Colombian independence from Spanish rule proceeded over forty years. It started with peasant rebellions against heavy taxes around 1780, and lasted until the definitive defeat of the Spanish armies in 1819. The construction of the Colombian national community was predicated on social symmetry but constructed on profound inequalities. Once independence was secured internal domination was firmly established, mirroring the rigid system
Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell.
Springer, New York, 2008
Of racial and social segregation imposed by the Spanish. Although there were several constitutional and legal allusions to equality and democracy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, discrimination along cultural (racial) lines was rampant.
Internal colonialism was at stake in the struggle between liberal and conservative ideas throughout the nineteenth century, very often disputed in battlefields that caused thousands of deaths in several local, regional, and nation-wide civil wars. While conservatives defended a colonial nation (Hispanic, Catholic, and segregated), liberals fought for a modern state (mestizo, secular, and integrated). This struggle was not won by either of the confronting parties; instead, in the cultural realm it resulted in a hybrid co-production straddling modernity and tradition (Garcia 1989), configuring a Colombia characterized by “a system of abstract inclusion and concrete exclusion” (Martin 2003: 5). This contradiction is maintained by the relationship between modernity and nationalism: in Colombia, progressive functions of national sovereignty are coupled with powerful and pervasive structures of internal colonialism.
One of the main characteristics of the nation-state—the consecration of equal rights of all citizens, including the right to participate actively in the production of political authority—became the standard of modernity. Yet, in Colombia an imbalance existed between the promotion of republican ethics and the construction of the other (indigenous, Afro-Colombians, women), who was forbidden the status of citizen and deemed unfit to enjoy its rights. The definition of citizenship and its rights were enunciated from an androcentric and occidentally-centered locus; the self was centered in the civilized man. The project of modernity initiated in Colombia by the governing liberal elite of the mid-nineteenth century attempted to build an inclusive national (modern) identity; yet, native communities (an important part of the population and, more decisive, occupying more than three-quarters of the territory) were troublesome: while internal colonialism kept them subjugated and at bay, nationalism demanded their inclusion, based on an egalitarian ethic.
The Colombian elite, especially liberal, recognized the need for an instrumental knowledge capable of dealing with alterity; “social sciences” emerged to discipline discourses about identity. In 1882 Salvador Camacho noted the importance of non-scholastic sciences, particularly sociology, for the establishment of “the laws that preside over the historical development of those collective beings called nations” (Jimeno 1984:164). Two texts written some years later—the essay of Jorge Isaacs (1967) about the “tribes” of the Magdalena and the manifesto of Rafael Uribe (1907) for converting “savages” to civilized life—focused attention on the need for anthropological discourse. Issacs argued that anthropology should assess the level of civilization achieved by savages, an activity that would endorse their insertion into the national society. Uribe observed that the management (reduccion) of savages would have to be mediated by their cultural particulars: “In sum, to apply to each one this criterion, derived from the study that anthropology has made of natural man, in his moral and physical aspects: the diverse human races are productive only when they are employed in the kind of work suited to the level of civilization they have achieved” (Uribe 1907: 24).
Late nineteenth century studies of “indigenous antiquities” were undertaken within the same mindset. Archaeology, albeit amateurish, was summoned to provide part of the rhetorical fuel needed to launch the modernist rocket. Miguel Triana, wrote about the precolumbian Muisca of the Eastern Cordillera in 1922, stating that in doing so he was “establishing the positive bases of a national sociology, modeled on the autochthonous race formed here by geology and climate” (Triana 1972: 22). However, Ezequiel Uricoechea, one of the founders of an explicit archaeological discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century, made it
Clear that non-professional endeavors, such as his and that of Triana, were to be followed by a truely disciplined practice: “I hope that a patriotic archaeology emerges; my little book could only by fulfilled if there were professional archaeology in our country” (Uricoechea 1984: 108). Uricoechea’s modesty was grounded in his scientific training (he was a doctor, chemist, and astronomer) and stemmed from the fact that what he and others were doing was just the collection and esthetic description of antiques. However, the scientist that Uricoechea was surfaced in many parts of his work (for instance, he made chemical analyses of two gold Muisca pieces with the idea of making comparisons and formalizing study of “the art of the ancient dwellers”).
