This research addresses the colonial legacies traversing understandings of indigenous languages and their “revitalisation” in Colombia, arguing that neither language theories nor policies escape power-knowledge relations. It shows how alphabets and grammars have operated as colonial normalising technologies and defined indigenous languages as “illiterate” or “incomplete” languages, forcing them to adjust to foreign models and justifying the intervention of colonisers, missionaries and academic experts (who sought to “transform” indigenous languages into “complete” grammatical and alphabetical languages). It examines the asymmetrical clashes regarding the validation of “expert knowledge” over indigenous knowledge practices. Additionally, it acknowledges the contributions of postcolonial, decolonial, ecological, critical and cultural theories for decentring alphabetical, grammatical and monolingual normalisations and relocating indigenous languages in complex (non-anthropocentric) relations and community filiations. This research proposes a comprehensive “(po)ethical” approach that dialogues with indigenous language practices in their poetical, ethical and political dimensions. This has three important effects. Firstly, it challenges reductive models of literacy and grammaticality, consolidated since the colonial encounter. Secondly, it highlights the deep articulation of indigenous language practices with the recreation of traditions and community filiations. Thirdly, it redefines “revitalisation” as a process that goes beyond linguistics insofar as, conceived otherwise, it challenges colonial epistemic violence, rebuilds community filiations, and enables healing. (Po)ethical practices are agonistic. They emerge from the pain of the conflicts, historical conditions and violent asymmetries that are inscribed in the bodies and the languages we inhabit. In contrast to colonial technologies and policies of multiculturalism, (po)ethical practices do not pursue the elimination or assimilation of difference. Through agonistic translations, they acknowledge and connect creative processes of resistance and healing, allowing dialogue between adversaries instead of “eradicating conflict” by eliminating difference. The research stresses the local and global potential of agonistic translations of (po)ethical language practices in challenging coloniality and rebuilding communities.

Victims' organisations are still very much the "black boxes" of transitional justice studies, despite the fact that victims themselves have, over the last decade, joined institutional design and inter-elite pacts amongst the chief preoccupations of the discipline. This study proposes that we cannot genuinely comprehend victims without looking inside their associations. It addresses this gap by shedding light on the micro-dynamics of two understudied associations, namely the Colombian Asociación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Association of Relatives of Detained Disappeared, ASFADDES), and the Panamanian Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos Panamá (Committee of Relatives of Detained Disappeared Panama, COFADEPA). The 2000 fragmentation of COFADEPA and the 2004/2005 division of ASFADDES is seen as a gateway to comprehending the heterogeneity of victims in terms of needs, interests, and capabilities, and their individual agency. Using analytic narratives, it traces the development of these crises by deploying two versions of the Asymmetric Escalation Game created by Zagare. It asks whether or not fragmentation was an avoidable outcome, what incentive structure actors responded to when they initiated, and then repeatedly escalated, the conflict, as well as why no restraint was exercised on any part when fragmentation became imminent. The conclusion is that fragmentation was the unintended, but not accidental, result of the escalation of a conflict triggered by changes in the internal conditions of the organisations, and their political settings. The previous foundational pact or, to put it in game theoretic terms, the equilibrium between the coalitions underpinning these associations, broke down, and was not or could not be replaced because incongruities between affiliates frustrated the search for new common ground. Instead, believing they had the support of a majority of members, each side attempted to impose its vision, by escalating its threats against their antagonist, further polarising issues, and eventually culminating in fragmentation.

The island of Barú, located along the Atlantic coast of Colombia, has occupied, since the colonial era, a geographical and social interstitial position. The island was a strategic space in key processes and events of colonial and national modernity. Its inhabitants have combined movement and interaction across geographical spaces and social groups with retreat and relative closure. The historical experiences of dislocation and of marginality have shaped local modes of relatedness and particular ways of signifying and narrating “family”, masculinities and femininities, the divine and the wondrous. State and capital's progressive encroachment over the Island trans-territory has recently undergone a conspicuous acceleration. Moreover, new religious organizations have influenced the ways in which people think and talk about identity, local forms of sociality and religiosity. “Development” and ethnicity-based identity politics have functioned as identity-, community- and memory (re-)making devices. Various political and economic actors currently envision and try to implement projects of “place” which commoditize the island and aim to reshape local subjectivities and relational modes according to market-oriented values.

This study examines the construction of the pre-Hispanic past of Colombia from the 1820's to the 1940s. It describes and analyses the reception, dissemination and appropriation of knowledge about ancient Colombian societies. It analyses the works by Colombian and foreign antiquarians, savants and archaeologists and the formation of Colombian pre-Hispanic collections in the Museo Nacional in Bogotá and in three major European Museums : the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, the British Museum in London and the Musée d'Etnographie du Trocadero in Paris. The study shows the ways Colombian archaeological objects were viewed in the course of this history. At its outset, during the Colonial period, Colombian pre-Hispanic objects were first seen as "Idols of the devil"; in Europe, they were initially considered as curiosities and as works or art. During the nineteenth century, archaeological objects began to be valued and interpreted by Colombian and foreign scholars and antiquarians as antiquities and also as art objects. How Colombia was presented and represented in the National Museum in Bogotá and in international exhibitions during the second half of the nineteenth century is described and analysed, and how pre-Hispanic artefacts came to form part of a representation of Colombia nationally and internationally. The final chapters deal with the first four decades of the twentieth century, when the pre-Hispanic period received a new degree of recognition in Colombia with the enactment of official measures for the protection of antiquities, the building of archaeological collections in the National Museum in Bogotá and in research done by foreign and Colombian archaeologists, which began to define archaeological areas scientifically. The final chapter examines the background for the establishment of the Colombian scientific tradition in archaeology during the 1930's with the creation of the Servicio Arqueológico Nacional, the Institute Etnológico Nacional and two archaeological museums, the Museo Arqueológico Nacional and the Museo del Oro.

This dissertation is concerned with a road in the Colombian region of Putumayo. The history of this road spans from the mid nineteenth century up to the present, and encompasses a wide range of characters and events, from nineteenth and twentieth century statesmen and missionaries’ ambitious colonization projects to ongoing peasant land conflicts regarding the road’s future. Together, these characters and events could be conceived or read as many different fragments and voices, past and present, of the same story. My main aim, however, is not to assemble these voices and fragments into a single narrative of the road, as much as to place them in the broader historical geography of state and frontier. I focus primarily on the multiple dialectical entanglements, conflicts, and encounters through which the state and the frontier have been discursively and materially constructed in this specific region. In doing so, I will argue that this historical geography of state and frontier has been primarily shaped by a relation of “inclusive exclusion”, or a relation where the assimilation or incorporation of the frontier to the spatial and political order of the state has historically depended on its exclusion from the imaginary order of the nation. Through a historical and ethnographical approach to the road, I emphasize the rhetorical and physical violence embedded in this relation, as well as the everyday practices through which this relation has been challenged and subverted in time and through space.