Some notes about the Kogui and their culture
The Kogui are one of the four nations of the SNSM. The other three are the Arhuaco, the Wiwa, and the Kankuamo. The languages of all four belong to the Macro-Chibcha, a group of languages that share a common ancestor, found from Honduras to Ecuador, including Venezuela and Colombia. Linguistic studies have shown that the Arhuaco and Kogui languages come from a common ancestor, and that from the Arhuaco originated the Damana of the current Arhuaco, and the Kankuamo, now extinct (Constenla 1991). Kankuamo and Arhuaco are located mainly in the east; the Wiwa in the north, and the Kogui in the north and southwest. The Kogui are endogamic, with matrimonial rules among two clans, Duxe and Take, the former being matrilineal and the latter patrilineal (Pérez 1995). A member of the Duxe clan must find a marriage partner from the Take clan; in most cases the couple’s residence is patrilocal. This implies high mobility in the territory since the couple has relations with the clan of origin and the clan of residence. The Kogui have an expanded notion of the territory; touring the territory means strengthening family relationships. This high circulation has been interpreted as a lack of community cohesion. During the 19th and 20th centuries large clan movements were reported, from one territory to another, mainly due to factors associated with state violence; internal migrations were then added to normal mobility, which was read, by a particular classical anthropological literature, as a lack of consistency (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1953). The Kogui from the hydrographic basins of Ciénaga recognize that their settlements date from the end of the 19th century after police intrusions displaced them into their territories (Francisco Gil, personal communication). The archaeologists have interpreted 18th-century reports of displacements as discontinuity between the populations that inhabited the territory at the time of Spanish arrival at the beginning of the 16th century and current communities (Oyuela 1986). Some anthropologists maintain that Wiwa and Arhuaco communities, located in the lower parts of the SNSM, are mostly defensive, while the Kogui, located upon the mountain massif, preserve the laws of the universe (Gómez 2015). For Wiwa mamos such as Ramón Gil, the four nations of the SNSM are like the four legs of a table; the Kankuamo is the weakest leg because it has suffered the most in defending its way of life. We should also mention the Tagangueros (from Taganga), which are fishermen clans associated with northern Kogui clans. They have recently gained state recognition as an ethnic community, yet are entirely invisible in the region’s ethnographic literature. Despite this, the Indigenous council of Taganga managed to be included in the list of Indigenous authorities in Colombia.
This process has been led by Ariel Daniels, Mayor of the Cabildo, and the community leader David Cantillo. Taganga is an essential point within the Koguis ontology because it is recognized as the gateway to the territory.
Since the Kogui nation is large and extensive, political leaders do not recognize Tagangueros as Koguis, although the great mamos are aware of the blood ties that unite them. Let us talk about the Kogui ontology.
The worldview of the Kogui is based on a system of similarities or analogies (Gómez 2015). Despite being different from plants, animals, or things, human beings belong to the same group; this is expressed in language; for example the lexema hu has been translated as an idea of “home”; yet, it also means something “round” (hu-ingaze) or, as an adverb, “together” (hu-ini). The lexeme can also be a verb, hu-luni, “come into the house.” House is hu-i and hu-lene is the gate of the house; then, many things belong to the group of things that count on this lexeme, including round things, the acts of joining a group and the action of entering the house. The Kogui language has several types of lexeme: nouns, qualifiers, adverbials, and verbals (Ortíz Ricaurte 2000:765); it also has nominal classifiers, prefixes that give meaning to words. For example, kala is “elongated”, so that kasa-kala is ankle (kasa is foot and kala pulling, elongated). Rain is “elongated water”: ni-kala. Hu-kala is a house roof. And so on. The episteme of similarities is also expressed in some word forms such as compound names. For example, a golden figure used for a payment is niuba-kaggabe, which means gold-people (kaggabe is used to refer to human beings). During many workshops led by Indigenous political organizations, it became clear that archaeologists had misunderstood everything. For example, since the arrival of J. A. Mason gold was believed to be a feature of the political distinction of past societies; however, it is now clear that gold is a material to pay fathers and mothers for human life. In a workshop where we discussed sums with Amado Villafaña, an Arhuaco filmmaker, it was understood that gold was of broad access since it was almost obligatory for people to pay with figures made from this metal.
