See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/350710300

Under the Pavement Makeup: Muisca Territory Beyond Culture and Nature

Preprint · August 2020

CITATIONS READS
0 423

1 author:

Daniel Rubio Rosas

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
3 PUBLICATIONS 0 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Daniel Rubio Rosas on 07 April 2021.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Taught Masters Dissertation

SCHOOL of DIVINITY
The University of Edinburgh

Course Name: Dissertation (MSc in Religious Studies)

Dissertation Title: Under the Pavement Makeup: Muisca Territory Beyond Culture and
Nature.

Date: August 24, 2020

Author: Daniel RubioRosas

Supervisor: Dr. Arkotong Longkumer

1
 UNDER THE PAVEMENT MAKEUP
Muisca Territory Beyond Culture and Nature

Content:

Introduction: ......................................................................................................................... 3
Chapter 1: “Why Are We Indigenous?” ............................................................................ 8
The Roots of Raizales ....................................................................................................... 10
Politics of Indigeneity....................................................................................................... 12
Culture and Nature in Modernity...................................................................................... 16
Chapter 2: Muisca Territory Beyond Culture and Nature ............................................ 19
Territories in tension ......................................................................................................... 20
‘Encantos’ Beyond Culture and Nature ............................................................................ 23
Chapter 3: Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Bogotá Savannah ..................................... 29
A common territory .......................................................................................................... 30
Worlding ........................................................................................................................... 34
Muisca Cosmopolitics ...................................................................................................... 38
Final Remarks: ................................................................................................................... 42
Figures: ................................................................................................................................ 44
Sources: ............................................................................................................................... 45

2
Introduction:

«Tres siglos correrán de ingrato nombre,

Fanatismo, terror, infamia i pena,
Atado el pueblo a la servil cadena
Del tirano i brutal conquistador;
Mas de Hunsahúa los nietos, aquí mismo,
Bajo del sol que mi martirio alumbre,
Sacudirán la imbécil servidumbre
En los brazos de un Gran Libertador1

—Próspero Pereira Gamba,

“Last prophecy of Modan the seer”
Akimen-Zaque, o La conquista de Tunja (1858)

One of the most famous passages in anthropology is perhaps that of Clifford

Geertz’s ‘wink’, an example to explain his notions of culture and frames of meaning: “The
thing to ask about a burlesqued wink”, he says, “is not what [its] ontological status is. It is
the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other—they are things of this
world. The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is (…) that, in their occurrence and
through their agency, is getting said” (1973: 10). The ontological certainty of a single
empirical reality—the ‘things of this world’— and the conviction that culture is the
semiotic context in which such reality receives a meaning—what ‘is getting said’ and
anthropology must analyse—has come into question in the last decades. The issue is: why
are rocks and dreams confidently classified as ‘things of this world’ or ‘nature’, while
spirits and magic are usually deemed ‘cultural’, ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ beliefs and
interpretations of the empirical reality? According to Colombian anthropologists, Arturo
Escobar (2016), the idea that the world is only one—the empirical reality in front of us—is
not universal or natural. On the contrary, even though it is usually “taken as the common
sense understanding of ‘the way things are,’ the One-World world is the result of particular

1
“Three centuries will go by with ungrateful name, / Fanaticism, terror, infamy and sorrow, / Tied the people
to the servile chain / Of the tyrannical and brutal conqueror;/ Yet the grandchildren of Hunsahúa, right here, /
Under the sun my martyrdom illuminates, / Will shake the imbecilic bondage / In the arms of a Great
Liberator.”

3
practices and historical choices. A crucial moment in the emergence of such practices was
the Conquest of America, which some consider the point of origin of our current
modern/colonial world system” (2016: 21). The “ontological occupation” of indigenous
territories has not seized since the sixteenth century; on the contrary, the consolidation of
settler Nation-States and the expansion of globalized capitalism has stretched the frontiers
of modernity and cemented the “One-World world” at the expense of local realities. There
are, however, resistances and quiet endurances of these alternative worlds, in which by
“interrupting the neoliberal globalizing project of constructing One World, many
indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and poor urban communities are advancing
ontological struggles” (2016: 20). In the following pages one of this indigenous struggles
will be addressed: the case of the Muisca people in Colombia, their issues with indigeneity,
their territorial disputes, and their relation with the State, always insisting on the
importance of unravelling the ontological presuppositions of modernity to approach in a
more horizontal way what is often called ‘spirituality’ or ‘worldviews’.

The struggle takes place in Bogotá, a vast sprawl of brick and pavement embedded
in the eastern mountain range of the Colombian Andes, that houses nearly eight million
people as the capital city of Colombia. It was founded in 1538 by Gonzalo Jiménez de
Quesada in the high-altitude plateau that he initially called ‘Valley of the Alcazares’ since,
in the eyes of the Spaniard General, the large and perfectly squared wooden palisades that
proliferated throughout the discernible landscape, enclosing round buildings of different
sizes, resembled the Moorish fortresses of his native Andalusia (Mejía Pavony, 2012). And
yet, Bogotá already existed; he had just arrived there, in Muyquytá2, the residence of
Tisquesusa, lord or zipa of the southern Muisca people. The Muisca (or Mozca, or even
Mhuysqa3), as most native nations of the Americas, were subjected to forced labour and
died massively due to the physical abuse and illness, until eventually they were grouped in
communally owned lands called resguardos where they were able to live and farm paying
tribute to the Spanish Crown (Mejía Pavony, 2012; Del Castillo, 2019). However, a

2
This is the most probable etymology, but there is no absolute certainty of the name of the
indigenous town.
3
Contemporary communities have adopted new grammatical forms, potentially as a disruption of the
historical Hispanization of indigenous names. In the present research the form ‘Muisca’ will be used in order
to maintain cohesion with the different sources.

4
romantic idea of the Muisca past, their ‘kingdoms’, and their resistance against the Spanish
aggressors started to emerge in public discourse as a foundational image linking the
indigenous struggles of the sixteenth century with the nineteenth-century efforts for
independence. Despite the rhetoric imagery of a glorious Muisca past, the contemporary
indigenous population was excluded from the creole4 national project (Guarín Martínez,
2005). With the independence from Spain and the consolidation of a Nation-State came a
policy of ethnic and cultural assimilation towards mestizaje (‘miscegenation’) (Esteban
Palma, 2017b). Most Muisca resguardos were dissolved and its lands privatized during the
nineteenth century (Del Castillo, 2019). In the end, the authorized version of history “taught
at schools and presented to the public in museums” stated that the Muisca civilization was
“exterminated by the Spanish, leaving no descendants apart from the mestizos that are now
the majority of the inhabitants of Bogota and its surrounding towns” (Esteban Palma,
2017b: 5). Independence and the creation of the Republic meant nothing for these
indigenous peoples. On the contrary, as the modern project of Nation-State was based upon
the principle of mestizaje, indigenous peoples and their specificity were rendered invisible.

