5
Tropical Empathy: Orlando
Fals Borda and Participatory
Action Research
Álex Pereira and Joanne Rappaport
‘I did not want to return to writing sociology
books unless they contributed to squaring the
circle of social communication with organi-
zations representing diverse class interests
and intellectual levels,’ affirms Orlando Fals
Borda (1979a: 17A) in the first pages of
Volume 1 of Historia doble de la Costa
(‘Double History of the Coast’), his history
of the spread of agrarian capitalism and peas-
ant resistance on the Caribbean coast of
Colombia, and his most extensive narrative
of his pioneering work in Participatory
Action Research (PAR). Fals never published
a manual documenting how PAR functioned
in its early years; instead, he insisted that
PAR drew upon local experience to cultivate
a philosophy, methodology, and set of tech-
niques for conducting research premised on
the establishment of horizontal relationships
between external researchers and communi-
ties in the service of the organizational objec-
tives of the latter. For Fals, PAR did not
follow a recipe, but instead, was a kind of an
intersubjective and empathetic dialogue
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 55
between researchers and the subject group,
one that would be adjusted to the particular
circumstances of the research relationship.
One could say that Fals conceived PAR as a
method based on lived experience and for
this reason, it was renewed each time it was
put into practice.
Our interest in this chapter is to trace the
process through which PAR developed in
the early part of the 1970s, in the depart-
ment of Córdoba on the Caribbean coast of
Colombia, to the southwest of Cartagena
and Barranquilla and one of several loca-
tions across the globe in which participatory
methodologies were in gestation at the time
(Hall, 1982). Fals Borda’s project in Córdoba
was a process of the recovery of forgotten
histories of peasant struggle, resulting in
the production of narratives published in a
form accessible to unschooled readers. These
materials were intended to nourish the politi-
cal evolution of the National Association of
Peasant Users (ANUC), the Colombian peas-
ant movement.1 Our task in this chapter is to
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 56 Key Influences and Foundations of Participatory Research
analyze the mechanisms through which Fals
and his team imagined the establishment of
a horizontal dialogue with coastal peasants,
who were unfamiliar with academic lan-
guage. We determine how, in the course of
this dialogue, priority was given to the col-
lective construction of historical knowledge,
which would then be appropriated by ANUC
to its own political ends. We are also inter-
ested in examining what Fals and his asso-
ciates understood participatory practice to
involve and how the ideas they coined have
been transformed in Colombia over the inter-
vening four and a half decades.
Our story is based on documentary
research into Fals Borda’s personal papers,
which are located in the archive of the
National University of Colombia and in the
Regional Documentary Center of the Banco
de la República, in Montería, Córdoba.
Historical sources were supplemented by
interviews with members of Fals Borda’s
research team, homing in on memories from
over 40 years ago and keeping in mind that
after the death of Fals Borda in August 2008,
some respondents found it uncomfortable to
criticize his work. Few of the peasants who
worked with Fals Borda are still living or can
be easily located. For this reason, we cannot
answer all the questions that readers might
pose, particularly those concerning peasant
reactions to his participatory project or the
day-to-day workings of his research team; we
have not been able to find out how differences
in approach might have been aired within the
team or with their peasant associates.
The origins of PAR on the Colombian
Caribbean coast date back more than four
decades. In the interim, numerous questions
have been raised concerning the feasibility
of establishing a truly horizontal relation-
ship between researchers and the grassroots.
Moreover, new collaborative methodologies
have evolved that explore and attempt to
bridge the epistemological differences that
placed barriers on Fals Borda’s dialogue
with coastal peasants. Fals Borda imagined
and dreamed more than he could achieve;
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 56
his work on the Caribbean coast was dis-
tinctly utopian in nature. The research
team did not achieve everything it had set
out to accomplish in the three years that it
functioned in the department of Córdoba,
before factional disputes within ANUC at
the national and regional levels forced them
to abandon their research. Therefore, Fals
Borda’s methodological approach provides
us with a philosophical horizon more than a
recipe for participatory research; his work in
Córdoba is inspirational, rather than provid-
ing a concrete route for conducting PAR in
the present.
