Joanne Rappaport, La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social. Reimagining History As Collaborative Exchange in 1970s Colombia

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La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social

Reimagining History as Collaborative Exchange
in 1970s Colombia
joaNNe RaPPaPoRt
In the summer of 1970 a group of Colombian intellectuals—sociologists and

journalists, some of them Presbyterian ministers—came together to propose the
creation of a foundation that would combine scholarly attention to such pressing
issues as the politics of ethnicity, culture and class and the tensions between nation
and region, with a firm commitment to support for grassroots political movements,
particularly among peasants and indigenous people.1 The group founded La Rosca
de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Research and Social Action), a space
located outside the Academy where these scholars could practise what they called
‘investigación-acción’ or ‘action research’; their methodology is one of the fore-
runners of participatory action research, whose originator, sociologist Orlando
Fals Borda, was one of the founding members of La Rosca.
La Rosca members proposed rejecting traditional academic research method-
ologies and abandoning the university altogether, to put their skills in the service
of popular sectors by inserting themselves as researcher-activists into local and
1
This chapter is based on research with the papers of Orlando Fals Borda, conducted at the Archivo
Central e Historico de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá (ACHUNC/B) and the Centro de
Documentación Regional, Banco de la República, Montería, Cordoba (CDRBR/M) with the support
of the Graduate School of Georgetown University. I thank the directors and staff of these repositories,
particularly Gabriel Escalante at the Universidad Nacional and Rita Díaz Sibaja, Ana María Espinosa
Baena and Emerson Sierra at the Banco de la República in Montería. I also wish to thank Professor
Fals Borda who, in the last weeks of his life, graciously agreed to be interviewed, as well as Víctor
Negrete for his ideas and continuing encouragement. Oscar Amaya Ortega, a doctoral student in Latin
American Literature at Georgetown University, and Mónica Moreno, a doctoral student in Human and
Social Sciences at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, helped me to think through the contents of
Fals Borda’s fieldnotes; Mónica also shared important documents on Fals Borda from other archives.
A preliminary version of this chapter received the critical commentary of Les Field, David Gow, Eric
Lassiter, Mónica Moreno, Janet Nelson, José María Rojas and León Zamosc, for which I am very
grateful.
Proceedings of the British Academy, 207, 000-000, © The British Academy 2017.
232 Joanne Rappaport
regional struggles. They argued in favour of establishing research priorities

in conjunction with local activists, studying the history of their organisations
and then returning the results of their research to them. Their approach presup-
posed ‘that the researcher himself is an object of investigation: his ideology,
knowledge, and practice are judged in light of popular experience. The exploi-
tation that occurs when people are studied as “research objects” ... is [thus]
abandoned, leading to a respect for them, their contributions, their critiques,
their intelligence.’2 In effect, then, final authority would rest with the popular
sectors and not the researchers. La Rosca proposed, in essence, that popular
sectors ‘expropriate’ scientific knowledge, techniques and methodologies.3 early
funding came from the Presbyterian Church in the United States, with which
several of the founders of La Rosca were affiliated.4
Operating through a host of local research organisations that forged working
relationships with such grassroots social movements as ANUC (the National
Association of Peasant Users) and CRIC (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca),
La Rosca established chapters in the indigenous south-western highlands, along
the Pacific coast and in the Caribbean region, where they advocated a method-
ology called ‘critical recovery’ (recuperación crítica) that paid ‘special atten-
tion to those elements or institutions that have been useful in the past to confront
the enemies of the exploited classes. Once those elements are determined, they
are reactivated with the aim of using them in a similar manner in current class
struggles.’5 For example, institutions like the resguardo (self-governing land-
holding institutions that ensure collective land-rights for native peoples) are the
sort of practices that La Rosca hoped to study and subsequently reintroduce into
indigenous communities. In the Department of Córdoba, on the western edge of
the Caribbean coast, they reintroduced the baluarte de autogestión campesina
(bastion of peasant self-management), a system of cooperatives established on
2
Víctor Daniel Bonilla, Gonzalo Castillo, Orlando Fals Borda and Augusto Libreros, Causa popular,
ciencia popular: una metodología del conocimiento científico a través de la acción (Bogotá: La Rosca
de Investigación y Acción Social, 1972), p. 46. Gonzalo Castillo told Mónica Moreno (personal
communication) that although the authors are listed in alphabetical order, Fals Borda was the true
leader of the initiative.
3
Bonilla et al., Causa popular, ciencia popular , p. 48.
4
Fals Borda requested US$386,740 over three years from the National Committee on the Self-
Development of People of the Worldwide Ministries of the Presbyterian Church, receiving approxi-
mately US$75,000 a year from 1971 to 1973. See Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia
(henceforth, PHS/P), Worldwide Ministries, Self-Development of People, Correspondence, Reports
on International Projects, 1970–88, box 2: ‘A Self-Development Program for Colombian Destitute
Groups’ submitted by the Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social with the sponsorship of Church
and Society in Latin America (ISAL) Colombia, 1970. They also received US$90,000 in 1975; see
James A. Gittings, From Dream to Reality: A Contextual History of Twenty Years of the Presbyterian
Self-Development Program (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of
People, 1993), pp. a–x. I thank Mónica Moreno for making these documents and bibliographic infor-
mation available to me.
5
Bonilla et al., Causa popular, ciencia popular , pp. 51–2.
Reimagining History as Collaborative Exchange 233
reclaimed lands that promoted economic self-sufficiency and raised political

consciousness; La Rosca drew its inspiration from the oral histories they collected
about baluartes established in the 1920s and 1930s by activists organised against
the debt-peonage system.6 Reactivation of historical knowledge was stimulated
by a process of ‘systematic devolution’ (devolución sistemática) through work-
shops and courses for local leaders, films and pamphlet publications.
La Rosca withdrew from the Coast in 1974 after prolonged conflict with the
Maoist left, as well as a severe political crisis within ANUC itself; it ultimately
morphed by 1976 into an organisation primarily concerned with research.7 Local
research organisations established as part of La Rosca’s project, for example the
Fundación del Caribe in Montería, continued to function for some time after La
Rosca’s demise, employing participatory research methods.8
Orlando Fals Borda’s collaboration with ANUC culminated in later years in a
major piece of academic writing, his four-volume masterpiece, Historia doble de
la Costa (Double History of the Coast), a historical narrative aimed at educated
readers and written in an innovative style that is still provocative and inspiring
decades after its publication.9 Each volume—thematically, they move along in
chronological order from the colonial period to the peasant activism of the twen-
tieth century, although each volume also incorporates oral history collected in the
1970s—is framed by a theme (or a kind of ‘totem’, which Fals10 calls a ‘personi-
fication’) culled from discussions with local narrators; for example, the first
volume, Mompox y Loba, features the hombre anfibio or amphibious man, whose
riverine lifestyle characterises the peasantry of the departments of Córdoba and
Sucre, where the La Rosca efforts were centred. The pages on the left-hand side of
Historia doble narrate history from the local point of view, eschewing chronology
for a narrative that simulates orality. The pages on the right-hand side are reflec-
6
ernesto Parra escobar, La investigación-acción en la Costa Atlántica (Cali: Fundación para la
Comunicación Popular, 1983), ch. 10; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Política e ideología en el movimiento
campesino colombiano: El caso de la ANUC (Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos) (Bogotá:
CINEP, 1982); Anders Rudqvist, Peasant Struggle and Action Research in Colombia (Uppsala,
Sweden: Research Reports from the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, vol. 3, 1986),
pp. 149–62; Leon Zamosc, The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in Colombia: Struggles
of the National Peasant Association 1967–1981 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Geneva:
United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1986), pp. 168–9.
7
‘A Short Presentation of Punta de Lanza Foundation 1970–1986’, AHUNC/B, Colección Orlando
Fals Borda, caja 49, carpeta 2, 71–73. All further citations from this archive are from the Fals Borda
collection.
8
Víctor Negrete Barrera, ‘Orlando Fals Borda en Córdoba: Claves para la creación o fortalecimiento
de movimientos democráticos locales’, Revista Foro 65 (2009), 3–4.
9
orlando Fals Borda, Mompox y Loba (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1979); El Presidente
Nieto (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1981); Resistencia en el San Jorge (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia
Editores, 1984); Retorno a la tierra (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1986).
10
Spanish usage incorporates the surnames of both the father and the mother, in such a way that Fals
Borda combines his father’s surname (Fals) with his mother’s (Borda). While his complete surname
is Fals Borda, it is also correct to simply refer to him by his patronymic, Fals. Both usages will be
employed in this chapter for all Spanish-language authors with composite surnames.
tions on the Marxist theory that oriented La Rosca, explanations of its method-
ology of ‘critical recovery’ and sociological analyses of the historical processes
recounted in the narrative channel. The very form of the books appears to repli-
cate the process of dialogue and exchange that characterised La Rosca, conveying
a complex vision of the relationship between theory and practice. In fact, many
of the materials produced for activist consumption, such as Fals’s history of the
agrarian question in Colombia, can be read as preliminary analyses later expanded
in Historia doble.11
There has been a great deal of ink spilled documenting and evaluating the La
Rosca project, particularly on the Caribbean Coast. Histories of La Rosca tend
to concentrate on the political nature of its methodology, evaluating the extent to
which these scholars were able to successfully insert themselves into the grassroots
movements in whose interests they laboured; the political impact of the materials
they produced for consumption by the grassroots, including graphic histories,
testimonial literature and radio shows; and struggles with the party left, especially
Maoist organisations, who were deeply mistrustful of a non-vanguardist organisa-
tion composed of academics, many of them educated in the United States, who
operated thanks to foreign funding, and who, to some extent, spoke a language
inflected by Christian options for the poor.
In the past decade, Orlando Fals Borda’s personal papers have become avail-
able to the public, in particular, the fieldnotes growing out of his field research
on the Caribbean Coast. These papers open new windows into La Rosca’s meth-
odology, permitting us to focus not only on investigación-acción as a political
strategy (which, of course, it was), but on the collective’s research methods and
the techniques used to collect the historical materials they ultimately transformed
into pamphlets, crónicas and other writings aimed at popular consumption.
In this article, which is my first attempt at interpreting Fals Borda’s papers, I
intend to provide a bird’s eye view of the themes I think most clearly illuminate
La Rosca’s brand of action research as seen through the documentation produced
by the collective, topics I hope to approach in more detail in future writings. First,
Fals Borda’s writings on the Caribbean Coast must be understood to be deeply
ethnographic in nature.12 His fieldnotes can be read as experiments in ethno-
graphic description that were later translated into graphic histories for a peasant
readership and into his masterwork, Historia doble. The field diaries betray Fals’s
deep literary sensibilities, which he channelled into a lasting commitment to crys-
tallising complex social processes into accessible—indeed, elegant—prose. In
this way, La Rosca’s ethnographic research process informed and was, in turn,
11
For example, Orlando Fals Borda, Historia de la cuestión agraria en Colombia (Bogotá:
Publicaciones de La Rosca, 1975).
12
Although Fals Borda was a sociologist by training, we could claim him as an ethnographer of the
Caribbean Coast; his earlier work in the central Colombian province of Boyacá was similarly ethno-
graphic in nature; Orlando Fals Borda, Peasant Society in the Colombian Andes: A Sociological Study
of Saucío (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1955).
influenced by the production of educational materials for popular consumption,

