Is Colombia Andean? Depends Who's Talking

Abstract:This article examines the appropriation of Andean cultural models among Nasa activists of the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC) in Colombia. Culturally, the Nasa have little to do with Andean communities, being much more similar to the cultures of the peoples of the Amazonian lowlands in their oral traditions and their lifeways. Beginning in the 1990s, Nasa intellectuals began to conduct research into what they called cosmovision and, as a result of cultural exchanges with Andean researchers from Ecuador and Bolivia, adopted lo andino as a political strategy that allowed them to imagine a desired future. This brief essay inquires into how appropriate it is to include Colombia—and more specifically, Colombian Native peoples—in the Andean cultural sphere, and then proceeds to examine how Nasa intellectuals have appropriated Andean cultural motifs.