In Search of a Tropical Science
In the mid-1960s, after having conducted
groundbreaking research on agrarian econo-
mies in the Colombian highlands using a
conventional sociological model (Fals Borda,
1955), Fals Borda pursued a reformist agenda
that straddled the policy and academic
worlds. He affiliated with the Colombian
Ministry of Agriculture to work on the agrar-
ian reform that promised to resolve problems
of unequal access to land in rural areas, at the
same time that he directed the Faculty of
Sociology at the National University of
Colombia, where he trained aspiring applied
researchers (Jaramillo Jiménez, 2017).
However, Colombia’s agrarian reform pro-
ject failed to redistribute land to the landless,
spurring peasant occupations of haciendas
(Zamosc, 1986b). In response, Fals reposi-
tioned himself ideologically, promoting
research that harnessed the transformational
powers of the working classes to effect social
change through a revolution from below
(Fals Borda, 1969). His social practice,
including his articulation with peasant move-
ments, as well as his theoretical contributions
and methodological experiments, indicate
that he remade himself in the role of an
organic intellectual of the subordinated
classes (Pereira, 2019).
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research
In 1968, Fals was in Switzerland serving
as research director for the United Nations
Research Institute for Social Development,
where he coordinated investigations into the
failure of rural cooperatives across the globe,
a further example of his disenchantment with
reformist projects. While in Geneva, he met
with a small group of Colombian intellec-
tuals from the Caribbean coast who shared
his adherence to the Presbyterian Church,
including economist Augusto Libreros
Illidge and sociologist Gonzalo Castillo
Cárdenas, both Presbyterian pastors (Pereira,
2004). Together with Víctor Daniel Bonilla, a
journalist who in the 1960s conducted soci-
oeconomic research in rural communities
for the Colombian agrarian reform agency,
they founded a research collective, La Rosca
de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of
Research and Social Action; henceforth,
‘La Rosca’), funded by the US Presbyterian
Church (Castillo, Fals Borda, and Libreros
were all practicing Presbyterians with links
to new progressive currents in the World
Council of Churches). La Rosca proposed
to ally itself as a collective of researcher-
activists with ANUC, as well as with various
Indigenous organizations, schoolteachers,
and other urban workers. Their accompani-
ment in the political activities of grassroots
organizations prodded them to adopt Marxism
as their central theoretical support, as well as
toward the construction of a participatory
methodology – which they sometimes called
‘militant research’ and at other times ‘action
research’ – giving origin to PAR.
Just before Fals embarked on his collabo-
ration with ANUC, together with his asso-
ciates in La Rosca, he co-authored a brief
book, Por ahí es la cosa (Bonilla et al., 1971),
which compiled a series of public talks to
400 primary and secondary schoolteachers
from the Caribbean coast. The presentations
centered on a critique of traditional peda-
gogical practice and described the group’s
recent experience in opening channels of
communication with subaltern sectors. Like
Paulo Freire (2005 [1970]), they understood
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 57
57
education to be a vital tool for the acquisi-
tion of self-­consciousness and the recogni-
tion of the place of individuals in the social
fabric. Alternative forms of popular educa-
tion would, they argued, open the way to
heightened class consciousness and effective
political action by placing in question the
foundations of a system based on oppres-
sion and inequality. In their talks, La Rosca
members advocated for the circulation of
ideas between researchers and members of
subordinated classes, respecting and fore-
grounding people’s knowledge, with the aim
of returning to the most oppressed the capac-
ity for collective action. This would only be
possible, they argued, if intellectuals bridged
the intellectual gulf between the lettered
city and the world of workers, peasants and
Indigenous people.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Latin
American intellectuals had elaborated a cri-
tique of positivist social science emanating
from the global North. They argued that the
models presented by social scientists from
North America and Europe were not applica-
ble to Latin America or other regions of the
global South because they paid scant atten-
tion to the structural obstacles faced by its
inhabitants. Latin American social scientists
had already begun to recognize that northern
theories emerged out of an analysis of soci-
eties different from their own (Cardoso and
Weffort, 1973). La Rosca built on this foun-
dation to broach the possibility of creating a
people’s science arising out of ‘our own geo-
graphic and human conditions, a science of
the tropics and of tropical people … adapted
to our needs and aspirations, which would
also bring to light existing mechanisms of
exploitation and domination, and the contra-
dictions at the heart of our society’ (Bonilla
et al., 1971: 32). Their aim was to refashion
knowledge by opening a conversation in cir-
cumstances characterized by contradiction
and conflict, thereby challenging existing
schematic models of social research.