such as graphic histories of the peasant movement. These political intentions are
also apparent in the organisation of Fals’s fieldnotes: attention to what categories
he used to classify his materials can help us to comprehend his research process.
In other words, I will frame Fals’s process of data collection as a crucial facet of
his action methodology, pointing out how his everyday research practice articu-
lated his political intentions.
It is difficult to evaluate a corpus of research materials produced in the course
of a political process that took place four decades ago without being overly critical.
La Rosca’s methodology, however innovative and inspiring it was, and regardless
of the profound impact it has had on politically committed research on a global
scale, was somewhat paternalistic in nature. While it consciously valued partici-
pation, La Rosca did not always involve peasants in the day-to-day workings of
its research projects and when it did, the details of their involvement are occluded
in both the archival record and in personal memory. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
ascribes this state of affairs to an epistemology that ‘reproduces the subject-object
asymmetry by instrumentalizing the needs and demands of popular sectors on
the basis of collective goals formulated beyond the bounds of those sectors, and
which have little to do with endogenous perceptions.’13 Consequently, it is diffi-
cult to gauge the extent to which ANUC activists influenced the collection of oral
histories and ethnographic observations on the Caribbean Coast. In my conversa-
tions with La Rosca researchers (and with Fals Borda himself), I discovered that
it was very difficult to steer them toward discussions of research as a process of
collaboratively collecting historical materials in conjunction with ANUC leaders.
I could not get them to focus on how the peasants informed and participated in
their study: while peasant agency in the political struggle was foremost in the
minds of these researchers, a stubborn stain of paternalism clung to their research
methodology.
This does not imply, however, that participation in the process of recupera-
tion of historical knowledge had no impact on ANUC members, or that they were
oblivious to the novel research methodologies of La Rosca. The very existence
of an autobiography by Jesús María Pérez, a peasant leader from Sucre, one of
the departments in which ANUC was most active, indicates that peasants them-
selves adopted the posture of observer and analyst.14 Consequently, my objective
13
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘El potencial epistemológico y teórico de la historia oral: De la lógica
instrumental a la descolonización de la historia’, Peri-feria (Neiva, Colombia) 4 (2004), 21–2. She
also argues that La Rosca’s Marxist approach tended to homogenise class attitudes and experiences
(at 22).
14
Jesús María Pérez, Luchas campesinas y reforma agraria: Memorias de un dirigente de la ANUC
en la costa caribe (Bogotá: Grupo de Memoria Histórica, 2010). Pérez’s manuscript sat unpub-
lished for decades, until he was encouraged to publish it by researchers affiliated with the Grupo
de Memoria Histórica, a government-sponsored research institute dedicated to studying the armed
conflict to influence human rights policy, <http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co>, accessed
12 December 2013.
is only partially accessible, fading in and out of view and perhaps only reachable
obliquely through speculation. The interpretive tools I have at my disposal come
from comparison: I will attempt here to read the historical record of La Rosca
through the lens of more recent approaches to collaborative research in Colombia,
in which the nature of grassroots participation in research endeavours has been
explored more extensively.
A Genealogy of Collaboration
I first came upon the trail of La Rosca in 1978 while conducting dissertation
research among indigenous communities in highland Cauca, when I met one of its
founding members, journalist Víctor Daniel Bonilla, and grew familiar with his
work on mapas parlantes (a literal translation would be ‘speaking maps’) in the
Nasa community of Jambaló. The mapas parlantes encoded Nasa history in the
local topography in a series of chronologically organised drawings that privileged
the oral memory.15 Through Víctor Daniel I met Luis Guillermo Vasco, an anthro-
pologist from the National University of Colombia, who in the 1980s collabo-
rated with the cabildo (resguardo council) of Guambía, Cauca, to document their
oral history. Luis Guillermo certainly worked alongside the cabildo of Guambía,
although his activism was largely confined to his participation as an ethnogra-
pher on the research team. This stands in contrast to La Rosca, whose research
activities were intimately combined with political activism and whose participa-
tion in peasant and indigenous struggles frequently overshadowed their research,
as Fals and others have observed.16 Luis Guillermo’s approach to collaborative
research involved what I have in other publications called ‘co-theorization’: the
generation of culturally grounded conceptual vehicles by a collaborative research
team, through a process that transforms the field from a space for the collection
of data to a space of interpretation.17 This methodology exerted a profound influ-
ence on me, leading me in the 1990s to build a series of research teams with
15
Víctor Daniel Bonilla, ‘Experiencias de investigación-acción en comunidades paeces’, V Congreso
de Antropología, Medellín, octubre 1980, AHUNC/B, caja 49, carpeta 3, 61–70. See also Bonilla,
‘Algunas experiencias del proyecto “Mapas Parlantes”’, in Juan Eduardo García Huidobro (ed.),
Alfabetización y educación de adultos en la región andina (Pátzcuaro, Mexico: UNESCO, 1982),
pp. 145–61.
16
orlando Fals Borda, El problema de como investigar la realidad para transformarla: Por la praxis
(Bogotá: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1978), p. 49. See also, León Zamosc, ‘Campesinos y sociólogos:
reflexiones sobre dos experiencias de investigación activa en Colombia’, Orlando Fals Borda, et al.,
IAP en Colombia: Taller Nacional, Bogotá, noviembre 14 al 16 de 1985 (Bogotá: Punta de Lanza/Foro
Nacional por Colombia, 1986), pp. 28–9.
17
Luis guillermo Vasco Uribe, Entre selva y páramo: Viviendo y pensando la lucha indígena (Bogotá:
Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2002); partially translated as ‘Rethinking Fieldwork
and Ethnographic Writing’, Collaborative Anthropologies 4 (2011), 18–66. See my take on Vasco in
Joanne Rappaport, Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic
Dialogue in Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Nasa researchers and collaborators with the indigenous movement, in which we

developed common theoretical vehicles for making sense of the history of politi-
cally grounded bilingual education in Cauca, as well as of indigenous politics in
the wake of the 1991 constitution, which reimagined Colombia as a multicultural
and pluriethnic nation.18
My interest in La Rosca owes a great deal to a desire to situate my own
collaborative experience in a broader universe of conversation and to identify its
emergence out of a genealogy of activist research in Latin America. I approached
Orlando Fals Borda’s personal papers in the hope that they would help me to
contextualise the methodologies I had become accustomed to employing in my
own collaborative work. Specifically, I hoped to discover how La Rosca and the
regional research groups affiliated with it, such as the Fundación del Caribe, set
about collecting and interpreting historical materials in concert with peasant activ-
ists. That is, my interests diverge from those of previous scholars insofar as my
goal is to delve deeper into the research methodologies employed by these activ-
ists, as opposed to focusing on the political impact of that research. Of course, the
two cannot be entirely separated; I hope to slightly shift the emphasis.
Fals Borda was revered by many and spurned by others during his profes-
sional career. Since his death in 2008 there has been a steady flow of publications
eulogising him and praising his ground-breaking work. While I most certainly
admire the man and his legacy, I am highly conscious of the shortcomings of La
Rosca, whose brand of participatory research fell short of the goals it initially set
out to accomplish. Nevertheless, I would argue that La Rosca’s research methods,
to the extent that we can tease them out of the archival material, are ‘good to think’
insofar as they provide us with some illuminating clues as to what collaborative
research is and what it should be.
The Emergence of La Rosca in the Late Twentieth Century
At the moment of the emergence of La Rosca, Colombia was a country saddled