The 1991 Constitution proclaimed for the first time that Colombia was a
multicultural and pluri-ethnic Nation-State. In such changing political climate, various
communities from the peripheries of Bogotá started progressively coming forward and
claiming they were contemporary Muisca (Goubert, 2019). Their claims were initially met
with scepticism, due to the endurance of in the popular imaginary of the romanticised idea
of the Muisca as a people of the past, and because neighbouring communities saw their
claim only as an opportunistic way of accessing State benefits (Esteban Palma, 2017: 35).
However, five Muisca communities managed to obtain legal recognition and organized
themselves in Cabildos—an indigenous form of government—, two of them located within
the city and the rest within the surrounding territory known as the Bogotá Savannah (Fig.1).
This geographic region consists of the southern portion of the high altitude plateau known
as the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, a large area between the 2,500 and 2,760 meters above
sea level that, at the arrival of the Europeans, comprised most of the territory inhabited by
the Muisca (Fig. 2); this predominantly rural landscape is today home to many agricultural

4
Descendant of white Europeans born in the Americas.

5
communities, called in Spanish campesinos (‘peasants’ or ‘small-holder farmers’). In Latin
American countries there is often a blurry line between what is considered indigenous and
what is considered campesino (Gómez Montañez 2019: 34). However, the close similarities
and historical coexistence between the campesinos of this region and the Muisca
communities makes this a very particular case and a complicated situation for the latter, as
their indigenous identity is constantly under question by the State and the general public.
The process of recognition has been a long and complex one, attracting the attention of
several researchers for the last thirty years. It is precisely these ethnographic accounts and
descriptions of the Muisca territory the main focus of the current study: the diverse features
and stories mentioned by the people that inhabit it, which are generally approached in these
ethnographic analysis as particularities of the culture, local spiritualties or worldviews. The
confluence of the ontological and political struggles for the land have been usually left
unattended. This research will propose a different approach to the published ethnographic
material, in which the accounts of the territory will be understood as alternative worlds
struggling for their existence, asserting the necessity of approaching them with the same
prerogative to reality as the ever-expanding world of modernity and its scientific rationale.

Conflicting worlds are never entirely separated and people are often circulating in
between these entangled realities. Relationality and comparison are also central aspects of
indigeneity, and precisely this “indigenous empirical self-comparison” presents “an
opportunity to scholars of religion” who can “contribute to theorising discourses of
indigeneity by way of our hard-earned lessons regarding failures of the comparative method
and ways to nuance rejuvenated approaches to comparative practice” (Johnson and Kraft,
2017: 11). Indeed, for Richard King (2017) the “comparative study of religion is a
privileged location to engage in ‘truly comparative humanities’ as it gives the broadest
perspective with which to comment on modernity” (2017: 18). In the modern One-world
model of reality, that distinguishes between the universal empirical reality of science and its
local discursive interpretations, a critique of modernity can be engaged from the latter
perspective by comparatively approaching “historical and non-Western contexts since these
serve as the primary sites of difference from which one may view dominant Western
models of modernity in their historical and cultural specificity” (ibid). Taking this even
further, one might compare, relativize and question, not just the “cultural” but rather the

6
ontological specificity of modernity and its universalizing project. To accomplish this, the
first chapter will be devoted to exploring Muisca indigeneity, their internal debates on what
makes them indigenous, the eminently political and relational characteristics of the
‘indigenous’ identity, and the importance of the ‘roots’ that connect the community with
their ancestral territory. In the second chapter, the focus will be in the territory itself: the
conflicts between the urban and the Muisca territorialities, and the elements, relations and
practices that constitute this struggling indigenous territory. The final section will delve
into the ontological politics or ‘cosmopolitics’ (De la Cadena, 2010) of claiming a Muisca
indigeneity and territory, not only in relation with the State but also with the campesino
majorities which share with them parcels of these struggling worlds.

7
Chapter 1: “Why Are We Indigenous?”

Now my face shows you that I am not white.

I am a Muisca india of red colour.
Because to be seen I’ve had to paint and hide my true face.
To be named I’ve changed my ancestral name.
Today I am Alba and not Sajipa, the successor of Tisquesusa.
Hopefully to live we don’t have to die.
Suba Chogue Za, Chogue Za Suba.
Good night Suba, Suba good night. 5

—Alba Mususú Rico (1999),

former Governor of the Muisca Indigenous Cabildo of Suba.

In the patio of the Muisca Indigenous Cabildo of Bosa, located in the south-western
margin of Bogotá, the Muisca governor Reinel Neuta asks during a meeting of Cabildo
members: “why are we indigenous?”. Multiple answers are discussed in the debate that
arises and one of the present, a young woman named Sandra, shares her opinion:

Well, I am indigenous because I belong to this land, because since I was born I have
been in it, because my ancestors have been in this land. I learned the love for this land
and my customs from generation to generation. An everyday life that comes from
generation to generation and makes us different; because despite it might not be
noticeable, we are indeed different (in Martínez Medina, 2009: 24).

In Sandra’s intervention, there are two elements associated with the self-recognition as
indigenous: land and difference. Regarding the first one, and unlike other indigenous
communities in the region, both the Suba and Bosa Cabildos were denied the possibility of
regaining formerly collective land due to the growing urbanization and the high cost of
property in the area (Goubert, 2019: 53); however, a close bond with the territory is still

5
All translations from Spanish are done by the author. A clarification will be provided in brackets if there is
more than one possible translation. Local terms and concepts will remain in the original language but a literal
approximation or an explanatory footnote will be provided when possible.

8
fundamental for these ‘urban’ Muisca and their reconstruction of indigenous identity. The
sense of belonging to the motherland is emphasised by Sandra as a marker of difference
between the life-long inhabitants of the territory—particularly the families descended from
the residents of the old resguardo—and the recently arrived settlers. This distinction points
towards the most literal meaning of the word ‘indigenous’, which suggests on itself this
sense of belonging and difference, of being native to a territory or descendant of the
original peoples that inhabited it before others. Nevertheless, there are many meanings to
the term ‘indigenous’ and, as suggested by Alan Barnard, “being an ‘indigenous people’
bears relation only in a rather loose sense to most of these” (2006: 1). Although the
connection with the homeland is fundamental in this discussion, being ‘indigenous’ to
somewhere is not the same thing as being the ‘indigenous people’ of the place (2006: 7-9).

In response to Sandra, Governor Neuta argues that this yearn for the motherland is
not on itself a justification of Muisca indigeneity, asking if “the environmentalists, for
example, do they not [want/love]6 their territory as well? The campesinos, do they not
[want /love] their territory as well?” (in Martínez Medina, 2009: 24). By bringing up the
cases of other social agents who participate as well in struggles for the defence of their
territories, Reinel does not deny the importance of the land for the Cabildo members, but
rather puts it in perspective. Since the beginnings of Colombian anthropology in the 1940s,
the importance of the territory was acknowledged as one of the main characteristics of the
indigenous peoples in the country and their relations with the rest of the national society
(Correa, 2006: 35). However, the issue of land ownership is a widespread historic struggle
for many social groups and one of the main reasons behind the decades-long internal armed
conflict (Fajardo, 2015; Luna, 2019). Although anthropologists have interpreted it as an
essential element in the characterization of indigenous peoples, as well as a fundamental
component of Muisca indigeneity, the reclamation of land and the territorial disputes are
not an exclusive feature of indigenous communities in Colombia. The Governor’s question
acknowledges this context and thus, with the certainty that there is indeed something that
differentiates them from others, he insists on thinking further about the kind of relation

6
The Spanish verb ‘querer’ can mean, depending on the context, both to want or to love something. In this
case both meanings are possible and point towards fairly the same idea.

9
Muiscas have with their land and what makes it particularly ‘indigenous’ in contrast to
other practices and experiences of the territory.

