Producing the land of oblivion

Abstract

The Kogui are a group of indigenous people that live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia. They have come to represent one of the maxims of indigenous traditionalism and environmental wisdom thus constituting one the greatest myths of Colombian anthropology. This association of place and people now occupies a special place in conservationist milieus. The purpose of this ethnographic text is to inquire on the process through which the conservationist discourse in an association with (anthropological) representations has produced this image of a fixed place and culture. Considering individual and collective agency I further consider ways in which these representations are contested, negotiated, and re-appropriated in various contexts that intertwine the national and transnational realities of contemporary environmental politics.