The reader familiar with contemporary social science literature may note that the system of similarities in Amerindian communities is similar to what Michel Foucault (1999) called the system of the similarities of the 16th-century episteme in France. Although Foucault did not even consider the existence of this episteme outside Europe, the fact is that, in Amerindian communities and other parts of the world, this system exists, and coexists with the hegemony of modern thought. In these ontologies, to use the notion popularized by Descola (2013), and as Foucault assumed, some marks of nature must be read by selected individuals. That is why Foucault spoke of interpretatio naturae as the art of deciphering the messages that nature had in store for human beings. The person entrusted to read these messages was the polymath, and from there emerged the “legends,” the readings that the polymath can make of the world. In its original meaning, the legend is not something of a mythical order, but something that can be read by the polymath.
One morning in 2018, I was on the main square of the University of Magdalena. I was about to listen to a talk delivered by Ramón Gil, a Wiwa authority. Ramón has been a central figure for the SNSM communities, especially since Indigenous social movements begin to form there in the 1980s. He is one of the most respected authorities of the SNSM and represents one of the most prestigious Wiwa lineages because of his emblematic figure and assertive voice. Before the talk I greeted him, and he responded, as always, swiftly and told me that he had been trying to break down the word “baptism” to understand what made up the act of baptizing and how that composition was expressed in the language. I told him that, unfortunately, Spanish is not composed of lexemes, and that the closest thing were our syllables, but they alone say nothing. So, in a way, he concluded, “baptizing” meant nothing.
For the nations of the SNSM, the world is made up of interconnections between things and humans, which the mamos can read. The mamos are the polymaths of the SNSM. Such an interconnection must be maintained continuously and fed using payments. In their cosmology jabas and jates left places with markers showing where humans can make payments to them for the water, sun, animals, positive energies, and the like that they bestowed upon them. Payments are made with tumas, small polished quartz beads; each clan and each place has its particular type of tuma. The reproduction of society entails each person making payments with tumas and other paraphernalia for what they have received, such as the air or water, pottery vessels or mochilas, health and family. If payments are not made, the beings that feed on the lack of payments increase their power and gain ground, because what they want is to separate the clans and break the families. Colonial authorities since the 16th century prevented payments, so the clans were no longer able to feed the connections that keep the world in balance. The SNSM nations are currently striving to reverse this situation by reclaiming their territory and, to some extent, the tumas that were dispersed among countless museums worldwide, stolen by the archaeologists.
For decades, archaeologists have been destroying ezuamas. Since in ezuamas they used to have ceramic vessels in which polished stones were deposited, many payment sites were classified as mere dumps with the remains of polished stones. So, a significant part of the energy that the Indigenous social movements invest in their cause is oriented to preventing archaeological work.
Organization of the visible and non-visible worlds among the Kogui
The following description of Kogui philosophy is the result of several conversations over almost ten years that I have had with the Kogui, Wiwa and Arhuaco. Among these, I should highlight Francisco Gil, a Kogui academic; Amado Villafaña, the great Arhuaco documentary filmmaker; Ramón Gil, the great wiwa mamo; and José de los Santos Sauna, highest authority of OGT. However, I will use as a reference the book Shikwakala: El Crujido de la Madre Tierra (Mestre & Rawitscher 2018), published by OGT and the Kogui-Malayo-Arhuaco reservation; it has no single author, and it was produced using collaborative methodologies tethered to auto-ethnographies. This book is iconic because it was produced as a Kogui response to the representations that anthropologists have made of them for more than a century. Although it hides internal tensions, I stress the points of agreement. The research that led to the book involved tours of the territory and several interviews with Kogui mamos, especially those living in the northern basins of the SNSM. We must remember that access to the upper basins of the Kogi clans has been restricted since the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. Now with the Covid-19 pandemic, access really is impossible and also dangerous for communities.