History was central to this project. Orlando
Fals Borda and Víctor Daniel Bonilla had
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 58 Key Influences and Foundations of Participatory Research
already used historical methods to docu-
ment the history of land tenure in their pre-
vious research (Bonilla, 1972 [1968]; Fals
Borda, 1955), and had sensed the centrality
of historical consciousness to Indigenous and
peasant struggles, following and redirect-
ing a Colombian ethnohistorical tradition
that focused on the changing relationships
of Native groups to the dominant society.
Moreover, their appropriation of Marxism
presupposed an emphasis on historical mate-
rialism. Thus, the intellectual environment in
which they were operating inspired them to
adapt historical inquiry to their participatory
methodology.
La Rosca and the Fundación del
Caribe in Practice
Fals Borda and his colleagues conceptualized
participatory action research as a methodol-
ogy predicated on the insertion of external
researchers into social movements. These
were not scholars confined to their university
desks, nor did they conceive of their insertion
into communities as purely for observational
purposes. Instead, they saw themselves as
politically committed investigators allied
with and participating in the activities of
rank-and-file organizations. Their commit-
ment to activism stands in contrast with that
of most ethnographers, as well as with many
of today’s collaborative researchers, who
tend to limit their collaboration to the
research space. As La Rosca stated in its
1974 manifesto: ‘[Participatory] action
research includes those procedures that
enable the analysis of class components of
the collectivity, the observation from the
inside of processes of change in order to gen-
erate and accumulate knowledge of reality,
and the recovery of various elements with the
aim of energizing class consciousness’ (La
Rosca, 1974: 33). In the process, what Fals
Borda called ‘people’s knowledge’ would
come into dialogue with scientific
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 58
knowledge, potentially transforming the pro-
cess of research as we know it.
This reconsideration of social scien-
tific methods involved a reconceptualiza-
tion of the meaning of research, as well as
the coining of a set of underlying concepts:
participation, critical recovery, and system-
atic devolution. We explore these three con-
cepts and the changing meaning of research
for La Rosca through an examination of
Fals Borda’s experience on the Caribbean
coast, where he organized a research team
called the Fundación del Caribe (Caribbean
Foundation) to collaborate with the National
Association of Peasant Users (ANUC).2
ANUC was originally established in 1967 by
the Colombian government to foster agrarian
reform and defuse the violence that had per-
sisted in rural areas since the 1950s. By 1972,
it had split into two opposing lines in the face
of rural dissatisfaction with the snail’s pace
at which the process of land redistribution
was unfolding and anger at the expulsion of
sharecroppers and smallholders from hacien-
das slated for reform. The more radical cur-
rents of the peasant movement coalesced into
what was called the ‘Sincelejo Line,’ named
after the city in which they held their found-
ing congress; those sectors of the organized
peasantry that supported a continuing alli-
ance with the government met at the previ-
ously established congress site in the city
of Armenia, and thus came to be known as
the ‘Armenia Line.’ ANUC-Sincelejo called
for a program of direct action, including
civic strikes, public demonstrations, peas-
ant marches, and electoral abstention. Their
pursuit of solutions to peasant grievances was
combined with a more general strategy of
overturning the social and economic system
(Zamosc, 1986b). Shut off from the govern-
ment assistance that ANUC had previously
enjoyed, the Sincelejo Line was forced to
seek other means of support from progressive
intellectuals like those of La Rosca (Zamosc,
1986b: 106, 113–116). The Caribbean coast
was a hotbed of peasant ferment in the early
1970s and one of the strongholds of the
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research
Sincelejo Line, constituting a laboratory in
which Fals Borda could test his approach to
activist scholarship.
Participation
The Fundación del Caribe’s participatory
research process deferred to peasants (camp-
esinos) in the generation of the research
agenda and fostered their active involvement
in the interpretation of data and the insertion
of what was learned into political practice. In
other words, Fals envisioned a dialogue
punctuated by activism, with information
garnered through research providing the
basis for collective decision-making about
political action (Fals Borda, 1979b). His
methodology was grounded in the conviction
that external researchers are not mere observ-
ers, nor are the members of popular organiza-
tions unsophisticated informants whose
words and activities would be recorded by
the researcher. As he argues, ‘one and the
other work together, all are thinking and
acting subjects in the work of investigation.