The Roots of Raizales

In response to his insistence, a member of the Cabildo named Mery brings to the
discussion one of the first and most important approaches to identity and difference that the
Muisca have used since before they had any indigenous recognition; she says: “What
differentiates us is the root. That this is our territory, that we have a special sense of
belonging with it” (in Martínez Medina, 2009: 24). The argument emerges in relation with
the endonym raizal (derived from the Spanish word for ‘root’: raiz), which refers to the
rural communities that in the past self-identified as “‘descendants of indios7’ and in some
occasions as ‘indios’ descendants of the Muiscas” (Carrillo , 1997: Chapter 1.1). These
communities that called themselves raizal later engaged in the process sometimes referred
to as ‘ethnogenesis’ or ‘re-indigenization’ (Gómez Londoño, 2005; Durán, 2005; Esteban
Palma, 2017a, b), which led to the organization of the various Muisca Indigenous Cabildos.
The term emphasises a differentiation based on territorial belonging, referring to those who
were “born and raised” in that territory (Martínez Medina, 2009: 24) and have their ‘roots’
in that land, as opposed to the recently arrived settlers, the fuereños (‘outsiders’) (Martínez
Medina, 2010: 160). It expresses simultaneously both territoriality and difference, the same
factors that according to Sandra made them indigenous. The term is seemingly not different
from the notion of ‘indigenous’, however the idea of having one’s raíz—the root—
embedded in the land recognises an additional value and dimension of belonging to the
territory beyond strict ownership or habitation. For Carlos A. Durán (2005), the ethnonym
raizal suggests two possible metaphors that reflect their “system of symbols and the bond
with the territory”: “the land as mother (…) and the land as symbolic space where culture
has been nurtured and the roots of the community’s genealogical tree have grown” (362).

7
‘Indians’; colonial terminology to speak about indigenous peoples from the Americas. Although it is
sometimes used today by older people, it often has a pejorative connotation when speaking about living
communities.

10
These possible implications add contextual meaning to the term raizal beyond the generic
definition of ‘indigenous’ and the mere fact of being native to a physical territory. It
emphasises the significance of the land as the origin of the community, the repository of its
latent history and dwelling place of their diseased but still abiding ancestors. As one of the
highly respected elders of Bosa replied to the Governor’s question: “I can account for the
cemetery, for the church, for my grandparents… We are indigenous because my ancestors
are buried here. Because they are sowed here. We have always been here” (Beatriz
Chiguasuque, in Martínez Medina, 2009: 24). The agricultural language in which the sense
of belonging is articulated suggests a parallel between the relation they have with the
territory and that of a crop in the ground: just like a plant the Muisca or raizal are seeded
and nurtured by the soil of their territory, they have long roots stretching deep into the land
making them materially inseparable from it without the risk of withering away. Being
raizal entails a situated experience of the territory, the community, and the intertwined
histories of both; it suggests more than the literal meaning of ‘indigenous’ and could be
understood—like Mery suggests—as the contextualized Muisca way of being ‘indigenous
peoples’.

The term raizal is the one preferred by many elders who reject the name
‘indigenous’ because of its proximity with the label indio: for them, ‘indigenous’ carries the
same derogatory stereotypes with which they were stigmatized when growing up (Martínez
Medina, 2009: 28). In the past, due to the historical violence and exclusion, many
descendants of Muiscas and life-long inhabitants of their traditional territory chose not to
“self-identify as indigenous (let alone as indios), but as raizales, marmatos, natives, typical
of the place, or simply as campesinos” (Gómez Montañez, 2019: 163). It has been in
relatively recent decades that raizales have started to publicly recognize as Muisca and as
indigenous people in a context of political and territorial struggle where, thanks to the
changing institutional policies, recognizing in such way had benefits in specific situations.
For instance, Doña Dioselina Tiviño Bulla—a Muisca leader from Suba—could not
initially believe what a man called Carlos Caita started telling local families about the
“indigenous peoples of Suba” after he had discovered maps of the indigenous resguardo in
the National Archive. However, after considering her own struggle to recover the lands that
were usurped from her mother, she decided to join the very first indigenous organization in

11
Suba (Gómez Montañes, 2019). Her daughter Myriam explains that starting to identify as
‘indigenous’ was a hard transition and something difficult to grasp: “When I was taught
history at school they told me [the Muiscas were] something of the past, I didn’t understand
this very well and in the beginning I was embarrassed […], they were scornful because [it
is commonly thought that] the indigenous person is the one in loincloths[;] this is the
[common] view and it is not the people's fault, because they were taught that an indigenous
person wears a loincloth and feathers” (Myriam Martínez Triviño, in Gómez Montañes,
2019: 119). According to her the process of colonization that the Muisca had to endure was
so hard, particularly in the Bogotá Savanah, that the idea of being an ‘indigenous person’
became derogatory; they were “the filthy ones, the savages, the ignorant, the ones who
knew nothing” (ibid., 121). Identifying as ‘indigenous’ was especially difficult, if not
outright inconceivable, for the older generations. It was not accepted, for example, by
Bárbara Bulla—Dioselina’s mother and Myriam’s grandmother–, who had all her life
referred to themselves as ‘native’, a term which did not hide “the roots of her ancestors nor
her relation with the territory of Suba. What she seemingly wanted to deny was the
prejudice that the term [indigenous] entails” (Gómez Montañes, 2019: 121). Despite
avoiding the use of the expression ‘indigenous’, this does not mean that the awareness of
being somewhat different from the rest of the population appeared out of nowhere as an
excuse to claim indigeneity and profit from it, as some non-indigenous neighbouring
communities claim (Esteban Palma, 2017: 35, 40). However, the existing sense of
difference present in longstanding terms like ‘native’ or ‘raizal’, was articulated following
new categories and re-elaborated notions—such as ‘indigenous peoples’—that allowed
them to establish relations with the State in more favourable conditions than ever before.

Politics of Indigeneity

During the final decades of the past century, many marginalized communities in
South America—particularly along the Andes—which in the past did not identify as
‘indigenous’ saw in the change of Political Constitutions and the newly introduced

12
multiculturalist discourse a strategic platform to demand recognition and claim their
historically neglected rights (Canessa, 2007; Gros, 2013; Burman, 2014). Indigeneity, as a
way to conceptualize difference and marginality, came to be seen as a distinct—and more
beneficial—way to relate with the State “rather than a system of meanings generated from
within a particular culture” (Canessa, 2007: 210). For this reason, Barnard considers that
the concept of ‘indigenous peoples’ is of little use in ethnographic description, however, it
should not be dismissed so promptly despite its conceptual inadequacy, as diverse groups
of people demanding their basic rights have made political use of the notion in public
discourse (Barnard, 2006: 8-10). So, despite not being very accurate as an anthropological
notion, it is “an ideological and social construct recognised by those who claim the status
[of ‘indigenous people’], by anthropologists who support their cause and no doubt by the
educated public at large” (2006: 7). Identifying as ‘indigenous’ as a political way to
conceptualize difference, especially in regards to their connection with the land, is what the
Governor Reinel Neuta highlights as a possible answer to his insightful question:

I am indigenous because I feel indigenous. Don’t forget where we come from. (…) If we
were born in Spain or something like that we would not be able to reclaim being
indigenous. Where are we from? Well, from here, and there was a resguardo here… We
are not the descendants, we are the original indigenous people, we have always been here.
So firstly I feel indigenous, and secondly, I have roots, thus I am indigenous (Reinel
Neuta in Martínez Medina, 2009: 25).

