Colombia and the Legal-Cultural Negotiation of Racial Categories
Colombia and the Legal-Cultural Negotiation of Racial Categories
- Joanne RappaportJoanne RappaportGeorgetown University Department of Anthropology United States
Summary
Colombia is a country that has over the past two centuries defined itself as a mestizo nation, but almost no one identifies as mestizo. During the colonial period (16th to 18th centuries), an early modern epistemology of race different from our own was founded in the notion of an ever-changing human body and on a society whose members were only in certain contexts classified by race, fostering fluid taxonomies that cannot be adequately represented by the canonical triad of “white,” “black,” and “Indigenous,” and their admixtures. If, in the 19th century, “scientific” notions of race spread across the globe, this racial discourse took particular forms in each location. In Colombia, racial categories were adjusted to mark geographic, as opposed to individual, diversity. Regions of the nascent Colombia were defined by their “whiteness” or their “blackness,” in a civilizing discourse that attempted to erase but at the same time maintain social hierarchies. This redrawing of racial taxonomies had at its center the goal, for the Andean heartlands at least, of a progressive movement toward whiteness.
Subjects
- History of Northern and Andean Spanish America
- Indigenous History
- Social History