One would not exploit the other as an “object”
of research, above all because the knowledge
is generated and returned in circumstances
controlled by the group itself’ (Fals Borda,
1987 [1970]: 91). Both external and internal
researchers would enjoy the same level of
responsibility in a project, while, at the same
time, they would all participate in the social
movement as activists (Brandão, 2005), for
example, at land occupations. Continuous
flows of reciprocity in both research and
political action would transform the very
meaning of ‘objectivity’ into a bi- or multi-
directional process.
From 1972 to 1974, Fals and the
Fundación del Caribe produced a series of
graphic histories (Chalarka, 1985) narrat-
ing four ­20th-century peasant struggles on
the Caribbean coast in a format that could
be easily digested by the ANUC rank-and-
file. These comic books, which provide an
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 59
59
exceptional window into the Fundación’s
research process, were composed by a het-
erogeneous group of activists with dissimilar
talents and life experiences, who engaged one
another in a chain of conversations and col-
laborations. ANUC leaders set the research
agenda, sending Fundación researchers
and Fals Borda to comb local archives and
to participate in community meetings at
which campesinos and researchers listened
to elderly narrators who had been active in
the 1920s to 1960s. Artist and Fundación
member Ulianov Chalarka took visual notes
at these events and shared his sketches with
his campesino audience, receiving construc-
tive criticisms, as well as new information
to supplement the drawings. The Fundación
laid out the graphic history using Chalarka’s
illustrations as a starting-point, later adding
speech-­balloons and captions. After ANUC
approved the final version, it was taken to
assemblies and workshops, where it was read
and discussed by rural audiences. The work
of dissemination augmented the knowledge-
base of the graphic histories by incorporating
the personal experiences of the readers and
their recollections of their forebears. In this
way they would come to ‘own’ their history.
If we limit our definition of research to the
collection and analysis of information by the
minuscule number of trained professionals of
the Fundación del Caribe – of its members,
only Fals had formal social science training –
we lose sight of the innovative character of
this project. The Fundación’s experience pro-
vides an alternative notion of what research
is. It does not negate the significance of
the rigorous and systematic collection of
information but, instead, places the work
of experts in dialogue with other modes of
inquiry in which research becomes a collec-
tive process of thinking through ideas (Vasco
Uribe, 2011). Thus, the Fundación succeeded
in merging two distinct styles of research:
one intuitive and grounded in public mem-
ory-work, the other analytical, growing out
of the collection of oral and documentary
materials using academic methods.
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 60 Key Influences and Foundations of Participatory Research
Readers might inquire how horizontal
this process really was, given the rigid class
divisions on the coast and the educational
gap that separated the university-educated
researchers from the unschooled, frequently
illiterate, peasants. The lack of information
in the documentary record makes it diffi-
cult to gauge the extent to which the rank-
and-file participated in the research process
in any capacity beyond that of an audience.
The ANUC leadership, however, which had
received intensive training by the Fundación
del Caribe and other organizations, appears to
have achieved a horizontal relationship with
the external researchers, although the latter
tended, in the end, to exert more control over
the research process (Zamosc, 1986a: 29).
Critical Recovery
Central to the approach of La Rosca and the
Fundación del Caribe was an objective they
called ‘critical recovery,’ which paid ‘special
attention 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’ (Bonilla
et  al., 1972: 51–52). One of the clearest
examples of critical recovery in the
Fundación’s collaboration with ANUC was
the reintroduction of baluartes de autogestión
campesina (bastions of peasant self-­
management) on occupied haciendas.
The idea of the baluarte originated in his-
torical research on socialist organizations
that in the 1920s settled the landless on pub-
lic properties that were in dispute with large
landholders (Fals Borda, 1986: 144A–148A).
Fals had interviewed Juana Julia Guzmán,
a campesina leader in the 1920s, who in
1972 urged the ANUC activists occupying
the hacienda La Antioqueña to adopt a simi-
lar organizing model (Parra Escobar 1983:
chaps. 7–9).