with enormous inequalities in land distribution. On the Caribbean coast, for
example, a region typified by large-scale cattle ranches, peasants had been pushed
to the margins of settlement and compelled to colonise forests and virgin territories
from which they were subsequently expelled as the hacienda system expanded;
the modernising aspirations of twentieth-century hacienda owners, who were
18
Graciela Bolaños, Abelardo Ramos, Joanne Rappaport and Carlos Miñana, ¿Qué pasaría si la
escuela ...? Treinta años de construcción educativa (Popayán: Programa de Educación Bilingüe e
Intercultural, Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca, 2004); Joanne Rappaport (ed.), Retornando la
mirada: Una investigación colaborativa interétnica sobre el Cauca a la entrada del milenio (Popayán:
Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2005).
intimately connected to the local political power structure, subsequently forced

sharecroppers off existing hacienda lands.19
By the 1960s, the inequities in land distribution propelled President Carlos
Lleras Restrepo to enact an agrarian reform law and create the Colombian Institute
for Agrarian Reform (INCORA) to implement the process of land redistribution.
At the time, Orlando Fals Borda, a Barranquilla native who had received his
doctorate in sociology from the University of Florida and had conducted research
on peasant land tenure in Colombia’s central highlands, was employed as Director
General of the Ministry of Agriculture and helped lay the groundwork for agrarian
reform.20
In 1967, the Colombian government created ANUC as a semi-official peasant
association in order to regulate peasant participation in reform activities.21
Peasants throughout the country, but especially in Cauca and neighbouring Huila,
as well as Córdoba and neighbouring Sucre, read Lleras Restrepo’s backing of
ANUC as an invitation to take direct action to occupy haciendas, given that the
gears of the INCORA bureaucracy wound so sluggishly that the agrarian reform
they had hoped for was but a utopian dream. By the early 1970s hundreds of haci-
endas were invaded, legitimising a layer of radical leaders of the peasant organisa-
tion; at the same time national policy, influenced by large landowner associations,
veered toward counter reform, repressing land invasions, restraining the agrarian
reform process and instead supporting large-scale agricultural production. This
led to a radicalisation of sectors of ANUC, which in 1972 split into two lines, one
of them—called the ‘Sincelejo line’, from the site of the ANUC congress at which
it emerged—under the tutelage of various leftist parties, adopting a programme
19
See Fals Borda’s Retorno a la tierra. For a history of peasant land-loss on the Caribbean coast,
see Gloria Isabel Ocampo, La instauración de la ganadería en el valle del Sinú: La hacienda Marta
Magdalena, 1881–1956 (Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia/Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano
de Antropología e Historia, 2007).
20
Fals Borda recounts this period of his life in an interview by Alfredo Molano in a 1995 televi-
sion programme, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX5PWLvg8yw>, accessed 27 May 2014; see
also Alexander Pereira Fernández, ‘Fals Borda: La formación de un intelectual disórgano’, Anuario
Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 35 (2008), 380. Fals’s recommendations for agrarian
reform based on his dissertation research in the 1950s—which caught the eye of the Minister of
Agriculture—are included as a preface to the first edition of El hombre y la tierra en Boyacá: Bases
sociohistóricas para una reforma agraria (Bogotá: Ediciones Documentos Colombianos, 1957). See
Zamosc, The Agrarian Question, chapters 1–2, for a summary of the conditions leading to the enact-
ment of the agrarian reform law.
21
My very brief summary of ANUC’s history on the Caribbean coast is drawn from Rivera Cusicanqui,
Política e ideología en el movimiento campesino colombiano and Zamosc, The Agrarian Question.
CRIC, the Caucan indigenous organisation, which was founded in 1971, was for a time affiliated with
ANUC as its Indigenous Secretariat, but split with the peasant organisation in the late 1970s after
refusing to subordinate itself to ANUC’s leadership; Pablo Tattay, ‘Construcción del poder propio
en el movimiento indígena del Cauca’, in Daniel Ricardo Peñaranda Supelano (ed.), Nuestra vida
ha sido nuestra lucha: Resistencia y memoria en el Cauca indígena (Bogotá: Centro de Memoria
Histórica, 2012), pp. 67–71, <http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/descargas/informes2012/
cauca.pdf>, accessed 19 September 2013.
of civic strikes, public demonstrations, peasant marches and electoral abstention,

combining their pursuit of solutions to peasant grievances with a more general
strategy of overturning the social and economic system.
The Sincelejo line was shut off from the government aid that ANUC had
previously received, requiring them to seek other means of support. Radical intel-
lectuals like those of La Rosca were enlisted to their cause, connecting them with
a panoply of international foundations, as well as assisting them in promoting
their identity as peasant activists within the wider array of leftist organisations
that were emerging in Colombia, as they were worldwide. Fals Borda had, a
decade earlier, founded the Department of Sociology at the National University
of Colombia, where he worked side by side with the radical Catholic priest,
Camilo Torres Restrepo, who joined the National Liberation Army (ELN), a
guerrilla organisation, and fell in combat in 1966. Fals’s evolution as a radical
social scientist who came to reject the functionalist tradition in which he was
trained was further reinforced in the mid 1960s by his inquiries into Colombian
social movements and his critical evaluation of the need for a specifically Latin
American social science that could stave off what was seen as intellectual impe-
rialism from the north; in this respect, he was profoundly influenced by proposals
for decolonising the social sciences by a series of Latin American authors (Paulo
Freire, Darcy Ribeiro, Rodolfo Stavenhagen), as well as thinkers from India and
Africa.22 Participatory action research provided a model for fashioning this new
social science in the service of popular movements; Cauca and Córdoba, which
were hotbeds of peasant ferment in the early 1970s, constituted the laboratories in
which La Rosca undertook this task.
Fals Borda’s Field Notebooks
I begin with a brief look at what is contained in the archival materials. The two
major repositories I consulted, the Central Historical Archive of the National
University of Colombia in Bogotá and the Centre for Regional Documentation
of the Banco de la República in Montería, contain very different types of docu-
mentation. At the National University, I discovered papers that paint a portrait
of La Rosca as an institution: proposals, position papers, statutes and other legal
documents, notes from meetings and commentaries on projects, transcriptions
of workshop proceedings and personal correspondence. The Montería collection
contains Fals Borda’s notes for Historia doble de la Costa: memos emanating
from the Fundación del Caribe, copies of archival documents and notes, letters
from local informants and from peasant leaders, transcriptions of interviews and,
22
Pereira Fernández, ‘Fals Borda’; work by Fals Borda includes, ‘La investigación-acción en
convergencias disciplinarias’, LASA Forum 38 (2007) 4, 17–22; La subversión in Colombia (Bogotá:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1967); and Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual: Los nuevos
rumbos (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, [1970] 1987).
above all, his fieldnotes, sometimes carefully stored in notebooks, at other times
quickly jotted down on scraps of paper.
Fals Borda’s field diary is an intimate and only partially organised registry,
as frequently occurs with texts whose authors never imagined that they would be
made public. While his earlier fieldnotes, dating from the 1950s and compiled in
the course of his research in the highland region of Boyacá, are carefully organ-
ised into topic areas that cover a myriad of economic activities (agriculture,
mining, fishing), as well as other areas of local life (linguistics, marriage, recrea-
tion and sports), the diaries Fals wrote while on the Caribbean coast in the 1970s
are loosely collated by location and date (Cerrito, Loba) or by political project
(baluarte, for instance), suggesting an intentionality distinct from his previous
research, with a focus on social process as an avenue toward achieving utopian
goals rather than what he registered in the 1950s as sociological realities.23
Fals compiled his notes on Córdoba over the space of a decade, from the early
1970s to the mid 1980s, when he donated his papers to the Banco de la República;
thus, he continued to collect data well after the demise of La Rosca. His notes
combine oral and written texts, collected in both formal interviews and informal
conversations and observations. Like his Boyacá fieldnotes, his Caribbean field
diary is nourished by an extensive examination of notarial material that would
ultimately be cross-referenced with interviews with peasants and dayworkers
(jornaleros), most of them of advanced age and who, by dint of personal experi-
ence or family narratives, were familiar with local history. A substantial portion of
the archive reflects his impulse to unravel and expose the history of land-theft by
elite actors and the struggle of peasants to reoccupy these lands and reclaim them
in the name of ANUC. Thus, the notes from the Caribbean coast reflect Fals’s
changing interests, viewpoints and intellectual tendencies as an activist-scholar;
his archive does not only compile ethnographic and historical data, but documents
how this information was reintroduced by La Rosca into local political struggles.
Fieldnotes do not merely record what the observer experiences in the course
of conducting research. Instead, they might be thought of as an intermediate step
between participant observation and ethnographic writing: James Clifford speaks
of them as ‘the enunciation of an ethnographic persona speaking cultural truths’,
23
AHUNC/B, Serie I, Vereda de Saucío, 11 boxes. For a discussion of Fals Borda’s methodology in
Boyacá, see Mónica Cecilia Moreno Moreno, ‘Orlando Fals y el cambio social inducido en materia
de tecnología agrícola, 1952 y 1961’, Paper presented at the Seminario de Estudios Sociales de las
Ciencias, las Tecnologías y las Profesiones, Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, 9 October 2012. For a
history of Fals’s work in Boyacá, see Jaime Eduardo Jaramillo J., ‘Campesinos de los Andes: Estudio
pionero en la Sociología Colombiana’, Revista Colombiana de Sociología 3:1 (1996), 53–82. When I
first encountered the Fals Borda papers in Montería, they were still contained in the manila envelopes
in which Fals had stored them, with the original classifications; subsequent cataloguing by archivists
retained Fals’s classificatory framework. I thank Ana María Espinosa Baena for providing me with a
brief history of the donation.
a focused and selective interpretive process.24 He goes on to refer to fieldnotes as

