Since the mid-nineteenth century Colombian governments have attempted to solve the supposed deficit of modernity. By the first decades of the twentieth century governing elites believed that modernization of the country was trailing behind its rhetorical promotion. Railroads had been built, connecting roads were replacing the dependence on rivers for communication, there was a standing army, the economy was open to world markets, and the political life had become relatively democratic; yet, a large part of the population
Was still excluded from the happiness promised by the egalitarian ethics of republican life and from the market economy that was allegedly raising Colombia from underdevelopment. In other words, the creation of the “modern” individual was still somewhat incomplete (and so was the “modern” Colombia). Cultural differences were central to that exclusion. Although mestizaje had replaced “whites” in colonial dominance over colored castes, opening formerly guarded gates of political and economic participation, native communities and Afro-descendants (who together made up more than 30% of the population) were true outcasts.
The State embarked upon an all-out promotion of a national history to create the still non-existent sense of an all-embracing community. Historical narrative was modernized: the first historical text, mandatory for the schools, was adopted in 1910; a National Archaeological Service was created in 1938; the Gold Museum was created in 1939; the National Museum was strengthened; and anthropology was established, professionally, in 1941. Archaeological discourse, discarding amateurism, rushed to help close the gap between modernity as rhetoric and as realization; the past came to rescue a clouded future.
Modernization of the historical domain meant the replacement of outdated ideas and practices (vernacular, unregulated, idiosyncratic) with those of rationalism, universalism, and objectivism. A center-periphery dichotomy arose: the center produced cognitive standards and the periphery strove to adopt them. Science was presented as an international endeavor; the vernacular was an anachronistic noise that had to be silenced. Interpreted from an archaeological perspective, the argument ran as follows: there is a center that produces scientific archaeological knowledge (capitalist democracies, especially the U. S. and England) and a periphery that consumes it. This argument resonates with the idea that colonies produce raw materials and metropolitan centers manufactured goods through the aggregation of value; applied to archaeology it amounts to saying that peripheral countries contribute the past (as a referent) and the metropolises enact its discursive conversion, which is then reproduced back at the periphery. What did this situation require? The same solution as technological backwardness: through the transfer of knowledge and the establishment of an adequate infrastructure (including scientists prepared in, or sent by, the center).
The Escuela Normal Superior, established in 1936, was the first academic institution geared to teach social disciplines. The institutionalization of archaeology in Colombia started with the State-sponsored work of French anthropologist Paul Rivet in 1941, the year he founded the National Ethnological Institute (devoted to research and academic training), endowed with an open, liberal environment that lent credence to the potential role of the social sciences in constructing a new social fabric. Rivet’s endeavor catalyzed an ongoing and incipient (both in scope and support) archaeological program and established the scientific canon. Although the political agenda of the NEI was overtly pluralistic and democratic, Rivet guided the nascent institution toward a distant, aseptic relationship with social life. Ethnic alterity was objectified in museums and academic reports; its existence was thus secured but enclosed. A double domination was placed in motion: first, cultural difference was domesticated by making it appear as constitutive of national identity; and second, social memory was tamed, showing Colombians how alterity became part of the self by virtue of its incorporation into the collective project [Note 1].
The nationalistic discourse in vogue by the mid twentieth century was soon undermined by the very same discipline it had established to provide its rhetorical needs. Anthropologists built upon a previous political and artistic indigenismo, vindicating the indigenous legacy. Cultural relativism, handed down from Rivet to his pupils, showed that indigenous societies were highly developed, had complex systems of thought, were in a
Sort of harmony with the environment, and had not needed western guidance to walk the road to civilization. Cultural relativism was a kind of anti-nationalism because it praised and endorsed cultural differences, thereby curtailing the ideal of homogeneity set forth by nationalism. These anthropological or ethnological ideas alienated anthropology from the State. Archaeology, however, was the exception: it kept strengthening nationalism by incorporating native societies into a common history.
