Abstract

GAMBA-BARON, Oscar Fernando; UNIGARRO-CAGUASANGO, Daniel Esteban  and  CARVAJAL-SANCHEZ, Nohora Inés. Indigenous Territoriality: External Discourses and Native Perspectives on the Space Inhabited by Tegria’s U’wa Community. rev.udcaactual.divulg.cient. [online]. 2021, vol.24, n.1, e1621.  Epub Apr 21, 2021. ISSN 0123-4226.  https://doi.org/10.31910/rudca.v24.n1.2021.1621.

Tegria’s community is part of the U’wa indigenous people, who have inhabited the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy since the pre-Hispanic period, in the jurisdiction of the current municipality of Cubara in Boyaca (Colombia). However, this region known as Sarare has been described from anthropological, ethnohistorical, linguistical, and to a lesser extent, geographical approaches, which have generated representations of territory that ignore the historical process of indigenous people. To account for the present territoriality, it was proposed to contrast these external discourses with the community’s visions on its history of occupation and the transformations of the inhabited space, compiled through participatory methodologies that sought the collaborative construction of knowledge based on joint recognition of the place, the participant observation and the constant dialogue between indigenous and researchers. In this way, it was established that the external discourses show a territory that does not correspond to the processes of appropriation, adaptation, and reconfiguration of the space that the U’wa indigenous community has lived through and are evident in everyday settings such as the cultivation plot and the school. Therefore, it is only possible to recognize indigenous territoriality by exploring other alternatives, expressions, and perspectives that involve directly the communities and are not external to the context of the inquiry itself.

Keywords : U’wa people; Cosmovision; Collective memory; Territorial representations; Indigenous space.

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