a space in which:
the present moment is held at bay so as to create a recontextualized, portable
account. ... A systematic reordering goes on. Fieldnotes are written in a form that
will make sense elsewhere, later on. ... Turning to typewriter or notebook, one writes
for occasions distant from the field, for oneself years later, for an imagined profes-
sional readership, for a teacher, for some complex figure identified with the ultimate
destination of the research.25
One gets the same sense from Fals Borda’s field diary: the notes appear to track
the process of constructing a narrative that could potentially become part of a
published work, although, as I will demonstrate, Fals’s immediate preoccupation
was to gather information for written materials serving the peasant movement. In
one of his 1972 notebooks that records information on ongoing land occupations
in Córdoba, Fals paints a portrait of a large landowner:
Personages Rosendo Garcés. Typical of the domineering and overbearing bour-
gois Sinuano [an inhabitant of the Sinú]. Direct and frank, somewhat arrogant. He
inherited part of his fortune, and administered it well enough to become the most
wealthy man in Córdoba. He doesn’t endure objections or arguments in his business
dealings (for example, in the sale of a lot of cattle). When [the peasants] invaded
and [Agrarian Reform director Rodolfo] Bechara went to negotiate with him, he
arranged for the direct transfer and distribution of the property, ‘without so much
red tape’—which he would accomplish alone, without the Agrarian Reform. Distant
from the people: when someone knocked on his door, ‘if he has sandals, let him go
to the kitchen door; if he’s in shoes, he should proceed to the sitting room.’ A coarse
man, he always wears khaki trousers and an open-necked white shirt; when he tried
to enter the Club in Cartagena they told him he couldn’t come in without a necktie;
he left, fashioned a 500-peso bill into a tie, and returned to present himself—they let
him in. He would burn 5-peso notes to light his cigars. He has more than 30 children
scattered about, whom he is accustomed to look after or recognize.26
This is more than a field observation: it is a carefully crafted and wryly observed
text.
Clifford reminds us that fieldnotes are intertextual.27 Fals’s depiction of
Rosendo Garcés makes us think of the caudillos in Gabriel García Márquez’s
novels—which also take place on Colombia’s Caribbean coast—with their osten-
tatious behaviour, their coarse mannerisms, their habit of leaving a trail of ille-
gitimate children behind them. Appeals to such intertexts permit Fals to engage in
24
James Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, in Roger Sanjek (ed.), Fieldnotes: The Makings of
Anthropology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 62–3. Luis Guillermo Vasco makes
similar observations, noting that in the field diary the collective nature of ethnographic research is
transformed into an individual narrative; see ‘Rethinking Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing’, 53–5.
25
Vasco, ‘Rethinking Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing’, 64.
26
CDRBR/M, 0395, 2236, p. 7.
27
Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, p. 57.
‘experiments in interpretation’.28 George Bond reminds us that fieldnotes ‘estab-

lish a dialogue with past occurrences. As texts, they only partially fix discourse.
They are part of a complex and collective negotiation of some past reality that
contributes to the recounting and making of history, not just to its description and
analysis.’29 So Fals’s field notebooks are spaces in which he was beginning to
weave narratives; they are not temporally situated at the moment he collected the
information, but are projected toward future writings.
Among the narratives registered in Fals Borda’s fieldnotes, his attention to
the logic and representations of sex and of images of manliness are particularly
noteworthy insofar as they appeal to such intertexts. His 1972 interview with
don Bárbaro Ramírez, a peasant from the village of Buenos Aires, Córdoba,
centres on the matrícula, an institutionalised form of debt-peonage that bound
peasants in servile relationships to large landowners. The contents of this inter-
view were subsequently incorporated into a workshop for ANUC members given
by Fundación del Caribe member Víctor Negrete, in which the narrator partici-
pated. Don Bárbaro relates how the daughters or female relatives of matriculados
were placed at the disposition of the large landowner, who, in one case, forced
various women to have sex with him, producing 100 children, all male, a feat that
rendered him, as recorded in the field diary, ‘a real macho’.30 This representation
of masculinity draws on two themes: first, the sexual capacity of a man who is
capable of sleeping with so many women, and second, the fact that his progeny
is exclusively male. Here, as in other narratives that Fals collects, the position of
women hinges on the dynamics of power relations among men.
While such stories do not focus specifically on the processes of land-loss and
recuperation around which La Rosca’s collaboration with ANUC revolved, they
help to paint a more nuanced and comprehensive portrait of peasant lives and
their struggles: the sentiments that surrounded and sustained political action, the
stories that were transmitted from activist to activist around cooking-fires and
at workshops, the sense that the peasant struggle was built by sentient beings:
people with families and friends, motivated by their aspirations for the future,
who communicated a deeply felt sense of the tragic and the comic. Such stories
round out the huge corpus of information on land-loss and land-claims contained
in Fals’s archive. Regardless of whether these narratives record events that really
28
Experiments that have the power to excite the imagination decades later. When I presented a version
of this paper in Montería, Córdoba, during the summer of 2013, Garcés’s son-in-law was moved by
Fals Borda’s description to offer to an appreciative audience—mainly of university and high-school
students who had not been born in the heyday of La Rosca—extensive reminiscences of the hacendado
during the question-and-answer session.
29
George C. Bond, ‘Fieldnotes: Research in Past Occurrences’, in Sanjek, Fieldnotes, p. 276.
30
The Bárbaro Ramírez interview is transcribed in CDRBR/M 0247, 1108–70; reference to the
100 sons is on p. 1113. Ramírez participated in a later workshop coordinated by Víctor Negrete; see
CDRBR/M 0246, 1093.
occurred, they became, in the words of novelist Penelope Lively, ‘one of those
vital inessentials that convince one that history is true’.31
This is not simply ethnographic detail, meant to nourish a written narrative:
at the time of its composition, such ‘inessentials’ were part of a broader political
strategy. Members of La Rosca expressly considered sentiment to be integral to
politics, as they assert in one of their early reflections on their methodology:
In a strict sense, there are no disarticulated objects of knowledge, as academic
thought recommends, but, instead, multilateral reflection in the service of action.
Multilateral, because it is active thought; it is active thought because its point
of departure are a people’s most vital expressions. It takes in BeINg but also
FeeLINg, their desIRes, the deepness of their sentiments. For this reason, this
type of thought is not cold. When it is expounded, it rushes out from the actions
themselves, gathering up, as in a cry, all of the repressed rebelliousness and because
of this it is invested with history and the symbols of the masses.32
That is, for La Rosca, politics, research and sentiment went hand in hand. The
feelings aroused by the narrators interviewed by Fals and his associates would be
translated into educational materials that could stimulate further political organ-
ising. This was not ethnography for ethnography’s sake, but an effort at identi-
fying those vital nodes of the fabric of local memory, which could be harnessed
to the organising process.
Participatory Research as a Form of Translation
The narrative channel of Historia doble de la Costa evinces the pen of a talented
narrator and writer. My conversation with Orlando Fals Borda two weeks before
his death confirmed to me his literary and artistic sensibilities: references continu-
ally cropped up to Dumas, Cortázar, Galeano and García Márquez. Fals spoke to
me of the writing of volume 1 of Historia doble, which is based to a great extent
on archival materials, as ‘a literary [and] historical adventure, [which was] unique,
which someone like me could not let pass him by. It opens up treasure-chests.’33
Similarly, he homed in on the question of style in the composition of volume 4,
which narrates the struggles of ANUC in the 1970s: ‘The form I adopted in the
fourth volume is like a diary. In diary form, using the word “I”, I write what they
did, why and where, what happened, the deaths, the sectarian divisions, the reac-
tions, etc.’34
But the close attention to language paid by Fals Borda in his field notebooks
cannot be appreciated solely as the ruminations of an author who would eventually
31
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 31.
32
‘Norte del Cauca: Reflexiones sobre conocimiento y poder popular’, AHUNC/B, caja 49, carpeta
3, 109. Emphasis as in the original.
33
Interview with Orlando Fals Borda, 24 June 2008, Bogotá.
34
Interview with Orlando Fals Borda, 24 June 2008, Bogotá.
produce a deeply literary scholarly work. His fieldwork and the investigations of
the members of the Fundación del Caribe were incorporated in short order into
materials meant for peasant consumption. A host of pamphlets, graphic histories
and recorded cassette tapes were employed in the systematic devolution of those
histories that La Rosca felt were most urgently necessary for the political process.
Most striking are the graphic histories, which depict historical experience in
the longue-durée, going back to the Spanish invasion and the social structures
spawned by conquest, highlighting processes of land-loss that tied peasants to
ranches and haciendas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, recounting the
efforts of peasant organisers in the 1920s and 1930s. Designed as a conscious-
ness-raising tool, the pamphlets revolve around the life histories of leaders in the
struggle against the matrícula, such as that of Juana Julia Guzmán and Vicente
Adamo, whose biographies were meant to inspire the formation of a militant
ANUC leadership.35 The information contained in these publications was culled
from recorded interviews and from the perusal of archivos de baúl or kitchen-
archives: the documents and objects saved by individuals in their homes. The
contents of these personal treasure-troves motivated researchers to compose
written materials not only in a language accessible to peasants, but also situated
these pamphlets within a local historicity, one with its own distinct narrative arc
and landmarks of memory.36
Matilde Eljach, who I spoke to at a café in the city of Popayán, was a univer-
sity student in Barranquilla at the time. One of three young women who signed on
as assistants to Fals Borda in the early 1970s, she recalled to me how Juana Julia’s
memories were collected:
We programmed two or three meetings with the peasants, depending on the imme-
diate conditions, because at times security concerns impeded our having the meeting,
or it was raining heavily. ... And the meetings were in groups with the people. We
sat in circles. They gave us their stories, we all took attentive notes, and at the end
of the afternoon the working group met to confront the notes and try to make a first
draft of the narration. Yes, because you didn’t only write what you heard. And all
35
Interview with José María Rojas, 14 July 2013, Cali.
36
The graphic histories produced in the 1970s were republished in book form as Ulianov Chalarka,
Historia gráfica de la lucha por la tierra en la Costa Atlántica (Montería: Fundación del Sinú, 1985).
Juana Julia’s archivo de baúl contains her vaccination record, an ID-sized photograph, her medical
records and some business contracts; see CDRBR/M 0854–56, 0861. The transcript of her interview is
contained in CDRBR/M 0864. Charles Bergquist, in his highly critical review of Historia doble, takes
Fals Borda to task for using kitchen archives and disregarding large repositories of documents that
would provide him with a regional and national context for his narrative: ‘In the Name of History: A
Disciplinary Critique of Orlando Fals Borda’s Historia doble de la Costa’, Latin American Research
Review 25:3 (1990), 156–76. Setting aside the fact that Fals did conduct extensive archival work in
regional and national archives, as well as in Spain—as his archival notes in Montería clearly demon-
strate—it seems to me short-sighted on the part of Bergquist to demand that history be narrated exclu-
sively in the form used by academic historians, when what La Rosca was seeking was a textured and
situated notion of historical narrative arising out of a local context. Kitchen archives (as well as the
picture-maps developed in Cauca) are perfect examples of ways of getting at this local historicity.
this was really important, because then we compared what you wrote, and what you
wrote. And then Orlando decided on the final version.37
Matilde described the drafting of the pamphlets as an exercise in ‘translation’:

The people spoke and we copied, reread, put together the narrative. So, they were
enormous, very long. And to put together this story, to synthesise it in order to put
it in graphic form, was a tremendous effort, because it could be pages and pages,
and we had to make it like a film in the pamphlets. That’s what we had to do. We
had to help in the task of synthesising it in a sentence, in simple language, without
distorting it, without mutilating the idea, but it couldn’t be a brick. We had to do all
that. It was marvellous.38
Víctor Negrete spoke of this process ‘as though he were writing with’ the peas-
ants.39 In fact, it was a communal effort: the pamphlet prepared in 1980 by Víctor
and José Galeano for the town of El Cerrito was read back in draft form to the
peasants. The authors endeavoured to capture the style of peasant narration,
replicating the tone of the conversations they had with activists: ‘the work ... is
written to be read aloud; its writing style is similar to that of the peasants who
were interviewed; its language is simple, characteristic [of the region], and a bit
literary; the chapters are brief and with sufficient illustrations.’40 David Sánchez
Juliao, a writer from Lorica, Córdoba, who collaborated with La Rosca by
collecting peasant narratives and crafting them as accessible literature that was
then recorded on cassette tapes, spoke to me of this as ‘a type of literature for
functional illiterates’.41 In other words, the graphic histories and taped narratives
produced by La Rosca were comparable to the Latin American genre of crónicas,
literary creations in which testimony from multiple narrators is combined into a
single narrative voice.42 This approach was seen as producing a more accessible
text than a recorded testimony: something that was more enjoyable to read or
listen to, which could consequently exert a greater impact on its peasant audience.
In this sense, the historical narratives published for peasant consumption went
through a process of literary composition similar to the experiments in ethno-
graphic description recorded in Fals Borda’s field notebooks. In fact, it might be
best to view Historia doble as the product of a double process of interpretation:
37
Interview with Matilde Eljach, 15 July 2009, Popayán.
38
39
Interview with Víctor Negrete, 22 July 2009, Montería.
40
CDRBR/M 0576, 2764.
41
Interview with David Sánchez Juliao, 4 August 2009, Bogotá. Sánchez’s short-story collections
were also published in various editions and circulated widely: ¿Por qué me llevas al hospital en canoa,
papá? (Montería: Fundación del Caribe, 1974) and Historias de Raca Mandaca (Montería: Fundación
del Caribe, 1975). In my interview with him, he described this work as ‘short stories—denuncia-
tions of concrete cases of repression against peasants’, and in a letter to Fals on 16 January 1974, he
explained that drafts of the stories would be corrected by grassroots activists; CDRBR/M, 0238, 1047;
see also 0664, 3621–22 for similar letters.
42
Blanca Inés Gómez de González, Viajes, migraciones y desplazamientos (Ensayos de crítica
cultural) (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2007), ch. 3.
unlike most ethnographies, which are frequently first conceptualised in fieldnotes,

Fals Borda’s ethnographic descriptions also passed through the filter of the publi-
cations written for peasant readers.
The act of translation involved in La Rosca’s graphic histories included not
only capturing in engaging prose the speaking-style of the narrator but also, the
rendition of the story in images. These were composed by Ulianov Chalarka, a
Montería muralist who, according to Víctor Negrete, drew his visual subject-
matter from his observations at meetings he attended:
When Ulianov went to places, he would begin to draw and he was surrounded by
peasants, and he had some models—faces, physiognomy, clothing. And then the
jokes would begin: ‘Look, paint this man’s nose like this, his mouth like this.’ And
they’d say, ‘Why don’t you put in that parakeet that’s there, that thing that’s there?’
They helped flesh these things out.43
Matilde Eljach noted in our conversation how much the peasants ‘were moved
when they saw their history in the pictures.’ The images brought the past into the
present and led people ‘to feel they were the protagonists of the history of Juana
Julia. And that has political value.’44 This was also noted by the authorities, which
on at least one occasion seized the pamphlets from a Montería bookstore.45
How is the research process transformed when its fruits are ultimately destined
to be used in a process of political organising? One of the few sustained anthropo-
logical studies of the relationship between fieldnotes and ethnographic writing, an
analysis of the work of Argentine anthropologist Esther Hermitte by her student,
Rosana Guber, endeavours to uncover how, in the Mexico of the 1960s, a neophite
scholar discovered the argument that would ultimately frame her monograph on
supernatural hierarchies in a Tzeltal community in highland Chiapas, leading her
to pursue specific avenues for the collection of ethnographic information.46 guber
argues convincingly, on the basis of Hermitte’s field diary, that it was through
everyday interaction with a select group of informants that the anthropologist
arrived at her subject of study.
La Rosca’s work on the Caribbean Coast did not function in this way. The
process of ‘critical recovery’ that determined the contents of the graphic histories
was co-directed by ANUC leaders, who selected the narrators that researchers
like Fals Borda and Víctor Negrete would record, and who participated in the
interviews and later, in the production of the educational materials used to train
43
44
‘La gente se emocionaba porque veía retratada la historia ... La gente se sentía protagonistas de la
historia de Juana Julia representado. Y eso tenía un valor político.’ Fals also saw this work as having an
impact on national intellectuals; he called it ‘an educative experience also for the “educated”’; ‘Letter
from Orlando Fals Borda to Mr. Lloyd M. Cooke, Chairman, NCSDP’, 26 December 1970, PHS/P, 2.
45
‘Decomisan en Montería un folleto histórico’, El Tiempo, 23 November 1972, in CDRBR/M 0691,
3839.
46
Rosana guber, La articulación etnográfica: Descubrimiento y trabajo de campo en la investigación
de Esther Hermitte (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2013).
ANUC cadres. That is, there is an intentionality in the research process that
is different from that which Guber determined on the basis of her analysis of
Hermitte’s diaries. The reasons for choosing one topic over another did not origi-
nate in academic discussions, nor in the personal relationships that unfolded
between the anthropologist and her informants. In the case of La Rosca, there was
an important intermediary through whom research priorities and the interpreta-
tion of ethnographic materials was filtered: ANUC activists. It was only years
later that, in retrospect, Fals Borda composed Historia doble. In other words, his
masterpiece is a reflection by an individual author on a collective research process
whose purpose was political. For this reason, I must now turn to an evaluation of
how participatory this process actually was.
La Rosca and Participatory Research Methods
In a 1988 interview, Fals Borda reflects on how he developed a two-channelled

approach for Historia doble and ponders the nature of the political and intellectual
relationships that ultimately gave birth to his masterpiece. His thoughts are worth
quoting at length:
It owes to the practical commitment [we had] with the peasant grassroots. It wasn’t
simply an invention, a divine inspiration, but responded to a need for communi-
cating what we had discovered with the grassroots, the people. You will remember
that in participatory action research we call for four levels of communication. Level
zero has no writing, just images; it’s for non-literate and indigenous communities.
Level one is the pamphlet that combines words and drawings, as in a ‘comic.’ Level
two is for the cadres; simple pamphlets with more explanation. Level three is that of
intellectuals and those concerned with theory. One of the commitments one acquires
in this sort of work is the capability of communication at all levels, including draw-
ings. As I am not a draftsman I concentrated on levels two and three. This implied
a simplification of language; adopting a narrative style that reflected how Costeño
peasants speak, using a highly rich and fluid language. For this reason I combined
two styles of messages, each one in its channel. One message is directed at the peas-
ants, through description and narration; and a conceptual and theoretical message
with the same [topical focus], but directed at intellectuals and academics. So, it
wasn’t an inspiration, but a methodological decision, so that the grassroots would
have access to the information that had been collected and so that they could under-
stand it. I have always considered them to be the owners of this information.47
Fals visualises the structure of his book as reproducing his dialogical meth-
odology in the field and as reflecting his political commitments with ANUC.
Clearly however, his notion of dialogue is embedded in a discernable hierarchy of
47
Carlos Low and Marta Herrera, ‘Orlando Fals Borda: El retorno a la tierra’, Huellas, 22 (1988),
43–7. Barranquilla. See also, José María Rojas, ‘Prefacio: Sobre la fundación de la sociología en
Colombia’, in Orlando Fals Borda, Antología Orlando Fals Borda (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, 2010), pp. xlvi–xlviii.
knowledge, in which conversations become progressively more complex as one