Although the professionalization of archaeology (its formalization into a discipline) would only occur several decades later, the discursive consequences of the amateur enterprise were numerous and far-reaching. The most important product was central to weaving the new social fabric: pre-Hispanic alterity was demonstrated and rationalized as the cornerstone of national identity while, simultaneously, contemporary alterity was marginalized and “invisibilized”. One of the basic ingredients in this segregation was evolutionism: the most “civilized” pre-Hispanic alterity was shown to underlie nationality, a necessary (and unavoidable) link in the evolutionary path towards simple civilization (modernity), planted by Europeans and tended by their Creole inheritors. The pre-Hispanic society overtly incorporated into national identity was the only one deemed civilized: the Muisca of the eastern highlands. “Civilized” had a precise meaning: stratified, with several decision-making levels, distinct institutions, a legal apparatus, religion, army, and taxes. That is, civilized society different in degree, not in kind, from contemporary European societies. Uricoechea stated that Colombian nationality was built upon the “nations” that populated the Andean region, thus excluding the “barbaric” nomads of the lowlands. The difference was based on the western dichotomy between sedentarism and nomadism, central to the legal conception of territorial rights. By virtue of their characterization as civilized, affirmed on the basis of the archaeological “evidence,” the Muisca were discursively presented as an alterity understood as primordially Colombian. This vindication of pre-Hispanic civilizations contributed to the production of the civilization-barbarism dichotomy that still pervades the discourse of the Colombian state, whether dealing with the ethnic other or with the criminal actions of guerrillas.
Archaeology contributed significantly to the modernizing apparatus set in motion by liberal, republican elites; the role accorded to archaeology was the rhetorical incorporation of an indigenous past alterity, a necessary complement to its contemporary suppression; in doing so it contributed to the creation of a national identity and played an important role in the promotion of national pride. Pre-Hispanic monumental sites (such as San Agustin and Tierradentro, in the southern Andes of Colombia) and their associated paraphernalia (gold work, stone statues) were adequate theaters for the mise en scene of nationalism. The emphasis on monumentality, at the expense of “less civilized” cultural traits, was part of the rhetoric of civilization, whose origin was located in the “civilized” pre-Hispanic societies; the contemporary heirs were excluded with the argument that they were just degraded remains of their more brilliant ancestors. Consistent with the discriminatory and anti-modern (no matter how modern its rhetorical outlook may have been) heterodoxic nationalism characteristic of Latin American countries, archaeology contributed little to dissolving the rigid, hierarchical order inherited from colonial times; instead, it helped solidify it.
The division of alterity between past and present built an indigenous present/absent dichotomy that fueled internal colonialism. As Fabian (1983) shows, temporal distancing (allochronism) is one of the main discursive strategies for constructing alterity, keeping
The other at a distance (more temporal than geographical). The “typological” and “physical” time of archaeologists naturalized the archaeological-anthropological construction of living aboriginal peoples into an other, effectively localized in a different time, a time that demanded to be attracted, through inclusion, to our time, the time of civilization. The morality implied in allochronism produced a “good” past alterity but a “bad” present one.
The discursive degradation of the contemporaneous other (the argument above, that the contemporary Indians are the degraded remains of brilliant pre-Columbian ancestors) explains the obsession Colombian archaeologists have had with cultural discontinuities, catastrophes, and diffusions. Diffusionism is a central element in the role played by archaeology in the reproduction of internal colonialism, even today. Diffusionism writes an atem-poral history of allegedly timeless societies (Fabian 1983: 18) through its use of spatial and evolutionary comparisons. Thus, the determination of origins is more political than factual (Pineda 1984: 202-203). Explanations positing a Mesoamerican or Peruvian origin for preHispanic Colombian societies were, and still are, common. The link to civilized others from abroad helps to valorize the civilized others within; it also lent credence to Spanish colonialism and to internal colonialism: both set about civilizing the uncivilized other.
Archaeology also helped to rationalize a schizophrenic alterity through catastro-phism. Colombian archaeological discourse continuously alludes to annihilation, disappearance, or continuity: archaeological subjects—societies, cultures, even sherds—do not change but disappear. In 1854, for instance, Uricoechea (1984) wrote that his book about the Muisca was the place where the memories of indigenous societies were to be found: “Let us be the ones who render the last tribute to those who disappeared, succumbed to the yoke of slavery and ignorance, and let us erect, with our efforts, the last monument to the Indian, to his talents and his knowledge”. The “Indians,” then, only lived within the pages of his book. The disappearance of pre-Hispanic societies implicit in catastrophism (due to invasions, migrations, annihilations) implies their definite annihilation in time and space and their textual salvation (sensu Clifford 1986: 112)—a rhetorical salvation, not social or political, to be sure.
The “more advanced” pre-Hispanic societies—those with metallurgy, statues, monumental public works—were eliminated from the historical landscape by catastrophes and replaced by “backward” societies all across Colombia—those societies constructed by colonial and republican discourses about ethnic alterity. And to the “backward” societies invading peoples give the gift of culture: civilization to the invaded. Thus, archaeological explanations mirrored Spanish and republican policies towards the other. Catastrophism is linked to sorrowful statements about lost “wonders.” Written out of history by the catastrophic strokes of archaeologists, the marvels of pre-Hispanic civilizations fell to smug invaders. And through colonial relationships alterity was kept at distance, and discriminated against.
World History