The importance that Reinel gives to self-identification as a reason for his indigeneity is, for
some scholars, one of the criteria for being ‘indigenous’. For Sidsel Saugestad, the
contemporary consensus in anthropology, law and politics, regarding who is ‘indigenous’
revolves around four components that characterise relations between peoples and modern
nation-states: “first come (i.e. that ‘indigenous people’ are descended from people who
were there before others); non-dominance (i.e. that they are under alien state structures);
cultural difference (i.e. difference from the majority population, with the assumption that
‘indigenous people’ are in the minority); and self-ascription” (in Barnard 2006: 7). In this
case, Reinel’s answer favours self-ascription as the most important reason but
acknowledges that this is only possible thanks to the special relation with their land, the fact
that they belong there and they are the original inhabitants of the area; in other words, he
13
acknowledges what Saugestad calls the ‘first-come’ criteria, which in the particular Muisca
context is encompassed in the idea of being raizal.

The root, the origin, the bond with the land, are signs of a difference that was
historically a source of marginalization and violence, but is articulated today for their
benefit in a modern political scenario. In recognizing themselves as ‘indigenous’ and
appropriating the notion, Reinel sees a way of opposing the disparaging treatment that their
recent ancestors had to endure and reaffirming the previously shameful difference to exhort
the institutional apparatus:

Remember as well that the grandparents where scorned. People told them they were the
indios of Bosa. The nicknames (…) made them feel embarrassed. That is the conception
that we need to change. That is the importance of the Cabildo. The Cabildo changes the
way of thinking. Nowadays a lot of people are not embarrassed. Now people do not say
[that they are indigenous] with embarrassment but demanding. (Reinel Neuta in Martínez
Medina, 2009: 28).

The possibility of demanding their rights is for Reinel a crucial implication of their
indigeneity, as well as the possibility of “transforming themselves in relation to the Other,
the colonizer, or the city, the new invader” (Martínez Medina, 2009: 29). Indeed,
identifying as ‘indigenous’ and organizing the community around this previously foreign or
shameful identity is only possible vis-a-vis an Other: besides the majoritarian society, this
alterity includes the modern nation-state and its institutions as it is in relation to them that
identifying as ‘indigenous peoples’ presents a political and strategic platform to demand
their neglected rights. But, although allied scholars like Barnard consider that non-
dominance and self-ascription are the most important aspects of this relation between
‘indigenous peoples’ and States (Barnard, 2006: 7), and despite Reinel has also highlighted
the importance of their roots (the first come component), for the Colombian State the
criteria to determine who is and who is not ‘indigenous’ focuses on the demonstrable
cultural difference.

Even though the new 1991 Political Constitution was a legal breakthrough for
indigenous peoples’ rights, anthropologist François Correa considers that the

14
transformations of the State and its institutions do not depend only on its formal
declaration, but rather on how they materialize in the relation with indigenous people:
“more than the notions employed by the State, the importance is on the policy that backs
them, as its criteria become required imperatives when deciding the subject of rights. This
is the case of the criteria that requires sharing ‘values, traits, customs or traditions of their
culture’, that ‘distinguish them from other communities’ of the country” (Correa,
2016:142). As Correa rightly points out, despite the progressive normative the requirements
to be legally recognized as ‘indigenous people’ ignores the long history of state policies
aimed at the disarticulation of indigenous societies and now demands them to demonstrate
clear differences from the majoritarian citizenry they were forced to integrate (2016: 143).
And although there has been a sense of difference preserved through generations of raizales
or Muiscas, it is not always something easy to demonstrate, especially when it has to be
done in the modern terminology of the Nation-State. For instance, although the Cabildo of
Suba was the first Muisca Cabildo to be legally recognized—in 1990–, in 1999 the National
Office of Indigenous Affairs decided to dissolve it due to a “suspiciously high increase of
Muisca population with access to free health services within six months” (Goubert, 2019:
51). Following this drawback, their attempt to regain recognition was rejected after a socio-
economic study concluded that they lacked the differentiated characteristics to consider
them indigenous. Finally, the strategy of ‘cultural restoration’ adopted by the community of
Suba “proved successful in 2005, when the cabildo regained legal recognition, this time not
only based on colonial titles, but also on proving they maintained certain cultural traits”
(2019: 52). This situation resembles what happens with the term raizal, which is useless
when trying to relate with government institutions; they have to identify instead as
‘indigenous peoples’, adopting the concepts used by the State to articulate their difference.
Likewise, the roots that connect them to the territory of their ancestors—the raizal sense of
difference—and the colonial records that demonstrate the origin of the community in
connection to the old resguardo, was not enough to fulfil the State’s requirements and
prove their claim of indigeneity. Instead, they had to describe themselves and their
difference using the modern conception of ‘culture’.

15
Culture and Nature in Modernity

Ideas like ‘cultural difference’ or ‘cultural traits’, which surround the State’s
definitions of ‘indigenous peoples’, are not transparent or universal notions but rather a
product of western modernity. According to Santiago Castro-Gómez, ‘modernity’ and the
technology of power called ‘coloniality’ are not successive events of history, but rather
“two faces of one same coin” (2005: 18, 67), both making reference to the paradigmatic
changes that the European colonial enterprise started to impose throughout the world from
the sixteenth century onwards. As part of this modern/colonial project of domination the
“idea that nature and man are ontologically separated spheres, and that the role of
knowledge is to exercise rational control over the world, was gently imposed. That is to say
that the ultimate role of knowledge is (…) the decomposition of reality into fragments to
dominate it” (Castro-Gómez, 2007: 82). The representation of human individuals—in
charge of politics—was separated from the representation of ‘things’—now trusted to
science—, a divide that in turn produced “our modern world, a world in which the
representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated
from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract” (Latour,
1993: 27, 29). The rise of twenty-first-century Constitutions in Latin America gave political
recognition to indigenous peoples as differentiated communities with special rights and
representation before the law. This incorporated them into the social contract of the modern
State, which governs human subjects and its relations but excludes ‘nature’ as a separate
domain, divesting it of any political significance or agency. And although this might have
cleared the path for marginalized individuals who gained participation in previously
restricted political spaces—like the cases of Alejandro Toledo in Peru and Evo Morales in
Bolivia, both men of descent who managed to become presidents (De la Cadena, 2008:
4)—, the multicultural neoliberalism of the new Constitutions contributed to the
advancement of modernity/coloniality’s project. As De la Cadena and Starn have pointed
out, critics of this model claim that “‘multicultural neoliberalism’ incorporates ‘diversity’
as little more than a strategy of management, containment, and global capitalist expansion
without any real change to structures of racial hierarchy and economic inequality” (2007:

16
8). Political representation and recognition of ‘ethnic’ citizens in the “classificatory
imagination of the law” (Martínez Medina, 2009: 24) is analogous to the modern rationale
that fragments reality as a means to classify, manage and contain it.

The State deals with indigeneity as a policy of classification that operates within the
domain of human representation which, therefore, has nothing to do with the understanding
of ‘nature’ and nonhumans—classified in a separate sphere of reality in charge of science,
not politics. The idea of ‘culture’ is therefore favoured as a guideline to characterize what
indigeneity legally means. The concept seeks to describe the diversity within the
ontological parcel of humanity presupposing its absolute disconnection from everything
considered nonhuman or ‘natural’ phenomena. The notion of ‘culture’, says Bruno Latour,
is “an artefact created by bracketing Nature off”; however, “Cultures—different or
universal—do not exist, any more than Nature does” (1993: 104). This divide is not
necessarily present elsewhere, yet Westerners have historically assumed its universality as a
foundational principle of modernity. According to colonial specialist Luis Fernando
Restrepo (2005), in the complex context of colonialism there were multiple and competing
views of nature, thus “it is not possible to assume that the Western distinction between
nature and culture was universal” (2005: 184). Its absence among diverse peoples is usually
addressed precisely as an expression of ‘cultural difference’ and a lack of understanding of
the universal empirical reality that lays beneath local interpretations:

we are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture, between
Science and Society, whereas in our eyes all the others—whether they are Chinese or
Amerindian, Azande or Barouya—cannot really separate what is knowledge from what is
Society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes from Nature as it is from what their
cultures require. Whatever they do, however adapted, regulated and functional they may
be, they will always remain blinded by this confusion; they are prisoners of the social and
of language alike. Whatever we do, however criminal, however imperialistic we may be,
we escape from the prison of the social or of language to gain access to things themselves
through a providential exit gate, that of scientific knowledge. The internal partition
between humans and nonhumans defines a second partition—an external one this time—
through which the moderns have set themselves apart from the premoderns (Latour, 1993:
99).

