"They are not Good Savages!" magic and politics in indigenous public policy making in Colombia

• In Event: Amerindian Ethnicity, Gender, and Stereotypes

Abstract

A call to the Colombian government to create safeguard plans for 34 groups of indigenous people aimed at protecting them from the civil war taking place in the county resulted in the Colombian Constitutional Court’s mandate 004. The Court demanded that such plans be formulated in consultation with the indigenous groups, creating a complex process of policy making. This paper explores those negotiations that took place between The Indigenous Affairs Bureau at the Ministry of Interior and various indigenous organizations. I show not only the highly technocratic and political characteristics but the magical aspects that were present in these negotiations also. The government officials think that the indigenous peoples are possessors of magical knowledge. This produces both fear and desire because they presume those magical practices can harm as well as protect them. These assumptions constitute a public secrecy that operates in the negotiations and therefore I consider them to be important to address. This unexpected inclusion of magic in Colombian public policy making is an opportunity to associate existing anthropological debates about representations of indigenous peoples and the debates about the multicultural state, and how it recognizes them as a group to be protected and celebrated but still to be feared and contained. I found this revelation to be of great significance as it relates to governmental policy making in Colombian society.

Author

• Valentina Pellegrino, Universidad de los Andes