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 60
The process of researching, writing, and
disseminating the Fundación’s graphic histo-
ries sought to make critical recovery compre-
hensible to peasants. The dialogue between
campesinos and researchers produced con-
cepts that crystallized both the major tropes
contained in the narratives of peasant eyewit-
nesses and provided avenues for making their
stories relevant to the present. The crafting
of Lomagrande (Chalarka, 1985: 5–25), the
first of the Fundación’s graphic histories (see
Figure 5.1), written during the occupation of
the hacienda La Antioqueña, furnished one of
several scenarios in which external research-
ers and local ANUC leaders forged a space in
which to think through what a baluarte had
been in the 1920s and what it could poten-
tially become in the 1970s. We could say that
the story of Lomagrande was written on the
bodies of activists: the bodies of the social-
ists of the 1920s, some of them killed in skir-
mishes with the police and later recalled in
the names given to ANUC’s baluartes, and
the bodies of the occupiers of the 1970s, who
were pictured in the comic book’s panels,
standing in for their socialist forebears of
whom there were a handful of photographs.
This juxtaposition of memories of the past
with images of the present forged a connec-
tion that was imbued with strong sentiments,
as well as historical knowledge.
Systematic Devolution
The fruits of critical recovery were dissemi-
nated through what La Rosca called ‘system-
atic devolution,’ whereby research results
were returned to the organizational leader-
ship and its rank-and-file ‘in an ordered fash-
ion, adjusted to the levels of political and
educational development of the grassroots
groups that use the information’ (Fals Borda,
1987 [1970]: 113). This ensured that the
products of research would have a life beyond
the bookshelves, in activist practice. However,
these materials were never meant to be final
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 Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research 61

Figure 5.1 Depiction of baluartes in Lomagrande, one of the Fundación del

Caribe’s graphic histories (Chalarka, 1985: 15)
Reprinted with the permission of the Fundación del Sinú

products, as occurs in academic research, but, out of the sedimentation of progressive stages
instead, they provide the stimulus for politi- of memory retrieval and interpretation, ena-
cal projects. La Rosca conceptualized bling grassroots information-sharing and
research as a continuous activity that evolved analysis at all stages in the process.

BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 61 06/07/21 5:29 PM

 62 Key Influences and Foundations of Participatory Research
The most important arena for systematic
devolution was a series of leadership work-
shops (cursillos) that the Fundación del
Caribe facilitated in Córdoba, particularly
in the municipality of Montería (Rudqvist,
1986). Cursillos were intended to intro-
duce ANUC’s regional and local leaders to
the founding documents of the movement,
the history of the peasant struggle and of
agrarian legislation, as well as to engage
participants in an analysis of local problems
(Centro Popular de Estudios, 1972). These
events engaged as facilitators a broad range
of volunteers from the coastal intelligentsia,
including folklorists, sociologists, and law-
yers. They were effective in mobilizing the
peasantry around Montería, which coalesced
around ANUC to a greater degree than in
many other parts of the department (Parra
Escobar, 1983).
Chalarka’s graphic histories were a
key component of the Fundación’s pro-
cess of systematic devolution. The stories
of Lomagrande, Tinajones, El Boche, and
Felicita Campos are anchored by narrators,
local activists whose head-shots appear at
crucial moments in the comics as a reminder
that these stories of the past were very much
relevant to the campesino readers’ present.
Narrators were chosen to embody this vital
connection and to imbue history with famil-
iar faces. All of them were real people, but
the stories told by their graphic personas
combine information culled from interviews
with numerous storytellers who are listed at
the beginning of each of the booklets. The
narrators function as vehicles for the ana-
lytical process of critical recovery, imparting
the lessons learned from the historical events
pictured in the comic’s panels. Some of the
narrators participated in ANUC meetings
where copies of the graphic histories were
distributed, by their very presence impli-
cating the events of the graphic histories in
the readers’ present. The superimposition
of the real world with a fictional world made
the narrators of Chalarka’s comics more
convincing, persuading readers to re-think
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 62
the relationships governing the world they
inhabited and to imagine their own agency
in transforming it. As former Fundación vol-
unteer Matilde Eljach observes in a 15 July
2009 interview in which she highlighted the
role of Juana Julia Guzmán, ‘People felt they
were the protagonists of the history of Juana
Julia. And that has political value.’