17
Essential for the “criminal” and “imperialistic” expansion of modernity through colonialism
were both of these partitions, as a way to set colonizers apart from the colonized and to
eradicate local worldviews that lacked the artificial nature-culture divide. In the Americas,
indigenous and African views were suppressed by the modern perspective of science and
capitalism that saw nature as an object to be dominated and exploited.

The integration of the Muisca society to the colonial capitalist system intended to
erase the local sense of ‘nature’ to allow the exploitation of the territory, for instance, by
“de-sacralising” spaces where they refused to farm or mine (Restrepo, 2005: 184-185).
Nowadays, due to the same imposition of the nature-culture divide and the epistemological
unimportance that non-scientific knowledge has in modernity, the raizal or Muisca ways of
conceptualizing their difference is not considered enough justification to re-gain legal
recognition as ‘indigenous people’ and demand reparations. The roots and their particular
territory have no validity unless presented as ‘ancestral beliefs’ or ‘local customs’ within
the sphere of ‘culture’: and interpretation of reality that does not dispute the universalist
authority of science. While the modern representation of ‘nature’ through science is
conceptually separated from human contingencies and deemed objective, the Muisca
account of their territory and what makes them part of it is only recognized when framed as
a subjective product of a particular culture entirely separated from the actual materiality
described. However, the material territory inhabited by the Muisca is much more complex
and less restricted to the cultural boundaries of their communities. According to Marisol de
la Cadena (2010) when “indigenous movements summon ‘culture’ this notion has the
capacity to include (what we call) nature also as other-than-human beings that are not
allowed a voice in the established political language” (350). These elements of the territory
articulated within the inadequate limits of ‘culture’ have been distorted and separated from
the materiality of everyday life. To approach them it is necessary to think past this
paradigmatic division between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, so that the full picture of the territory
and the roots of Muiscas and raizales becomes, not only clearer but politically significant.

18
Chapter 2: Muisca Territory Beyond Culture and Nature

Suba, I still love you, Suba, in

arms of a sad moon, you agonize,
you… My root, my sacred tree,
that harbours invisible treasures.

—Gonzalo Gómez Cabiativava (2005)8

For Iván M. Niviayo, Muisca Governor of the Suba Cabildo, the territory “has been
one of the central elements on which the muysca ethnicity of Suba has been built and, at the
same time, is one of the topics that has been scarcely researched” (Niviayo, 2017: 78).
Nevertheless, it seems like since the first ethnographic accounts of the contemporary
Muisca or raizles the researchers have indeed highlighted the importance of the territory,
often picturing it in a very different way from other conceptions of land and nature that
predominate in modernity. For instance, in 1997, María Teresa Carrillo Avendaño produced
a collaborative research—perhaps the first with these communities—with several raizal
people from Suba, Cota, Chía and Tenjo titled The Paths of Water (‘Los Caminos del
Agua’). The aim was to (re)construct or assemble the different local discourses about the
territory, scattered throughout the region in what she denominated the ‘paths’ or ‘cycles’ of
water: a picture of the macro-territorial processes, phenomena, features and beings that
shape the landscape inhabited for generations by the Muisca. She describes the “characters
of the remote past (…) that, for [raizales], still survive in nature”, and manages to organize
and compare the different versions of “stories about giant golden snakes, men who could
control the waters, living lakes, [and] trains in the fog…” (Carrillo, 1997: 1.1). These
narratives depict a significantly different territory from the officialised worldview that the
modern State has defended since the very first scientific explorations of the regional
landscape—like the Royal Botanical Expedition (1783-1816) or the Chorographic
Commission (1850-1862). These systematic assessments of the territory, ultimately
motivated by economic reason, started to create and impose an enlightened depiction of the
national geography (Castro-Gómez, 2005; Nieto Olarte et al. 2010). The city of Bogotá has
been since then the epicentre of political power and representation in an extremely

8
Included in Niviayo, 2017.
19
centralised country. The ever-growing town has been for decades swallowing the lands
claimed by the Cabildos of Suba and Bosa, imposing an urban order of numbered streets9
over apparently disordered geographies. However, the newly arrived urbanites and the
raizal are not necessarily inhabiting and disputing the same territory, despite residing in the
same physical space.

Territories in tension

Remembering the stories his grandfather used to tell, Governor Niviayo says that
“tunjos, mohanes, golden snakes and ducks emerged from his [grandfather’s] voice; all
sorts of encantos [‘enchantments’] flooded my imagination with an unexplored and entirely
new Suba, a territory intermingled with the urbanizations that started to appear on top of
ancient houses, crops, vegetable gardens, hot water lakes, chucuas10, animals, and water
beings” (2017: 74). He describes the funerary procession of his forefather as “walking
through the streets of a rural Suba covered with pavement makeup” (76). The Governor’s
words suggest how the landscape of the urban sprawl is only one of the territories that make
up today’s Suba; the Muisca territory, partly suffocated underneath the avenues and
buildings, is still faintly visible for some. The incompatible ways of producing
territorialities—by settlers and raizales—have affected the territory itself and the societies
that have inhabited it, a case not unlike the very first colonial clashes, as described by
Robert Sack: “When the relationships between people and territory change frequently the
territorial definition leads to an abstract sense of territory and of space, one which is
conceptually separable from the events it contains” (1986: 127). The mismatch between
territorialities, the changing population and the expansion of the metropolitan boundaries
upon these formerly rural areas have contributed to this breach between the territory, its
human dwellers and its history, making it almost impossible for the original inhabitants to
relate with the changing landscape in the way they used to. “We went from being the

9
According to Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, Bogotá’s grid organization, where any location can be pinpointed
using only numbers as a coordinate system, is one of the urban designs in the Americas that is most influenced
by the rationalized control of the intellectual elites (Rama,1996: 26-27).
10
A pond or wetland.
20
children of the gardens and the lakes”—says Niviayo in an interview— “to being children
of the streets and the neighbourhood” (in Peña Montoya, 2020).

But urbanization has not only transformed the visible territory and its boundaries, or
the relations between people; the urban expansion has mostly interrupted the characteristic
dynamics of the territory itself as described by the Muisca or raizal communities
throughout the region, ignored or dismissed by the modern world that is taking over. “The
water beings are dead” is the opening statement of a collaborative research with the Muisca
of Bosa: “Almost no one sees them nowadays in the Tunjuelito river or in its polluted
brooks” (Martínez Medina et al., 2007: 10). Progressively lost in the conflict produced by
the expansion of a modern westernized world, these beings and territorial dynamics are
precisely the sort of ‘things’ that for Marisol de la Cadena are been currently made public
in politics by indigenous movements: “things” that include not only “nonhumans” 11 but
also “sentient entities whose material existence—and that of the worlds to which they
belong—is currently threatened by the neoliberal wedding of capital and the state” (2010:
342). Thinking about water beings or the ‘paths of water’ not as local interpretations of the
one and only reality but rather as part of a different and endangered world is a way of
acknowledging what the Muisca have to say about their territory, going beyond the well-
established nature-culture divide of modern ontology to open space for alternative worlds.
There is no single territory, changed by the city and interpreted in different ways by
different cultures; instead, there is more than one territory in collision. Taking the raizales
seriously means to “take seriously the existence and power of other-than-human beings”
(Stengers, 2018: 100) and to give priority to the voices of those who are losing the conflict
and are being forced to quit their home and their knowledge about it.