Soon after Rivet inaugurated professional archaeology in Colombia the pan-Andean archaeological research project of the Institute of Andean Research at the American Museum of Natural History began research in Colombia as a marginal, northern appendix of the Central Andes [Note 2]; also, the Caribbean Archaeological Program of the Peabody Museum extended its interests into Colombia, joining the sixth expedition of the Institute of Andean Research Program. Although the expedition was led by two prestigious North American archaeologists, Wendell Bennett and James Ford, the results were meager in terms of transmission of methodology and the philosophy of knowledge because Bennet and Ford were transient visitors, little interested in bringing to Colombian archaeology the metropolitan discourse that eventually led to the adoption of an explicit scientific program.
The fact is that since the 1950s foreign archaeologists [Note 3] have not made an academic impact, nor established research standards that could serve as the basis for a truly scientific archaeology in Colombia (founded on rational, universal, and objective criteria). Archaeological work was done by Colombians trained in Colombia, initially by Rivet (and soon by his friend Gerardo Reichel-Domatoff, see Oyuela-Caycedo 1996) and later by his students, who became professors at the newly founded departments of anthropology (Los Andes 1963; Nacional 1966; Antioquia 1966; Cauca 1970).
Monumentalism continued to be the primary archaeological concern, while in the metropoles (and in other Latin American countries where the metropolitan standard was employed, such as in Mexico and Peru) more “mundane” research (settlement surveys and excavation at domestic sites) had already begun. Archaeologists limited themselves to produce aseptic (and boring) reports describing cultural materials. With the very notable exception of Reichel-Domatoff (e. g., 1972, 1981) they made no effort to establish webs of meaning linking contemporary indigenous communities with their findings and narratives; on the contrary, they avoided historical continuities (furthering a tendency started by amateur archaeology the previous century) and thus severed the syntagmatic integrity of the chains of historical significance. This rupture implied that indigenous peoples worthy of attention only belonged to the past, not to the present.
In 1971 the Foundation for National Archaeological Research (FIAN, its Spanish acronym) of the Banco de la Republica was created: it is the only institution devoted to sponsoring and disseminating archaeological research in Colombia through its publications series. While 1971 was the year of the greatest social unrest in the recent history of Colombia (with widespread student rebellions and the organization of peasant and indigenous movements), it also signaled a commitment by the State to a supposedly politically neutral discipline. That archaeology was the branch of anthropology to receive the support of the State was due to its tradition of non-involvement in politics. The collection of monographs published by FIAN is a good measure of what Colombian archaeologists have done. The core of the collection, numbering more than sixty volumes, is formed by descriptive, non-interpretative reports characterized by: (a) summary statements about similarities and differences; (b) non-explicit typological orderings; and (c) fairly limited and poorly supported explanations based on general extrapolations from current environmental conditions and historical documentation.
The orientation exemplified by the FIAN monographs remained little changed until recently. Colombian archaeology was oblivious to the academic events happening in the metropolis, where in less than a decade archaeology adopted an explicit scientific program, strove to make universal generalizations, and devoted increasing efforts to building solid inferences based on field research. The new scientific agenda, the model to be followed according to the center-periphery ideology, implied academic training in metropolitan centers and the standardization of disciplinary authority, such as publication in world journals (in English) and the internationalization of a writing genre (neutral and deprived of rhetorical tropes) as natural and correct for discursive contribution. But Colombian archaeology was “independent” and consequently, isolated. The investigation of the past in prescriptive scientific terms (the way to modernize a backward and vernacular archaeology, that is) was a task assigned to the few Colombians who pursued doctoral degrees abroad, especially in the United States, during the 1980s.
A historical analogy seems useful here: young members of the sixteenth century Cuna elite from Panama were trained in power centers of northwestern Colombia to introduce them into a social order that stressed inequality by restricting access to foreign goods and knowledge (Helms 1979). Political power in Cuna society rested on the manipulation of esoteric knowledge; power and knowledge were inextricably linked, and young members of the Cuna elite reproduced a political discourse learned in metropolitan centers.
Similarly, Colombian archaeologists trained in scientific practices abroad went back to their homeland to teach the “real” knowledge about the past, to extirpate old fashioned practices, and to establish an inflexible canon. Until then Colombian archaeology, reputedly modern but poorly developed, was produced at the margins of the global discourse of late modernity; such is the only legitimate sense of its “independence”.
World History