moves from the unlettered (and indigenous) grassroots to the marginally schooled
peasant leadership and, finally, to intellectuals and academics. Correspondingly,
the two channels of Historia doble also operate on distinct levels of abstraction:
channel A (the even-numbered pages) tells stories that all readers can navigate,
while channel B (the odd-numbered pages) abstracts these narratives into theo-
retical constructs that highlight the concept of class, Colombia’s agrarian structure
and the participatory methodology used by La Rosca.
Nonetheless, as in many polyphonic works, both voices belong to Fals Borda.
Fals used his own academic training as the basis for evaluating the materials that
he and his La Rosca associates collected jointly with local activists. He did not
attempt—nor was it even a conceptual possibility at the time—to interpret his data
using analytical constructs generated by the community itself, as some collabo-
rative research teams are doing today.48 Several of the key personifications in
Historia doble, such as the cultura anfibia (amphibious culture) and the hombre
icotea (the turtle-man), function as totems for the different volumes. The motifs
certainly arose in the course of Fals’s fieldwork, as is obvious in his fieldnotes.49
However, he informed me in our interview that he crafted these metaphors out of
his own ethnographic imagination; they were never developed as conceptual vehi-
cles by the peasants themselves. In short, La Rosca’s political commitment did
not preclude its adherence to traditional ethnographic procedures, which is why
the dialogical structure of Historia doble is not as apparent in Fals Borda’s field-
notes. La Rosca’s methodology encouraged peasant participation—as narrators
and as recipients of processed texts—but not peasant collaboration—as subjects
capable of interpreting their lived reality using their own conceptual vehicles. Fals
received information from his peasant interlocutors, which he then analysed and
returned to them: in many ways, this was a one-way conversation or, perhaps, a
dialogue whose progression was controlled by one of the participants.50
Participatory action research was meant to kindle a synergy between research
and action. Such a combination can only be achieved, contends León Zamosc,
through a process of assimilation of the results of research by the grassroots that
48
Bolaños, Ramos, Rappaport and Miñana, ¿Qué pasaría si la escuela ...?; Marcelo Fernández Osco,
La ley del ayllu: práctica de jach’a justicia y jisk’a justicia (justicia mayor y justicia menor) en comu-
nidades aymaras (La Paz: PIEB, 2000); Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘El potencial epistemológico’; Rappaport,
Intercultural Utopias; Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe, Abelino Dagua Hurtado and Misael Aranda,
‘En el segundo día, la Gente Grande (Numisak) sembró la autoridad y las plantas y, con su jugo,
bebió el sentido’, in François Correa (ed.), Encrucijadas de Colombia amerindia (Bogotá: Instituto
Colombiano de Antropología, 1993), pp. 9–48; Vasco Uribe, Entre selva y páramo.
49
CDRBR/M, 0750, 4228; 0757, 4246; 1108, 6375.
50
A fascinating interview by Miguel Borja with Álvaro Mier, one of Fals’s informants for the history
of the Mier family, indicates that his interlocutors perceived his intervention as one of extracting
information and ‘returning’ it to them, not as co-investigation (although the YouTube caption suggests
otherwise); I thank Mónica Moreno for alerting me to this interview. See <http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=9eHuDjsG_H4>, accessed 12 December 2013.
is made possible by the development of techniques and pedagogical methods

for returning this information to the community. Grassroots participation in the
collection of testimonies, such as that of Juana Julia Guzmán and other narrators
identified by the communities, coupled with their involvement in the examina-
tion of archivos de baúl, was meant to motivate peasants politically. However,
drawing on Fals’s own retrospective critique in El problema de como investigar la
realidad para transformarla, Zamosc is convinced that the work on the Caribbean
Coast was ‘more practical than theoretical’: the exigencies of the political junc-
ture in which La Rosca found itself forced the collective to privilege activism
over research in its relationship with ANUC.51 Zamosc contends that this led to
the ghettoisation of discussions concerning research, which were confined, for
the most part, to external intellectuals and not shared with their peasant allies:
‘Scientific discussion continued to be conducted among the researchers, to whom
peasant cadres took their impressions of what was occurring in the grassroots.
... For this reason, it was the researchers who ended up defining the research
objectives.’52
Creating Researchers
A very telling document in Fals’s fieldnotes makes this plainly apparent. In what
appears to be a proposal for establishing a methodological and ideological frame-
work for the Fundación del Caribe’s research practice (at the top of which, for
some reason, Fals has written Fundación member Franklin Sibaja’s name, perhaps
because he was the author of the text), we learn that the Fundación sought to
recruit ‘personnel suitable (idóneo) for research projects’ with the aim of creating
research teams in which local residents of municipal seats could participate; they
would receive the appropriate training in order to become active members of
these teams.53 The proposal continues with a discussion of the need to conduct
workshops (cursillos) to bring peasant cadres closer to the researchers, and which
would introduce the latter to the region ‘in their own words, [showing them] the
location of the zone, its population, the large haciendas that stifle it, and from
there the masses will discover the origins of their poverty and exploitation.’ In
the process, ‘a knowledgeable cadre would be created, [armed] with a new intel-
lect, the process of knowing stimulated by their own participation in the research
endeavour.’54
51
Zamosc, ‘Campesinos y sociólogos’, pp. 24–6. See also, Fals Borda, El problema de como inves-
tigar la realidad para transformarla, pp. 49–50.
52
Zamosc, ‘Campesinos y sociólogos’, pp. 28–9.
53
CDRBR/M, 0642, 3374.
54
CDRBR/M, 0642, 3375. The structure of these cursillos is explained to peasant readers in the
Manual para cursillos campesinos para cuadros del movimiento campesino (Montería: Centro
Popular de Estudios, 1972). The booklet highlights not only the subject matter of these workshops (the
Nonetheless, the fact that the Fundación del Caribe advocated the training of
ANUC cadres does not imply that peasants participated directly as researchers
in the Fundación’s projects; instead the author of the proposal recommends they
participate as a type of facilitator of research conducted by the academic cadres.
Witness, for example, the following definition of who can be a researcher:
In terms of recruitment, it is necessary to find suitable persons who really can work,
collaborate, or help in part of the research. In my opinion these persons should have
some prior knowledge of some sort of research methodology. At this moment there
are many young people who have completed their coursework at various univer-
sities, who could join the Fundación. There are also students, workers, and peas-
ants. Once the personnel is chosen their names will be presented to the assembly or
executive council, those who we think can serve will be summoned, and once he or
they have accepted, will be assigned tasks. They will be observed over a period of
one or two months, and those who truly demonstrate ability and the desire to work
will be accepted as members of the Fundación.55
The researchers who comprised the Fundación del Caribe were local activists,
students and artists inspired and trained by Fals Borda.56 they dedicated them-
selves as researchers to studying the nature of land tenure in the Caribbean region,
the history of the peasant struggle and union campaigns, health in rural areas,
and local folklore. In addition to more scholarly publications, they were involved
in the preparation of materials for popular distribution, like the graphic histo-
ries I have already mentioned, and they coordinated workshops for peasant and
urban activists. Fundación members also developed funding proposals to support
their work.57 Research projects were conducted using scientific methodologies,
although research priorities were to be selected by the grassroots, which was
study of the local reality through a look at the situation of exploited classes, the history of the peasant
movement and the significance of ANUC and its ideological programme), but how these meetings
should be organised (plenary sessions and break-out groups) and even the materials that workshop
leaders would need (for example, large sheets of paper).
55
CDRBR/M, 0642, 3376. Note that Sibaja visualises these potential researchers as men, and most
of them were. The document goes on to emphasise that researchers should not arrive at the field site
with long hair, but in simple clothing, and that they should not carry the sort of tape recorder that
could potentially lead local people to equate them with previous researchers; they should carry only ‘a
pocket notebook, a pencil, and a small camera, their modesty leading people to assume that they are
not “dangerous” elements’. CDRBR/M, 0642, 3578.
56
José María Rojas Guerra, ‘Semblanza y aportes metodológicos de un investigador social: Orlando
Fals Borda’, Paper presented at the Simposio Internacional de Investigadores en Ciencias Sociales,
Medellín, Universidad de Antioquia, 30 November–3 December 2010. Víctor Negrete, for instance,
studied chemistry and biology at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá; although he is now a social
science researcher and a university professor, his methodological training began in La Rosca, not in a
formal academic setting.
57
CDRBR/M 0639, 3566–71; 0648, 3588–89; 0650, 3598–99; 0668, 3629, 3633. See also Víctor
Manuel Negrete Barrera, Origen de las luchas agrarias en Córdoba (Montería: Fundación del Caribe,
1981) and his Historia política de Montería, 1844–1950 (Montería: Universidad de Córdoba, 1975);
the latter, which is a mimeographed publication, is contained in CDRBR/M 1300, 7253–62.
supposed to participate actively in them.58 Fals was asked to recommend instruc-