As suggested by Niviayo and Martínez Medina et al., the metropolitan landscape in

the peripheries of Bogotá, which not so long ago was still an agrarian or sylvan
countryside, is an ambiguous space of tensions between past and present, urban and rural,

11
I agree with Juan Javier Rivera Andía when he points out the “‘conceptual fuzziness’ of the category of ‘non-
human’ or ‘other-than-human’”. However, as it has demonstrated to be a useful and extensively used concept
when speaking of the Andean context, I will be using it just as Rivera Andía: “in a merely descriptive form and
mainly as an alternative to ‘nature’, to ‘supernatural beings’ (which clearly mirrors the Western idea of nature)
and also to ‘spirits’ (which evokes the spirit/body dualism of the modernist person concept)” (Rivera Andía,
2019; 4).

21
raizales and newcomers. In both cases—Suba and Bosa respectively—the landscape has
changed significantly in the past half-century although the geographic space is, in theory,
the same. Besides the disappearance of lakes and wetlands, the physical changes of the land
include also the progressive vanishing of other territorial features such as water beings,
which are of no less material significance in the Muisca territory. According to Inés
Alonso—a Muisca woman of Bosa—there is a man she knows who lives by the Tunjuelito
river and has told her about the close relationship he has with one of these beings:

“When it shows up in person [the mohan] speaks with him and tells him everything he
has to do. (…) We had a sow and three piglets, and the sow went missing. We went there
to ask what had happened with it and he told us that the mohan had come and said he
wanted it as a gift, and he had to gift it away (…). [Finding the animal] is, as they say, in
vain. The mohan can transform it into a rock, he can transform it into anything, take it
away, drown it…” (in Martínez Medina et al., 2007: 32).

The presence of some of these water beings—like the mohan—is not limited to the scope of
legends; they are part of the lived experience of the informants in the territory. Losing an
animal to a water being is as real and material as losing it to any other ‘natural’
circumstance; yet, the mohan is often considered just a character in the folk tales of the
traditional rural culture of the region (Pardo, 1947), only existing in human discourse (in
‘culture’) and not in ‘nature’. In the case narrated by Inés Alonso, the physical reality and
its consequences do not correlate with this modern distinction that segregates the water
beings as a cultural/discursive product: she suffered a tangible loss and possibly an
economic setback. The mohan was in that instance a material presence with material
implications as any other element of the territory. Inés continued saying about mohanes that
“it is just now that you don’t see [them] (…) because in the past you saw them everywhere.
The mohan travels much, he is made of water, he lives in the rivers, in the brooks, and
travels everywhere” (2007: 34). Just as lakes and wetlands can and have been physically
erased from the landscape, these beings are also vanishing in the same worldly way. They
are not disappearing from ‘culture’ but from the world.

Despite the changes, these other territories, which exceed the limits of modern non-
sentient ‘nature’, are still looming underneath the urban sprawl. Areas like Suba and Bosa

22
contain today “more than one, but less than two, socionatural worlds” (De la Cadena 2010:
347), meaning that the same physical spaces shared by raizales and urbanites contain both
the modern territory of the city and the fading raizal territory of lakes and mohanes. There
is a necessity of thinking about these conflictive ambiguities as more than just ‘cultural’
clashes. Analysing, for example, the case of the Tunjuelito river as a conflict between the
‘cultural’ significance it has for raizales, versus the irrelevance it might have for the new
settlers, is an interpretation that tends to favour the modern naturalistic view of the urban
newcomers: it presupposes that they see the river ‘as it is’ while the raizales attach to it an
additional cultural value. This reading upholds the “hegemonic opinion (…) that nature
is—publicly—only nature” and that “to think otherwise, to think that mountains or animals
are other-than-human persons is a cultural belief” (Blaser and De la Cadena, 2018: 2).
Therefore, instead of thinking within the traditional model of ‘one world, many cultures’—
“our modern multiculturalist and uninaturalist ontology” (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 3)—a
more nuanced approach would be thinking not in a “plurality of views of a single world,
but a single view of different worlds” (2004: 6). The dispute over the ownership of the land
in the peripheries of Bogotá entails a conflict between more than one configuration of
territories and the legitimacy of a struggling world disappearing by the imposition of
modernity.

‘Encantos’ Beyond Culture and Nature

The system of paths that water takes to traverse the territory across the sky, the
surface, the underground, and within people is part of this endangered raizal world.
According to Carrillo Avendaño, this system is a “cognitive scheme” in which history and
space are permanently being united in long chains of discourses (Carrillo Avendaño 1997).
She says that these “cycles of water” are a “contextual way of constructing discourse,
throughout a local and macro-territorial physical network. But as physical phenomena are
animated, it becomes as well a temporal and social network” (Carrillo Avendaño 1997:
Chapter 1.1). The compendium of short narratives about local territories recollected and
analysed in her research is interpreted as a discursive representation of the larger regional
landscape and its past, a structure “that gives them holistic explanations of a reality of both

23
natural and historic contexts.” Raizales, she says, humanize nature by populating it with
their ancestors, so that the “territory portrayed in stories is a review of the space
appropriated by decades of men” (ibid); such narratives about their surroundings produce
both a history and cartography of the territory. In this way, the “past is spatialized and it is
not defined by its temporality”, which means different moments coexist simultaneously in
space, and collective memories emerge and are elaborated “when the territories are
travelled and appropriated” (Gómez Montañez 2017b: 112). This “cognitive schemes” with
which the territory and the social history of the community are comprehended would be,
according to Carrillo Avendaño, proof of an old Muisca heritage and a mechanism with
which raizal culture is still transmitted and manages to live on.

Encantos (‘enchantments’), which according to raizales inhabit their territory, would

be an example of how these discursive links with the ancestral indigenous inhabitants of the
land are produced in the narration and description of the territory. Carrillo Avendaño
defines encantos as “living treasures” that come from the water:

“any waterbody (…) such as springs, wells, swamps, lakes, etc., is an exit door for these
living beings. (…) For Raizales, gold is alive from its origin and it stays motionless in the
dryness. Indios moulded it into ‘figurines’ that would come back to live, acquire
movement again when returned to the water shaped like people, animals, things or
vegetables since gold makes up the beings that populate this aquatic ‘world’” (1997: 2.1).

Various fragments of narratives shared by informants, as well as passages from older

ethnographies, are included to back up these observations. One of these quotes comes
from Teodomiro Rivas, interviewed in the village of Tenjo:

“They brought gold from many places and brought it in powder. Here the Old Ones had
plants with which they made liquids that they used to smelt the gold. Then they knead it
and shaped the little faces and the body with their hands. This sorcerer would gather all
the golden things and when the time came he buried himself alive with all those figurines
in the caves, in the mountains” (Teodomiro Rivas in Carrillo Avendaño, 1997: 2.1).