Few coastal peasants in the 1970s were
active readers, even if some could sign their
name on documents or write a few sentences
in a wobbly script. Pages of the graphic his-
tories were projected onto screens at work-
shops, the verbal content read aloud by the
few literate participants, provoking lively dis-
cussions in which elderly peasants recalled
their experiences of debt peonage or in the
grassroots organizations they had founded
decades before, which had confronted large
landowners. There is little information avail-
able, however, beyond the oral reminiscences
of Fundación members and a few transcripts
from workshops, to gauge campesino recep-
tiveness to these educational materials.
Moreover, their production and circulation
was an integral component of the wider activ-
ities of ANUC, so that their accomplishments
can only be read against the backdrop of the
successes and failures of the peasant move-
ment over the 1970s and its eventual break-
down in the 1980s (Zamosc, 1986b).
Fals Borda’s Legacy
The Fundación del Caribe and La Rosca
closed their doors by 1975 as a result of con-
flicts within the left and ANUC (Parra
Escobar, 1983; Rudqvist, 1986). Since then,
participatory action research has undergone
numerous transformations, best encapsulated
by Alfredo Molano, one of Fals Borda’s early
students and a chronicler of the Colombian
conflict:
In Colombia, we have passed from the dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie to the struggle for full respect
for human rights, or in other words, we have
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research
stopped fighting against the State, and are now
fighting for it. Before we were concerned with
militancy; now, our eyes are on participation. It is
as if Action Research had made us more modest.
Today we are prepared to accept equality; we are
undergoing a far-reaching redefinition of our own
relevance. The idea that the people need to be led
has fortunately been replaced by the excitement of
being among the people and the wonder of its
creative ability. Subjectivity has gained ground,
and allowed the heart to win some points against
the head. (Molano, 1998: 8)
Molano’s observations reflect the changing
nature of social protest across the globe, with
the advent of neoliberal policies that bound
popular movements to non-governmental
organizations, and, in the wake of the 1991
Constitution, fostered electoral participation
in new political parties as an alternative to
direct action and dreams of overthrowing the
current social order.
How have La Rosca’s interlinked objec-
tives of participation, critical recovery, and
systematic devolution fared in this changing
environment? In the summer of 2018, one of
us (Joanne Rappaport) took this question to
a series of grassroots organizations, research
institutes, and institutions of higher education
in different regions of Colombia, facilitating
a series of workshops with Indigenous activ-
ists, community organizers, health workers,
student activists, high-school students, and
university faculty, in which the three con-
cepts anchoring the work of La Rosca and
the Fundación del Caribe were presented
and evaluated in light of the objectives of the
diverse publics who participated in the events
(Rappaport, 2020: Ch. 7).
The seminars took place against a fraught
political backdrop. Presidential elections
held on 17 June 2018 brought to power Iván
Duque Márquez, a conservative politician
who rejected the 2016 peace accord signed
by then-President Juan Manuel Santos with
the FARC guerrillas. Workshop participants
anticipated that the extensive human rights
violations by the military and their paramili-
tary allies that marked the first decade of the
century would once again erupt (their fears
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 63
63
have been borne out since Duque’s elec-
tion, spurring massive public protest during
November 2019 in response to the assassina-
tion by armed right-wing actors of over 1000
social leaders since the signing of the accords).
‘Convivencia’ – the peaceful coexistence of
different parties to the conflict – was already
straining at the seams in 2018. For this rea-
son, many of the participants saw the work-
shops as a space in which they could think
through how their research methods might
be harnessed toward support of the peace
process and the building of a post-­conflict
Colombia. PAR was, for many of them,
an activist tool for constructing narratives that
would nourish an emancipatory concept of
society. Nonetheless, many of the workshop
participants struggled to imagine how the his-
tory of Fals Borda’s work on the Caribbean
coast could inform their own practice, given
the differences in the political and social
environments of the early 1970s and 2018.
As one of them so cogently – ­perhaps nostal-
gically – expressed: ‘What do we do today,
when the revolution is no longer around
the corner? There is no unified program for
social transformation that might resonate in
the academic world, nor among intellectuals
in social movements.’ How does the history
of a utopian research methodology steeped in
the universalist revolutionary ideology of the
1970s inspire today’s activists?