tors who could teach peasant-researchers how to keep records of surveys on land-
use, but there is no indication in the archival holdings that this was a habitual
practice.59
A very small number of peasant investigators sent research reports to Fals
Borda. These were recorded by ANUC leaders in unschooled hands and somewhat
stilted written language, conveying only a small portion of what they undoubtedly
learned in the field. Alfonso Salgado produced a series of life histories of indige-
nous rural labourers in San Andrés de Sotavento that highlight these men’s labour
trajectories and their histories of land ownership. Bursting with reported speech
and narrated in the first person, the notes appear to conform closely in topic to the
stories he collected from his informants, although they are probably not as rich
in written form as they were when they were recounted orally: they are some-
what spasmodic in tone, shifting topics from one sentence to the next, as though
there wasn’t enough time to record the richness of the oral discourse.60 Of greater
note is Moisés Banquett’s ‘Story of a Simple and Exploited Peasant During His
Life in the World’ (‘Historia del campesino humilde y explotado durante su vida
en el mundo’), which was delivered to Fals Borda over the course of 1974 in a
series of handwritten entries.61 Framed as his life history, Banquett’s narrative is
really the history of ANUC in the department of Córdoba as told by one of its
protagonists: it highlights the process of invasion of haciendas and the creation
of baluartes on the reclaimed lands, participation in electoral politics, the culture
workshops in which Banquett participated, learning about the Colombian left,
reading the Communist Manifesto and, on the basis of his experience, ultimately
declaring himself a political independent. Banquett evaluates the role of intellec-
tuals like Fals in the peasant movement, La Rosca’s differences with the party left,
and concludes that the latter did not sufficiently support the baluartes the peasant
movement was building. The texts by Banquett and Salgado were incorporated
as background information into volume 4 of Historia doble. That is, the two men
appear to have collaborated as research assistants whose work was then incorpo-
rated into texts produced by more academically inclined writers, like Fals Borda
or, possibly, Negrete.
But Banquett’s treatise is unusual: it is the only full-blown narrative written
by a peasant that I could find in Fals Borda’s archive. When I asked him about
peasant participation in the research process, Fals responded that it was difficult
to achieve a full-blown research partnership because of the extremely low level
of literacy he encountered.62 Besides this handful of semi-literate peasant associ-
58
CDRBR/M 0637, 3359–61.
59
CDRBR/M 0643, 3581.
60
CDRBR/M 0211, 774.
61
CDRBR/M 1056, 6125–62; transcription in CDRBR/M 1058, 6168–266.
62
This point is echoed by Víctor Negrete, who argues that illiteracy hampered the Fundación del
Caribe’s success in organising workshops with peasants; ‘Orlando Fals Borda en Córdoba: Bases
ates, Fals characterised the panorama as ‘very sterile’ and confessed that he had
to resort to interviews because it was so difficult to get the grassroots involved
in research. It is as though literacy were a basic requirement for doing research.
Redefining Research
But it was more than literacy that impeded peasants from participating in La
Rosca’s research: it was the overarching scientific ethos espoused by the collec-
tive which delegated the work of analysis to intellectuals.63 This is apparent in
Fals’s description of systematic devolution in the first volume of Historia doble,
where he glosses the process as one of the collection of information from the
grassroots, followed by its classification and systematisation by intellectuals,
who, once they have transformed it into a politically effective tool, then return
it to the masses.64 His references in Historia doble to ‘science’ cite such authors
as Mao; his appreciation of science must thus be understood as being Marxist in
nature.65 This is more clearly articulated in a 1981 paper, in which Fals assigns
participatory action researchers to the Gramscian slot of ‘organic intellectuals’,
who are capable of ‘articulat[ing] between regional specificity and general to
national theory, to produce a totalizing and integral vision of the knowledge that
has been acquired.’ He sees totalising scientific processes as entering into a dialec-
tical process with local knowledge.66
I wonder, however, whether by confining our notion of research to the collec-
tion and analysis of information by trained professionals we are short-changing La
Rosca’s and the Fundación del Caribe’s legacy, as well as skewing what we think
collaborative research ought to be—I am placing the onus here both of the remi-
niscences of researchers from the 1970s and of myself as an interpreter of their
experience. Luis Guillermo Vasco shares with his readers a very different notion
y desarrollo de la investigación acción participativa’, Revista Periferia 7 (2008), 6–7. Note that La
Rosca promoted literacy programmes and teacher training on the Atlantic coast; see PHS/P, ‘Precis’,
Jacques J. Kozub and Mike Jousan, 26 January 1973, p. 2.
63
As I have already mentioned, Zamosc pointed this out in ‘Campesinos y sociólogos’, pp. 28–9; in an
unreasonably condemnatory passage, Vasco makes a similar point in Entre selva y páramo, pp. 454–8.
64
Fals Borda, Mompox y Loba, pp. 58B–59B.
65
In his preface to Fals Borda’s writings, José María Rojas suggests that the two-channelled approach
of Historia doble led to an operationalisation of Marxist concepts in what Rojas calls the ‘erudite’
channel (el canal del saber ilustrado), that is highly dependent on the popular narrative appearing
on the facing pages. He emphasises that the relationship between the narratives in Channel A and the
Marxist concepts in Channel B is a product of his articulation with peasant agents of history in the
course of his activist research. ‘Prefacio: Sobre la fundación de la sociología en Colombia’, in Orlando
Fals Borda, Antología Orlando Fals Borda (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Nacional de Colombia,
2010), pp. 54–5.
66
Orlando Fals Borda, ‘La ciencia y el pueblo: Nuevas reflexiones sobre la investigación-acción’,
in Fals Borda, Antología, pp. 189–90. Fals points out that such intellectuals have not yet lived up to
expectations, concentrating more on political practice than on scientific conceptualisation.
of how research might be imagined at the grassroots, particularly in his discussion

of the break-out groups (comisiones) that mull interminably over proposals and
questions at Guambiano assemblies:
The work in break-out groups organized by indigenous people in their meetings
was, in reality, a research meeting, in which knowledge of a problem was intensified
through a discussion in which they confronted the knowledge of every participant
with that of the rest in order to finally arrive at group knowledge. ... My idea that
there were no conclusions at the meetings was wrong; there were conclusions, but
they did not take the same form as those with which I was familiar, nor were they
written. Later, it became clear to me that after the break-out groups and the multiple
discussions that ensued in them, in the mind of every participant lay certain conclu-
sions: a broader knowledge of the problem than what there had been before the
meeting, now that it was no longer personal knowledge, but knowledge held by the
entire group.67
In other words, Vasco visualises indigenous research as a process of thinking

through ideas, not of collecting and systematically analysing data. This is very
much what I have observed in my own collaborative experiences and in most of
those I’ve read about: external scholars are frequently obliged to collect informa-
tion because they are dealing with unfamiliar social or cultural contexts; insiders,
in contrast, tend to engage in more intuitive processes, so that research for them is
a sustained reflection on their own circumstances and a very contextualised form
of listening to the narratives of others, as opposed to what external scholars do in
such settings.68 Collaboration becomes, then, a dialogue between two differently
positioned participants who have distinct skill-sets and conceptual frameworks
which, when combined in a collaborative research project, transcend the limita-
tions faced by each of the participants working alone. There is no single party
capable of a totalising conceptual approach to the material, in contradistinction
to what Fals proposes. The dialogic process can, potentially, lead to the kind of
co-theorising developed by Vasco in collaboration with the Guambiano Cabildo’s
History Committee, but it can also result in a more diffuse form of interpretation,
such as in the paragraph of Vasco’s just cited.
I think that by modifying our definition of research so that it takes a broader
view of what happens in the field, reconstituting it as a space of interpretation as
Vasco suggests, we can attempt a new reading of La Rosca’s methodology. This is
not to say that La Rosca and the Fundación del Caribe understood research in the
same way that collaborative researchers do today, nor that they achieved the same
degree of co-conceptualisation that is beginning to crop up across Latin America.
67
Vasco, Entre selva y páramo, p. 461.
68
Although Fals was himself a Costeño, his class positioning was quite distinct from that of the peas-
ants. In addition, he was from Barranquilla, a very different part of the Caribbean Coast: less agrarian,
more industrialised, more urban. Thus, he was very much an external scholar, despite the fact that he
identified with Costeño culture writ large and saw himself as a kind of insider. I thank León Zamosc
for making me aware of this distinction.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that Vasco’s assertions provide us with a distinctive

lens through which to evaluate the Rosca project, always keeping in mind the fact
that it unfolded several decades earlier.
The best place to start reading between the lines of the historical record, of
reinterpreting La Rosca’s work as an incipient form of collaborative research, is
with its experience with the Nasa of the south-western highlands. María Teresa
Findji, Víctor Daniel Bonilla’s partner, recounted to me that in indigenous commu-
nities in Cauca, Rosca researchers did not expect native activists to employ the
same analytical methods as academics. Instead, they held meetings at which
community members shared their interpretations of history and external collabo-
rators used these gatherings as a space in which they could begin to comprehend
local meanings; the historical pamphlets they produced were a distillation of these
discussions, which were followed up with searches for relevant archival docu-
mentation of the events and processes brought to the fore in these conversations,
so that in a sense, researchers like Bonilla might best be thought of as ‘scribes’.69
Perhaps the fact that Bonilla was an investigative journalist contributed to this
reconceptualisation of what research involved.
A marginal note to a report on a 1982 workshop on investigación-acción in
Puerto Tejada, Cauca, crystallises some of these ideas; I don’t know who made
the notation (which was not in Fals Borda’s hand, although it is in his personal
archive). The writer states: ‘Here it is worthwhile to emphasize how we are victims
of educational tradition: it is supposed that the teaching moment occurs following
the research, in its devolution, but it is not accepted as an approach to the research
itself.’70 So even then, activist researchers were questioning whether there was
really a need for the separation of the work of activists from that of intellectuals
to be mediated by the process of systematic devolution. At the same workshop,
a discussion of Bonilla’s mapas parlantes project (in which Nasa history was
encoded in picture-maps) takes this even further:
The map is not the result of research; although it is the result of one stage of the
research, the research continues afterward, when certain cases are examined, they
must find other elements that are there, and they must bring them in or remember
them or they have them stowed away, or someone told them, or that the map is a
particular moment, a material basis, something they can see and touch, and they
arrive at knowledge through this material basis.71
69
Interview with María Teresa Findji, 17 July 2009, Cali. The most well known of the pamphlets
produced in Cauca is Víctor Daniel Bonilla, Historia política de los paeces (Bogotá: Carta al CRIC
4, 1977).
70
‘Norte del Cauca: Reflexiones sobre conocimiento y poder popular’, AHUNC/B, caja 49, carpeta 3, 113.
The document is followed by another one, ‘Reflexiones sobre la aplicación del método de I-A en Puerto
Tejada’, 118–38, which is dated 1982 and which includes a transcription of the workshop proceedings.
71
‘Norte del Cauca’, 129. See Bonilla, ‘Algunas experiencias del proyecto “Mapas Parlantes”’.
For a look at these maps, see <http://www/luguiva.net/cartillas/subIndice.aspx?id=10>, accessed 11
September 2013.
Research, then, is a continuous process of reflection that does not necessarily