The narration of stories involving these encantos, like the ones remembered by Governor
Niviayo, is understood by Carrillo as a characteristic raizal way of understanding and

24
appropriating the territory in relation with the pre-Hispanic ancestors—the Old Ones, the
Indios—that inhabited the same spaces. The peoples of the past and their behaviours
provide meaning to geographic locations such as the bodies of water or mountains where
they left a living part of themselves. The narratives presented by Carrillo Avendaño range
from stories about the manufacturing of encantos by the ancient indios, to stories about
contemporary people finding these golden figurines and interacting in different ways with
them. The collection of accounts about the peoples of the past and how they are still present
as encantos would provide a physical link between raizales and the Muiscas of old, which
preserves the history of the territory.

Nevertheless, some issues arise from this analysis. Carrillo Avendaño’s

interpretation is mainly focused on the discursive level of the narratives—or rather, she is
understanding these descriptions of the territory only as discourses. The macro-territorial
structure that she manages to construct from localized accounts is for her a discursive
model of the world, a mental scheme to comprehend and apprehend the territory, preserved
through time thanks to the social networks that storytelling enables. This analysis
presupposes a differentiation between the discursive and the physical, between those social
networks and the actual materiality of the territory represented. In other words, phenomena
or beings such as the aforementioned encantos are mainly treated as a cultural
representation of particular natural occurrences in the raizal territory. For instance, there
seems to be a separation between the natural and the social dimension when she speaks
about the “physical phenomena”—referring to things such as the flow of rivers or the
movement of clouds—which are “animated” in the discourse, making of the “cycles of
water” a “temporal and social network” (1997: 1.1). This might suggest that the discursive
“animation” of natural phenomena is just an outcome of cultural interpretations of the
world and not actual occurrences in reality. Additionally, despite the relevant interpretation
of how space and past are merged in the territory, the analysis does not go far beyond the
narrative dimension of what these raizal histories and cartographies imply for the
relationship between people and the land. As Pablo Felipe Gómez Montañez has pointed
out, “the academic tradition (…) usually gives to the territory the role of storage for events
that happen in given locations and around certain objects where, finally, memory is related
more as a matter of narratives, of temporalities, that materialize in space” (Gómez

25
Montañez 2017b: 111). This is precisely the case of Carrillo Avendaño’s interpretation and
even resonates with Robert Sack’s proposal, for whom the territory “contains” the socially
significant events: physical locations are just seen as enablers for these narratives to emerge
in discourse and be preserved in the collective memory.

When Carillo Avendaño introduces the idea of encantos she says there are different
kinds of “enchanted ancestors” who guard the “wealth produced by water”, including
beings such as Saints, Devils, guacas12, ánimas13 and specially mohanes (1997: 2). The
latter, she explains, were once people who got enchanted (‘se encantaron’) because of their
excessive wealth, assuming thus the ancient customs and acquiring the “power to control
the waters” (1997: 2.1). This is because the “excessive accumulation of gold (…) produces
an unbalance between the folk of the dry [land] and those of the aquatic, making the latter
to forcefully appropriate the offender” (ibid). However, in contrast with this version, called
by Carrillo Avendaño the “mythical cause”, she provides a discursive or social explanation:
she says that certain people of the past were “transformed collectively by tradition into
Mo[h]anes” after they passed away; and although it is not something frequent today, she
claims to know the case of someone who, after recently dying of natural circumstances, was
“made into a Mo[h]an, with a real proper name, by the oral tradition of the community”
(ibid). Her analysis is focused on the discursive and social dimensions of the territory and
its descriptions, and the content of such descriptions (the mohan) is, in turn, interpreted as a
product of discourse and culture. In the end, part of Carrillo Avendaño’s research leaves
aside the materiality of the land—which is precisely the concern raised by Governor Iván
Niviayo—and unintentionally surrenders the ethnographic possibility of approaching the
actual territory, its material relation with humans and and disputing the study of its
‘physical phenomena’, leaving it to be studied by the dominant rationale of modernity—
natural sciences, land surveyors, urban planners, etc.

For other ethnographers, these entities described by Carrillo are the result of an
interpretation of the territory “from ‘native’ epistemologies as a web of ‘peoples’: tree

12
From the kichwa “wak’a”: A type of treasure or burial left by the ancient indigenous peoples according to
popular culture in the Andes.
13
Wandering souls in purgatory.

26
people, stone people, plant people, water people. In such way, the elements of the
landscape are not representations, but real incarnations of individuals and communities
which are in continuous interaction with the people and social groups; in other words, they
are part of social relations” (Gómez Montañez, 2017b: 112). Then the social aspect of such
beings should not be restricted to how people speak about them or produce them in
discourse but it is mostly how they relate with them and the relations they establish.
Reducing their social implications to mere discursive representations of ‘nature’ fails to
comprehend and give true significance to the Muisca understanding of their territory. This
is sign of a conflict between the ethnographer’s worldview—who thinks of these stories as
discursive/cultural projections on ‘nature’—and the local experience where these beings
and dynamics are material part of the territory, as real as any other ‘natural’ feature. The
Muisca struggle with the modern and urban rationalities is, at its core, not a preoccupation
for preserving their local ‘culture’. The stories remembered by Governor Niviayo in Suba
or the fading water beings in Bosa are not being discussed by the Muisca as nostalgic
elements of their endangered ‘culture’—after all, as the Cabildo of Suba and its former
Governor reminded us: “Just like all peoples we have also changed and, in a certain way,
‘adapted’ to the majoritarian society”, “we are a culture in movement, in constant change”
(Muisca Indigenous Cabildo of Suba, 1999: 9; Mususú Rico, 1999: 14). The mater at stake
is the territory itself. These accounts become vitally relevant only in relation with the
material territory: knowledge about their land has no practical value outside its context of
reference as “multiple k[n]owledges, or epistemes, refer to multiple worlds, or ontologies”
(Escobar, 2016: 13). Without the territory, the accounts of water beings are only tales or
legends of a fading culture, as it has been often done by outsiders. Reduced to ‘beliefs’,
‘superstitions’ or ‘folk stories’, these “[n]onscientific relations with other-than-humans”
were only deemed “worthy of preservation as long as they did not claim their right to define
reality” (De la Cadena, 2010: 346). The proliferation of anthologies set out to ‘rescue’ the
oral traditions of rural Colombia during most of the twentieth century exemplifies how
these worlds were increasingly regarded by lettered urbanites as picturesque tales of a
dying way of life that presented no danger or valid alternative to the predominant modern
view of nature (cf. E. Restrepo, 1925; León Rey, 1942; Pardo, 1947; Ocampo, 1977).
Nevertheless, in recent decades the romantic idea of the ‘Muisca Nation’, that helped

27
solidify the Colombian Nation-State and the exotic nostalgia of the vanishing ‘folk stories’,
have been questioned and claimed back by living Muisca people. The political exercise of
new indigenous groups at the very heart of the nation-state carried with it the political
presence of new worlds that clashed with and disputed the territorialities of modern
urbanization and its ontological premises. This last chapter that follows is, as suggested by
De la Cadena, an attempt “to take seriously (perhaps literally) the presence in politics of
those actors, which, being other than human, the dominant disciplines assigned either to the
sphere of nature (where they were to be known by science) or to the metaphysical and
symbolic fields of knowledge” (De la Cadena, 2010: 336).

28
Chapter 3: Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Bogotá Savannah

One is not born traditional; one chooses to become

traditional by constant innovation.