The audiences of the workshops were het-
erogeneous. Some participants had extensive
experience with PAR, while others were only
beginning to appreciate the methodological
options available to them, thus representing a
cross-section of the PAR community. Despite
their differences, they voiced similar appre-
ciations of what constituted PAR, describing
it as a combination of research methodology,
pedagogy, and politics, a ‘methodological-
political horizon.’ More than a set of research
techniques, they called it ‘a philosophy of life,
an emancipatory stand to confront the world,’
and a collectively constructed ethic, echoing
one of Fals Borda’s last writings (Fals Borda,
2008: 162). Channeling Fals’ notion of the
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 64 Key Influences and Foundations of Participatory Research
‘sentipensante’ or ‘thinking-feeling per-
son’ (Fals Borda, 2001: 30), a concept that
anchors his methodology to grassroots life-
worlds, they observed that PAR is a process
of coming to know something, combining
sentiment and analysis to construct a rela-
tionship among the participants and with the
broader social reality in which they live.
Early proponents of participatory research
were always somewhat unclear as to how
their methodology was to be applied. They
envisioned PAR as an epistemological
stance that fostered horizontal relationships
through a process of collective investiga-
tion and critical reflection, rather than as a
set of procedures (Hall, 1982). Nonetheless,
those workshop participants with little PAR
experience tended, when they described their
projects, to envision PAR as a set of recipes
or techniques, focusing in particular on time-
lines of events and social cartography, both
of which have become mainstays of human
rights research in Colombia (Riaño Alcalá,
2013). In effect, they reduced the scope of
participation by relegating the role of com-
munity members to that of clients, and they
forgot Fals Borda’s insistence that research
unfolds in a dialogic relationship to politi-
cal action. Only the most experienced PAR
practitioners at the workshops appear to have
used critical recovery and systematic devolu-
tion as guiding concepts in their work.
This was obvious, for example, at a meet-
ing held at the Association of Indigenous
Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN), in
southwestern highland Colombia, where the
Indigenous Nasa have revived a strategy of
civil disobedience that first brought their
organization into prominence in the 1970s
(with the support of La Rosca). Now rechris-
tened as the ‘liberation of Mother Earth,’
local activists occupy commercially owned
cane fields in the Cauca Valley, frequently
provoking violent repression on the part of
the military police. Participants in the ACIN
workshop described their efforts as a way of
regenerating their organizational memory
through political practice. They said that by
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 64
liberating Mother Earth they could teach
today’s activists that they are not ‘invaders,’
they were ‘recuperadores’ – political actors
taking back what is theirs. This is a form of
critical recovery expressed through direct
action and the recovery of the meanings con-
nected to land occupations in the past. Note
that it does not necessarily involve the col-
lection and systematizing of information, but
instead, dredges up memories in the course of
political practice.
How could critical recovery contribute to
promoting the Colombian peace process?
This was one of the central questions on the
table at many of the workshops. One of the
leaders of the Corporación ConVivamos,
a neighborhood organization in the city of
Medellín, explicitly connected critical recov-
ery to the challenges of the peace process
when he noted that an insistence on peace
as an objective has led to a homogenization
of political discourse, placing undue empha-
sis on juridical language. He recommended
that research into community history might
revive local ways of thinking and acting that
could expand the community’s notion of
what constitutes politics. This is precisely
what La Rosca intended when it posed the
possibilities inherent to the process of critical
recovery.
The projects on the table at the workshops
were considerably more modest than those
of La Rosca and the Fundación del Caribe,
and, as Alfredo Molano observes, less mili-
tant. They were dependent on short-term
funding that strictly delimits the scope and
content of their research activities, in contrast
to the open-ended and generous support that
La Rosca received from the US Presbyterian
Church, which exerted little control over the
research process. What Molano neglected
to include in his analysis of the changing
nature of PAR, however, is how much the
character of its practitioners has transcended
the model of a partnership between exter-
nal researchers and grassroots communi-
ties. Workshop participants interrogated
the meaningfulness of the divide between
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research
local and academic researchers, questioning
who, exactly, qualifies as an outsider. In an
increasingly urbanized country, young peo-
ple from working-class barrios and peasant
hamlets fill the classrooms of public univer-
sities. Under such circumstances, the notion
that a university-educated researcher is exter-
nal to the community has become somewhat
shop worn. The young researchers who par-
ticipated in the workshops move across a net-
work of non-governmental organizations and
research institutes where they find many who
share their social profile. This could not have
been imagined by Fals Borda in the 1970s.
