Colombia años 50: Industriales, política y diplomacia (original) (raw)

2005, Hispanic American Historical Review

Neil Whitehead believes Amazonian history remains "an eternal present of 'fi rst contacts' and 'marvelous discover[ies]'" (p. vii). Western scholars have preferred to accept, as history, the discursive inventions of European chroniclers whose reports are several removes from their sources. What has been regarded as Amazonian history, then, is more correctly part of an Iberian travelogue tradition, in which the narrator, estranged from his surroundings, is his own subject of contemplation-and his imagination his primary source. Histories and Historicities uses the Amazon case to explore "a new scholarship on history and historicity." In it, nine anthropologists from Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States rely on oral histories and symbolic narratives of indigenous spokespersons, rather than written archival documents. Together, these contributions well illustrate that history is local, shaped by the specifi cities and interests of its narrators. The choice of the plural "histories" in the title, rather than the conventional "history," makes this point. Several prominent motifs run through the contributions, such as the process of signifying space in order to read into it events in time. In the process of historicizing space, specifi c topi are imbued with meanings that record and construct the past. Silvia Vidal, for example, describes how the Arawakan Warekena of Venezuela use the landscape to encode events and the group relations they authorize. For the Warekena, the journey of a culture hero is a means of denoting the landscape. Vidal fi nds Warekena cartography to be both a sociogeography of traditional territories and a cosmological mapping through which generations record and interpret their world. Domingo Medina fi nds similar historicizing and mapping functions in the journey narratives recounted by members of the De'kuana of Venezuela. The symbol-laden journey of the culture hero Kuyujani links the De'kuana to the landscape and to their past. Because laws defi ning rights to land are phrased in terms of antecedence, historic narratives that link native Amerindians to the lands they occupy play a critical role in shaping their future autonomy. The Kyujani texts described by Medina were used in a recent project to legitimize De'kuana land claims. The De'kuana demarcation process became one of self-discovery. As they reinforced and reifi ed cultural as well as spatial boundaries, the texts also helped young De'kuana discover their own tribal histories. Thus, a Hispanic American Historical Review