . . The other
thing, no doubt, [is] to make presencia del estado [state presence], because one can
see that in higher Guajira . . . Venezuelan currency is handled and the indgena
knows the Venezuelan national anthem more than the Colombian one . . . There
is something, however, that should be admired: they feel Colombian in their hearts
and defend their fatherland and they identify themselves more with Colombia than
with the sister republic of Venezuela. (Interview with J. C. Parody by P. Jaramillo, 7
June, 2008)

team gave to every

In order to consolidate the project, the Familias en Accion
Autoridad Tradicional a form to be photocopied and filled out with the information
of every unidad domestica (household) of the ranchera. As an ethnographer, and
concerned about possible outcomes from this census, I offered to lend a hand to a
leader in the neighboring rancheras to fill out the forms.
The form requested information about the members of each household,
including the ID number of each member (registro de nacimiento for newborns,

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tarjeta de identidad for children under 18, and cedula de ciudadana for adults).
Additionally, the forms asked for information about indigenous languages spoken by individuals, health coverage, and educational level.
Having photocopied the forms, we visited the households of her ranchera,
the leader asking the questions; I filled in the forms. As a general rule, a woman
replied to our questions and managed the identification documents, which she
would take out of a folder hidden in the house. Inconveniences soon emerged.
One householder said: I am already registered with another leader. My friend
was visibly upset because, as she said, tapushsia (she is our family). In a swift
response, the leader looked for alternatives to balance her numbers and guided me
along a pathway leading to Wawatamana, another ranchera. In this way, a race for
the forms emerged in and among rancheras, and the sheets of photocopied paper
took on an inflated value for a couple of weeks.
A leader from Campamento, learning about my participation in the census of
another ranchera, requested the forms from me so [she] could have a look I
assume that this was based on the premise that ethnographers never say no. After
my denial, she left, upset, to continue her low-intensity war with a leader called
Luis Angel, who was registering people from Campamento as if they were from
Uniaka. This complaint soon spread to other inhabitants: Uniaka does not even
exist; this is a recent thing; that is their invention. I asked, Whose invention?
Leaders inventions, was the answer.
This way of reckoning communal issues poses some questions: is it the leader or
the means (the censuses, workshops, and programs) that made them so? A number
of leaders were the representantes legales (legal representatives) of Asociaciones
de Autoridades Tradicionales with strong bonds with health service-providing
companies in the hands of other indigenous associations. Other leadersin fact the
majority of themhad less formal positions and had started to mediate between
the Autoridad Tradicional of their ranchera and the agencies that give things in
a rather informal way.
More fundamentally, these issues carried with them increasing feelings of insecurity about kinfolk and the implications of the indigeneity entailed in relationships
with the state in consolidation. People in the rancheras started to experience an
increasing nervousness about the kinds of (dis)loyalty that could emanate from
such a reconfiguration of the family. An incident with one of Helenas relatives
speaks for itself. Campamento was not only under siege by leaders, such as Luis
Angel, but also by people belonging to the same family. Helenas cousin, for instance, lived in a ranchera far from Campamento but had been visiting the latter
quite often in the couple of weeks before the census. She was introduced to me in
very gentle terms, but when it emerged that she had the intention of registering her
household for her own census, she started to be called the unfriendly nickname of
La Rata (the rat).
Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