The question today is not whether those with
a university education are ‘outsiders’ but,
instead, how researchers who are not affili-
ated with universities but who have access to
academic methods and ideas, can contribute
to the construction of new research method-
ologies. To complicate matters, the director of
ConVivamos pointed out that individual posi-
tionalities are not the only spaces of enuncia-
tion that are relevant to PAR. He compellingly
argued that research alliances not only take
place between individuals, but between insti-
tutions. Drawing on Fals Borda’s experience,
he pointed out that there was a difference
between the relationship of a campesino to
ANUC and La Rosca’s relationship with the
peasant movement. In other words, interven-
tion and dialogue occur simultaneously on
multiple scales, where power differentials
operate in distinct manners.
Conclusion
Among the major contributions of Fals
Borda’s approach to PAR is an insistence on
drawing on the collectively interpreted past
experience of subordinated groups to analyze
and transform the conditions of their present.
At the same time, Fals urged researchers to
maintain a political commitment to grass-
roots organizations in order to build a hori-
zontal research relationship with them. They
BK-SAGE-BURNS_ET_AL-210124-Chp05.indd 65
65
called the process of re-examining the past to
transform the present ‘critical recovery,’
which, they argued, would only be successful
if the project was ‘participatory’ and activist
in nature: if through it, an intellectual and
political relationship was constructed with
social movements. This involved the partici-
pation of organizational members in the
construction of a research agenda, in the col-
lection of research materials, and in the dis-
semination of results, but it also involved a
political participation on the part of external
researchers in the organization, including, in
the case of the Fundación del Caribe, facili-
tating workshops, providing legal assistance,
and participating in land occupations. Such a
departure from conventional research models
generated a creative tension in the research
process that still bears profound implications
for the type of knowledge that PAR produces
and the ways in which such knowledge can
be used. While it is true that the Fundación
was only partially successful in establishing
horizontal relationships and in impacting the
future of ANUC, their experience points to
an approach to activist research that contin-
ues to be relevant today.
Fals envisioned creative tension as emerg-
ing out of an intersubjective dialogue between
external researchers and grassroots research-
ers. Today, given the growing influence of
Indigenous and Afro-descendent researchers
in Latin America, we would call this rela-
tionship a diálogo de saberes, an exchange
between different epistemologies (de Sousa
Santos, 2018). In the early 1970s, it was
framed as a conversation between ‘people’s
knowledge’ originating in ‘common sense,’
instead of epistemological difference, and
‘scientific inquiry,’ which, in many of Fals’
texts, was identified as ‘universal,’ despite
the fact that he very consciously situated his
theoretical and methodological contributions
in the Latin American intellectual context.
In any case, these objectives were clearly
emancipatory, both in their foreground-
ing the hitherto-ignored point of view of
the oppressed and in their radical rewriting
06/07/21 5:29 PM
 66 Key Influences and Foundations of Participatory Research
of research methods, even if their achieve-
ments were limited by the political context.
Such an approach to PAR required a process
of counter-education or systematic devolu-
tion, through which subjects were simulta-
neously educated and involved in a research
process whose central concepts grew out of
their worldviews. Borrowing an idea from the
peasants of the Caribbean region, Fals envi-
sioned this as the building of intersubjective
empathy between ‘thinking-feeling persons,’
who combine the use of reason with attention
to feelings, the head with the heart.
Today’s PAR practitioners face a differ-
ent political climate than Fals Borda and his
associates did. Today’s Colombia is far more
dangerous than it was in the 1970s. Moreover,
many of the organizations with which La
Rosca collaborated are not as strong as they
were in the past (the Indigenous movement
being an exception). The meanings of ‘criti-
cal recovery’ and ‘systematic devolution’
have shifted over the past 40 years, as the
number of practitioners grew, ceding way to
a more recipe-driven methodology. We hope
that our brief description of Orlando Fals
Borda’s early forays into participatory action
research will stimulate today’s PAR research-
ers to revisit his contributions and deepen his
legacy.
Notes
1  The English version commonly used to refer to
ANUC translates ‘usuarios’ as ‘users,’ however,
it may be clearer for English-speaking readers to
translate ‘usuarios’ as ‘clients of the state,’ which
cogently expresses how the Colombian govern-
ment viewed its relationship to peasants.
2  This portion of our chapter draws from and sum-
marizes arguments laid out in Rappaport (2020).
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