Unlike other contexts and actors, few dialogic methodologies have been tried with the Kogui. The criticisms of the classic ethnographies on the Kogui did not denounce the abuses of unilateral descriptions but demonstrated the problems of ethnography as a form of literature (e.g. Orrantia 2002). That is, criticism was oriented to review the text’s problems, not the political dimensions that produced the dynamics of subjection exercised upon the Kogui. Revisionist ethnographies of the early 2000s presented the Kogui as manufacturers of genealogies that operated within a concept of tradition as something “flexible that adapts to new situations” (Orrantia 2002:55); they presented the Kogui and their attempts at organization as multicultural opportunism, not as a struggle against colonialism. For now, it is evident, within the different sectors of the Indigenous peoples of the SNSM, that ethnographic representation must be controlled and operated from within the social movement.
As the Kogui authorities such as Governor José Santos Sauna point out, with books such as Shikwakala, the Kogui cease to be objects of study and become part of a conversation with the Western world. For the last two decades, through their various organizational processes, the Kogui have generated their own ethnographic characterizations and are beginning to make their own historical inquiries and documentaries. This has been done to prove how wrong anthropologists (and archaeologists) were, especially regarding their cultural depth.
The Kogui call themselves Kággaba (Mestre & Rawitscher 2018:27). In some Indigenous reservations, this Kogui notion is used to refer to this nation, distinguished not only by its language but by its kinship rules. For them, the SNSM is Gwinendua, “everything that joins” (Mestre & Rawitscher 2018:27). The highest hill of the SNSM, Gonawindúa, is topped by Gwinendua. When the mamos, religious and political authorities, talk about this mythical relationship, the metaphor they use indicates that Gwinendua is like the hat they wear, the namanto. Gwinendua is the confluence of all the points that connect the world, so the Kogui believe that SNSM is the heart of the planet. There is an equivalence between the Kogui principle of unity of the points that make up the world, and the geometric idea that, in a sphere, all points are equidistant from center.
Using that simile, the SNSM is the center of the world, a point of confluence, because it is from that point that the whole is perceived. The Kogui are aware that not all human beings can see these relationships between different fields and between different beings, so their philosophy is projected with a moral tone. The practice of this philosophy has gone against the dynamics of capitalism, which seek maximization in production; on the contrary, the Kogui have demanded, concerning the tourist exploitation that occurs in the Colombian Caribbean, to consider the territory as a living being that must rest; this political agency has led to the temporarily closure of the PNNT and other spaces, such as “Ciudad Perdida” (the “Lost City”). These measures should be understood, not as whims of Indigenous people, but as practices of defuturing—which, in the terms of philosopher Anthony Fry (1999), are the conditions for transcending the Anthropocene era. For the Kogui agenda the challenge is to halt the vision of the earth as a resource, in order to heal the territory. Santos Sauna told me, in his OGT office, that their land management projects were intended to allow water to flow again in the creeks, so the birds can sing because they have water to drink. Santos Sauna was thus speaking of defuturing, because when one thinks of the future as being about the birds singing again, it ceases to be the projection of a radical transformation and becomes a space for reassembling anew. In this sense, the Kogui defuturing projects will be the realization of the communal (in the sense of Escobar 2016), a movement that re-establishes life in the territories, allowing the river basins to be reforested, and the forests everywhere to grow back. Those projects are not about making agriculture a monocrop production.
The Kogui territory is delimited by jaba Séshizha, the “Black Line.” It is a line because jaba Séshizha is composed of points, the places for payments, defined by their function—since particular payments are made in each place. There are places to make payments for the elements, such as air and water; there are others to make payments for family and health. Before the end of his term, President Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) recognized such a territory as a place for the practice of Indigenous religions, without compromising the private ownership of specific areas. This is one of the oxymorons of contemporary capitalism. However, Santos’ policy has had a positive impact on the political agenda of local communities for it has so far acceded to the demands of the Indigenous nations of the SNSM to be consulted regarding all development projects along the “Black Line.” This has not been a conflict-free issue, since these territories are in areas of high tourist demand. In any case, the struggle for the territory of jaba ...