347

One of the most remarkable outcomes of the census was the possessive language
that people started to use about their own rancheras and inhabitants: Uniaka is
Campamentos, Campamento is my ranchera, and the people of Campamento
are mine. The most visible result of the forms, as expressed in the tensions between
leaders to obtain households records, was the possibility to re-visit the rancheras
as a customizable space in order to fit intervention schemes.
On a map, the rancheras would start to look less like territorial clusters resulting from consanguine relationships and alliances, and more like a scattered set
of households held together by inclusion in particular social programs. The map
would express well the violence of numbers (Ferme 1998). But it is worth asking
what other forms of violent rearrangements escape such cartographic representations. A fundamental aspect here is the implicit homology between family and
household, as has been noted in a variety of contexts (Harris 1981; Harrison
1998; Moore 1994), and the correlative concept of rancheras as a set of households. A ranchera, of course, entails a complex notion of affinity and consanguine
relations and is a spatial (through the location of houses and paths) and temporal (as represented in the family cemetery, the ultimate token of land ownership)
representation of alliances in peace and war. Such an idea of interconnectivity is
implicit in the idea of apushi (family) and its irreducibility to the set of households
that integrate into it. But to take rancheras as a set of households, as the census
successfully did, have important political uses. Each unity relates in a one-to-one
relationship to agents that deliver subsidies or, as people say, give things. Each
mother (and due to space constraints I will leave gender issues unexplored in this
article) thus relates to the state, and the interconnectivity of the apushi, which
sustains notions of familial self-defense, can be diluted.
But then, who needs to defend themselves, if they are now citizens, as this is
what the state is for? Or is it not? This very question served to articulate a final and
more critical kind of anxiety, particularly experienced by the leaders, in the form of
fear of the commoditization of identity and the consumption of the self. At the final
stage of the fieldwork, I gathered with members of the indigenous organization that
emerged from these legal and political complaints. The purpose of our meeting
was to analyze the challenges of unity in the organization (a real obsession in
indigenous organizations). One of my tasks within the workshop was to share my
views on the tension between reparations, the delivery of subsidies to the ranchera,
and the multicultural organizationsessentially the same objective as this article.
After talking for hours, Karmen, Helenas niece, said, were selling ourselves off.
Another leader, who did not belong to the organization, was cruder that that: el
paisano [a colloquial term for an indian-looking person] is too interested; he goes
wherever things are being given away.
MacPherson (1962) identified a critical feature required to understand what
is going on in the production of a consumable indigeneity. The liberal subjects,

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MacPherson asserts, are defined by possessive individualism. Such a feature

entails more than a rhetorical definition. Because liberalism emerges in parallel
to a notion of waged labor, persons should necessarily own, at the very least,
the energy to be sold in the market. This notion of subject is particularly visible
in taken-for-granted ways of speaking about ones own identity. In addition,
as Strathern (1988) observes, we speak about identity as something analogous
to a commodity. This commodity-root metaphor is at the core of the previously
mentioned tension between genealogy and autology: a genealogic being receives information and genes; an autologic being circulates its own identity as a commodity
in order to be free. In conjunction, the notion of indigeneity entails impossible
identifications.
This section has described the ways in which the notions of self-determination
and self-responsibility, co-occurring with forms of inclusion in La Guajira, trigger
anxiety about indigeneity and its capacity to guarantee loyalty. As the limits of the
communal blur, and certainties about the family fade with latent risks of betrayal,
an anxious ethnic subject emerges. This subjecthood is underwritten in idioms
of possession and commoditization that produce in the final instance the fear of
self-consumption.

Post-Multicultural Anxieties: A Final Remark

This article began by analyzing the infliction of vulnerability on a population regarded as problematic and marginal by the state. Violence, commercial policies,
and multiculturalism have undermined the power of local elites and triggered their
transformation in ethnic terms. This transformation not only affected the elites
but the meaning of being indigenous in the formulas of inclusion. People were
also subtly forced to enact the genealogical traits that define them as indigenous
in order to become fully free and autonomous subjects. This aspect has been related to the necessary coexistence of autological and genealogical discourses in the
experiments of sociality implicated in neoliberalization processes. Autological and
genealogical discourses set the conditions for ambiguous definitions of communities and families and, in the final instance, for the re-imagination of indigeneity as
an object that can be exchanged for citizenship. The notion of liberty implicit in
the concept of citizenship is intimately linked to that of consumption. As Bennett
notes in a comment on Foucault (cf. 2008: 63),
freedom can only exist in variable forms as specific sets of relations between governors and governed. Viewed in this light liberalism comprises a specific way of
organising and distributing freedom. It is, first and foremost, Foucault argues, a
consumer of freedom in the sense that it requires a number of freedoms (of the

Post-Multicultural Anxieties?

