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Theoretical approach

Anthropology of the Colombian Caribbean

Toward an archipelagic anthropology

The anthropology of the Caribbean we propose starts from a specific place: the Colombian Caribbean, a shore in tension between Colombia, national anthropology, and the Greater Caribbean. A shore, not a margin read as lack. From there, the Colombian Caribbean reveals itself as a zone of crossing: continental and maritime, national and archipelagic, peripheral yet relational, traversed by colonial history, the plantation, racialization, migrations, popular memories, and territorial disputes.

Two anthropologies, one shore

Where the anthropology of the Colombian Caribbean is situated, between continental logic and archipelagic relation

The shore: continental anthropologies, zone of friction, and archipelagic anthropologiesOn the left, a green continental mass holding the national anthropologies of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina, each enclosed in its own circle. On the right, an orange archipelagic web where Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Martinique are linked by lines that continue beyond the frame. Between them, a vertical cream band — the shore — where the anthropology of the Colombian Caribbean is situated: a zone of friction in which the nation is destabilized and the archipelago becomes horizon. CONTINENTALANTHROPOLOGIESARCHIPELAGICANTHROPOLOGIES Mexico Venezuela Brazil Argentina Colombia Cuba Haiti Dominican Rep. Jamaica MartiniqueZONE OF FRICTIONAnthropologyof the ColombianCaribbeana shore, not a marginhere the nation is destabilizedand the archipelago becomes horizon The shore: continental anthropologies, zone of friction, and archipelagic anthropologiesAbove, a green continental mass holding the national anthropologies of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina, each enclosed in its own circle. Below, an orange archipelagic web where Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Martinique are linked by lines that continue beyond the frame. Between them, a horizontal cream band — the shore — where the anthropology of the Colombian Caribbean is situated: a zone of friction in which the nation is destabilized and the archipelago becomes horizon. CONTINENTAL ANTHROPOLOGIESARCHIPELAGIC ANTHROPOLOGIES Mexico Venezuela Brazil Argentina Colombia Cuba Haiti Dominican Rep. Jamaica MartiniqueZONE OF FRICTIONAnthropologyof the Colombian Caribbeana shore, not a margin
  • Continental anthropologiesEach national anthropology inside its own frame: a logic of center and periphery, territory as container. Its limit stops at the coast.
  • The shoreNeither margin nor intersection. Colombia arrives fissured: the nation is destabilized, and that point of friction becomes a place of enunciation.
  • Archipelagic anthropologiesA relational, translocal, opaque Greater Caribbean. Its links continue beyond the frame and cross the shore: the archipelago becomes horizon.

This anthropology presses against the limits of national anthropology, historically organized from an Andean, continental center, and enters into critical dialogue with the anthropologies of the Greater Caribbean: archipelagic, open, opaque, relational. Its place of enunciation does not choose between Colombia and the Caribbean; it inhabits the friction between the two — the point where the nation becomes destabilized and the archipelago becomes an analytical, historical, and political horizon.

From there, this anthropology does not reduce the region to a homogeneous identity, nor exclusively to an Afro-Caribbean one, though it recognizes the historical weight of Black, Indigenous, Raizal, peasant, mestizo, popular, and migrant lives in its configuration. Its wager is to understand how those lives produce knowledges, memories, practices of care, forms of resistance, and possible worlds within persistently unequal relations.

It is, in that sense, a situated, critical, archipelagic anthropology: a way of thinking the Caribbean from its connections, fractures, opacities, and displacements. It treats the Caribbean as a community of argumentation, a field of dispute, and a living space of theoretical production, not as a closed object.