result in a definitive final product. It is comprised by progressive stages of memory
retrieval that rely on systematic devolution of processed materials, but not merely
as information to be ‘returned’ in digested form to the community; instead, these
materials might better be thought of as props enabling information-sharing and
interpretation by the grassroots. That is to say, there is no sense that conceptual
labour is strictly the province of the external intellectual. Clearly, the kinds of
concerns articulated today by collaborative researchers were beginning to be aired
in La Rosca’s era.
But how might these ideas have influenced La Rosca and the Fundación
del Caribe, who by all accounts appear to have located the teaching moment as
posterior to the research process? Víctor Negrete recounted to me that when the
Fundación del Caribe arrived in a community for a baluarte assembly, they met
with groups of people and ‘we talked to one another, we cracked jokes. ... We
worked with them: whoever was a singer sang, another danced. ... And we began
to speak of how we would ... recuperate history ... while listening to their stories.
We would collect [the stories] and when we saw them another time we already
had it ready for them.’72 These meetings were mainly held at night with older
men: ‘We would arrive in whatever town, without a premeditated agenda or a
methodology: nothing, nothing, nothing. Totally free-form. And we’d start with
a piece of knowledge. We’d meet with the people. We’d begin to talk about the
town, the Coast, the past, the struggle, and so-and-so.’73 there is still the sense
that the narratives were raw material meant to be processed by the research team,
however, I would suggest that these were moments at which the grassroots was
privy to the research process.
The transcript of a May 1972 ANUC workshop in Buenos Aires, Córdoba,
facilitated by Víctor provides further clues to the dynamics of such exchanges.
It starts off with an exposition by Víctor of the history of land tenure and foreign
investment in the region, moving into a narrative of workers’ movements in the
early twentieth century. He explains that his objective is to transform the histor-
ical narrative, which as it is written does not represent what really happened;
in other words, it is a history told from the vantage point of the elite. However,
when Víctor introduces the subject of the matrícula—the system of debt-peonage
that operated on the Coast—he turns to Bárbaro Ramírez, an elderly peasant,
and invites him to share his observations with the participants. A skilled narrator,
Ramírez grounds his discourse in his life experience, highlighting particular rela-
tionships and events. His insertion into the workshop turns it into a dialogic space
in which peasants can educate peasants.74
72
73
74
CDRBR/M 0246, 1079–170. Note, however, that in retrospect Negrete feels that the workshops
were more expository than participatory; see ‘Orlando Fals Borda en Córdoba’, 6–7.
Can we state with certainty that such methods of collective reflection were
more effective than the ‘return’ of information by means of published pamphlets,
or that the graphic histories and cassette narratives functioned more as plat-
forms for further research by the peasants themselves, than did the ‘devolution’
of digested data? Jesús María Pérez, the ANUC leader from Sucre whose auto-
biography was recently published, was energised by this interpretation when I
shared it with him in an informal conversation in July 2013. However, it is very
difficult to tell, given that La Rosca’s experience on the Coast was cut short by
its differences with the left and by the severe government repression that crushed
the peasant movement. The fact that references to such a process are few and
far between in Fals Borda’s papers suggests that collaborative reflection was
only incipient and that La Rosca had not moved beyond what might be termed
a ‘vanguardist’ approach to research, in which academically trained or schooled
researchers were responsible for synthesising the results of interviews with peas-
ants. In contrast, we can see the concrete results of the research into Caucan indig-
enous history decades after Bonilla’s meetings with native grassroots activists;
in fact, it would be possible to trace concrete genealogies of the transmission of
this knowledge from the 1970s to the present in the indigenous movement. The
histories constructed at these meetings are very much common knowledge today
and are articulated constantly at multiple levels of the indigenous organisation.75
However, this is not to imply that Bonilla’s work in Cauca eschewed the pater-
nalism of La Rosca on the Caribbean Coast; Bonilla very much played the role of
the synthesising intellectual. It is only in retrospect that we can observe the effects
of participatory efforts from the 1970s in the indigenous movement.
Conclusion
The history of La Rosca as seen through this new lens impels us to generate a new
set of questions about what research was for 1970s Costeño peasants and how
they thought they were participating in the research process. To accomplish this
we must set aside academic notions of what constitutes research and accept that
75
Perhaps the differences between Cauca and the Atlantic Coast originate in the structural conditions
that have obliged native people in Colombia to take an interest in their history—that is, their need
to access colonial-era resguardo titles and the fact that these titles have been transformed over the
centuries into oral traditions that are common knowledge—in contrast to the peasants of Córdoba,
for whom history served as an inspiration, but was not as critical to their task of building baluartes
on reclaimed lands. See Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation
in the Colombian Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Given the continuous experi-
ence of violent conflict over the years by the peasants of Córdoba, it has also been suggested that the
recollection of more recent massacres and political struggle superimposes itself over the conflicts of
the past, clouding popular memory. See Absalón Machado and Donny Mertens, La tierra en disputa:
Memorias de despojo y resistencia campesina en la costa Caribe (Bogotá: Grupo de Memoria
Histórica/Ediciones Semana, 2010).
not all research involves the systematic collection and analysis of data. Instead, an
informal, oral process of recollection and reflection by the grassroots, combined
with the use of more systematic methodologies of data collection by academic
collaborators, may be what really characterises participatory or collaborative
research, leading us to also redefine what participation and collaboration mean.
Moreover, we must reinterpret the production of history as a collective engage-
ment of the imagination that does not only unfold in the oral domain, but whose
written results, when they assume forms replicating orality and alternative ways
of remembering, also force us to the historian’s craft. Consequently, we must
pursue an approach to interpreting the legacy of La Rosca that is not one-sided:
La Rosca is still ‘good to think’ forty years later, because it breaks the mould of
social scientific research in ways that not only benefitted the peasants and indig-
enous people with whom it collaborated, but also raised very significant questions
about the process of writing history.
10.1 David Sánchez Juliao in a study group with peasants, October 1973 (photo 221 in the
photographic collection of Orlando Fals Borda, courtesy of the Centro de Documentación Regional
Orlando Fals Borda, Banco de la República, Montería).
10.2 Page from the graphic history of
Tinajones, depicting narrator (Courtesy
of the Fundación del Sinú).
10.3 Peasants at a Montería workshop reading the graphic history of Tinajones, 1973 (photo 1398
in the photographic collection of Orlando Fals Borda, courtesy of the Centro de Documentación
Regional Orlando Fals Borda, Banco de la República, Montería).

Joanne Rappaport, La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social. Reimagining History As Collaborative Exchange in 1970s Colombia

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY • 207

How tHe Past was

Published for tHe BRItIsH aCadeMY

© The British Academy 2017

Database right The British Academy (maker)

First edition published in 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Typeset by Mach 3 Solutions Ltd (www.mach3solutions.co.uk)

La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social

In the summer of 1970 a group of Colombian intellectuals—sociologists and

regional struggles. They argued in favour of establishing research priorities

reclaimed lands that promoted economic self-sufficiency and raised political

influenced by the production of educational materials for popular consumption,

Nasa researchers and collaborators with the indigenous movement, in which we

The Emergence of La Rosca in the Late Twentieth Century

At the moment of the emergence of La Rosca, Colombia was a country saddled

intimately connected to the local political power structure, subsequently forced

of civic strikes, public demonstrations, peasant marches and electoral abstention,

Fals Borda’s Field Notebooks

a focused and selective interpretive process.24 He goes on to refer to fieldnotes as

‘experiments in interpretation’.28 George Bond reminds us that fieldnotes ‘estab-

Participatory Research as a Form of Translation

Matilde described the drafting of the pamphlets as an exercise in ‘translation’:

unlike most ethnographies, which are frequently first conceptualised in fieldnotes,

La Rosca and Participatory Research Methods

In a 1988 interview, Fals Borda reflects on how he developed a two-channelled

knowledge, in which conversations become progressively more complex as one

is made possible by the development of techniques and pedagogical methods

supposed to participate actively in them.58 Fals was asked to recommend instruc-

of how research might be imagined at the grassroots, particularly in his discussion

In other words, Vasco visualises indigenous research as a process of thinking

Nonetheless, it seems to me that Vasco’s assertions provide us with a distinctive

Research, then, is a continuous process of reflection that does not necessarily

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