349

market, of property rights, of discussion and expression) as a condition for its

operation. But if it is to consume freedom, it must then also produce and organise
it. (Bennett 2009: 1)

There is an interestingthough sinistercycle in operation here. Persons

framed as indgena are not only put in the position of consuming their own freedom, but of consuming themselves and re-imagining their indigeneity as something negotiable and in circulation. The bottom line is that the processes described
in this article actively produce notions of being and becoming indgena in Colombia while, in turn, casting relationships of dependency with regard to the state. It is
this possibility of creating notions of identity that resemble commodities that is
most unsettling in the whole process, in which there is not something other than
multiculturalism, but its actual realization through technical connections between
discourses of diversity and racist governance. That is, recognition and redistribution have colluded to undermine self-determination, rather than to produce
greater justice.
Acknowledgments
This article was first presented at the Forum of the Centro de Investigaciones SocioCulturales de la Universidad de los Andes (Foro CESO). I thank the participants

in this forum for their feedback and questions, and especially Monica
Espinoza
and Virginie Laurent for their challenging question, which made me reconsider
portions of the paper originally presented. I also thank Professor Peter Wade,
Professor John Gledhill, Professor Penny Harvey, and Dr Sian Lazar for their
invaluable comments at different stages during my research. I am grateful to Dr
Andrew Canessa and the two anonymous reviewers of this journal who offered me
excellent insights on how to improve this article. The research was supported by the
Programme Alan, the European Union Programme of High Level Scholarships
for Latin America, scholarship No. E06D100843CO.
Notes
1 Some

names in this article have been changed.

Latin America, mestizaje denotes racial and cultural mixture.
3 In this respect, the subject matter of this article can be contrasted to the processes of successful
resistance of indigenous peoples to colonization (e.g., the MapucheBoccara 1999) and the effects of
current efforts of State control in indigenous territories.
4 Cafe con leche is mix of coffee and milk in equal parts commonly used in Colombia and
Venezuela as a metaphor of racial and cultural mixture. The situation was less clear cut when indigenous
men married or had children with nonindigenous women, as the offspring would find it more difficult
to claim membership of the fathers family.
2 In

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5 Further

details about this strategy are given below.

of the most remarkable and publicized examples were the paramilitary incursions and
massacre in Portete Bay, on which the National Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation (CNRR)
published a report and organized several public commemoration events (CNRR 2010)
7 The actual statistics regarding the victimization of the population are murky and, as in Colombia
at large, a matter of heated dispute (Tate 2007). Indigenous leaders speak of nearly 250 killings and
disappearances, but only give full details of 135 incidents (Ramirez Boscan 2007). The Human Rights
and International Humanitarian Law Observatory of the Vice-presidency of Colombia gives a more

detailed picture of the situation in the municipalities inhabited by the Wayuu,

while contesting
the indigeneity of many of the victims (Vicepresidencia de Colombia 2008). According to the Vicepresidencys report, the main forms of victimization have been homicides, kidnappings, massacres, and
forced displacement. Between 2003 and 2008 there were 1,411 homicides in municipalities inhabited

by the Wayuu,
nearly half of them in Maicao alone (8). During 2003, 2004, and 2005 the homicide
rates (homicides per 100,000 inhabitants) in La Guajira (80.48, 70.85, and 57.97, respectively) and
Maicao (106.14, 91.96, and 68.44) were significantly higher than the national homicide rate (52.83,
44.62, and 39.34) (8). The authors of the report directly link the high incidence of homicide to the
represent
presence of armed actors and the surge of paramilitaries in La Guajira. Although the Wayuu
were
the vast majority of the population in La Guajira, the document states that only 37 Wayuu
victims of homicide between 2003 and 2008 (15). This figure seems unconvincing since there were only
51 victims in the nine massacres reported between 2003 and 2008, many of which occurred in directly
rancheras. Forced displacement was also an important manifestation of victimization,
targeted Wayuu

with 13,696 people fleeing their homes (from municipalities inhabited by the Wayuu)
between 2003
and 2008. As with homicides, the report states that only 9 percent of the forcibly displaced people

were Wayuu.
Finally, although nearly half of the 99 kidnappings in La Guajira between 2003 and
2005 are attributed to left-wing guerrillas (10), many of the remaining cases are presumably linked to
disappearances perpetrated by paramilitaries.
6 One

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