Anthropology of the Colombian Caribbean

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.

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.