—Bruno Latour (1993)

The Muisca started a “process of cultural reconstruction” during the 1990s with the
organization of Indigenous Cabildos (MICS, 1999: 9). As it was pointed out in the first
chapter, genealogical and archival records that demonstrated their connection with the
nineteenth century ‘indios’ that lived in resguardos was not enough proof to maintain legal
recognition, so they adopted the modern notion of ‘culture’ to frame their difference, just as
the notion of ‘indigenous people’ rather than raizales, in order to establish a relation with
the State. Nonetheless, for Martínez Medina (2009) this process of community
reorganization goes beyond the merely economic and politically utilitarian. He sees in the
words of Governor Reinel Neuta14 an insistence on the true aim of the Cabildo: “to build
new orders of reality and new ways of thinking” and thus being “[i]ndigenous people proud
of their indigeneity. A copy of themselves that is something else (…), a new way of being
raizal, to be the same while being other” (Martínez Medina, 2009: 29). Beyond an effort to
recover ancient practices or a forgotten language, the “Muisca awakening” (Gómez
Montañez, 2019) is also a process of innovation and creative search of new ways of being,
building upon what they already are and where they come from—their roots—but also
elaborating what is expected from them as ‘indigenous people’, translating their
experiences into the models of modern indigeneity, aligning their goals with the
expectations of the State and the majoritarian society. A set of performative aesthetics that
often reproduce colonial and romantic depictions of the ancient ‘Muisca Nation’, familiar
for the Colombian public, is developed as “the contemporary Muisca (…) look for new
ways of adjusting these imaginaries to the conditions of the present” as a way of
legitimizing their claims (Gómez Montañes, 2019: 162). These innovative articulations of
indigeneity emerged from an internal process in which communities reflected on what

14
Quoted in the first chapter; particularly the sentence: “The Cabildo changes the way of thinking”
(Reinel Neuta in Martinez Medina, 2009: 28).
29
makes them indigenous in the first place, exploring the traditional practices of their
forbearers who, despite having remained in their ancestral lands and preserving a “high
degree of endogamy and solidary relations” did not identify as ‘indigenous’ but rather, in
many cases, simply called themselves campesinos (2019: 16). Nevertheless, some of the
elements that contemporary Muisca communities identify as indigenous in their campesino
ancestors’ practices and traditions are also present in non-indigenous contemporary
campesino communities. This raises the question of authenticity that many pose to
contemporary Muisca demanding them to be ‘different enough’ “from the mestizo
majorities to deserve special treatment from a State that embraces multiculturalism”
(Esteban Palma, 2017b; v-vi).

A common territory

As commented by Luis Fernando Restrepo (2005), for the Muisca of pre-colonial

times “as for many Andean societies, divinity was manifested in various places such as
mountains, lakes, streams, caves, farming fields, and certain trees” (184). Nevertheless, the
idea of ‘divinity’ itself certainly emerges as a modern-Western translation of indigenous
experiences of the territory, as in the case of tirakuna studied by Marisol de la Cadena in
the Peruvian Andes, were anthropologists “may at times explain earth-beings as cultural
beliefs, thus potentially converging with the portrayal of the mountain as a spiritual being
or divinity”, “perhaps disregarding the fact that practices with earth-beings do not
necessarily follow distinctions between the physical and the metaphysical, the spiritual and
the material, nature and human” (2015: 25). However, Restrepo does highlight that forced
integration of the Muisca into the capitalist system did not erase entirely the native notions
of ‘nature’—or rather the absence of a cognate concept—but instead created a “culture of
rituals and narratives that sought to negotiate the contradictions of both worldviews” (2005:
185-186). This can be seen, according to him, in the stories of tunjos or encantos among the
contemporary campesinos of the region (186). Indeed, tunjos, encantos, mohanes, etc.,
make part of a territory inhabited also by campesino communities that do not identify as
raizal or indigenous, yet recognize the same dynamics and beings as the Muisca. For
example, Cárdenas Támara (2002) quotes the words of Doña Ovaldina Puentes, a

30
campesina from the municipality of Boavita (in the northern limits of the Altiplano
Cundiboyacense), speaking about very similar beings to the ones described by the Muisca
of the Bogotá Savannah:

The mohanes, definitely, it is people that didn’t want to be baptized in… they are
enchanted [son encantados]. But my mom used to tell about mohanes—I don’t know, I
haven’t seen anything—that when she was raising us a running boy (mohan) arrived there
in the patio (…). I did not see him; I don’t like speaking about what doesn’t… that’s what
she used to tell. But here in this area there are encantos (…) and I think they have been
here since (…) our Lord created the heaven and the earth. But there are encantos because
that is what carried this landslide, it was that, encantos, encantos (Ovaldina Puentes in
Cárdenas Támara, 2002: 89).

In this case, the Catholic context is much more noticeable than in the previous examples
from Muisca or raizales. She describes the origin of mohanes as people that refused to be
baptised —most likely the Muisca of colonial times, very similar to the version in Carrillo
Avendaño’s research—and illustrating the antiquity of encantos with a reference to the
Christian story of Genesis. Also noteworthy is the apparent taboo surrounding mohanes in
particular, something noted also in certain raizal contexts15. In some cases—as I noticed
during my undergraduate thesis research with a campesino community in the village of
Chíquiza—the caution while speaking about these kinds of subjects might arise from the
presence of the researcher, seen as an embodiment of urban modernity, in front of whom
they would not like to seem ‘superstitious’ or ‘ignorant’, as these kinds of stigmas might
have been in the past cause of political and economic marginalization (Rubio Rosas, 2018:
41). In any case, the similarities or even the common notions of the territory between
certain indigenous and non-indigenous rural (or formerly rural) communities in the region,
is evident when comparing Doña Ovaldina’s statement with those presented previously.

These common characteristics in the local descriptions of the territory allowed

Carrillo Avendaño to use multiple accounts of campesinos as evidence of the macro-
territorial reach of the ‘paths of water’, quoting extracts from—for example—César
Moreno’s (1994) thesis on campesino popular religiosity in the Candelaria desert as well as

15
When Carrillo Avendaño asked an elderly raizal woman about mohanes she used to warn her: “Shut up...!
Shut up…! That witches will come for us tonight!” (1997: Chapter 2)

31
older studies concerning campesinos (cf. León Rey, 1942; Pardo, 1947; Faust, 1989), which
are quoted without any distinction from the information given by raizal informants. In her
research, both indigenous and non-indigenous rural communities are part of the same
macro-territorial model of water cycles, including several beings and phenomena and
encompassing a large region far beyond the area of her fieldwork. Alongside her
informant’s narrations of encantos she also includes accounts of informants in Consuelo de
Vengoechea’s (1992) study of tunjos in the campesino oral tradition of Nemocón. There are
evident parallels between the statements of campesinos in Vengoechea’s research and
raizal accounts in Carrillo Avendaño’s work. For instance, the origin of encantos according
to Teodomiro Rivas (cited in the previous chapter) is very similar to the version
Vengoechea gathers: “Tunjos are for campesinos also ‘encantos’, ‘water encantos’, in other
words, supernatural beings related to water that have the characteristic of being beneficial
(…) It is said that [the indios] ‘knead’ them using gold, which they obtained from a plant
they knew, and then they gave them life” (2016: 184-185). In both cases, the pre-Hispanic
indigenous inhabitants of the territory are mentioned as the creators of such beings, which
closely associate encantos or tunjos with water, as well as mentioning a plant that allows
gold to be moulded by hand.

Most research on the rural populations of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense generally

ignores the existence of raizales when commenting the ‘beliefs’ of campesinos, usually
relegating the Muisca as a people of the past that influenced today's rural ‘culture’, agreeing
with Restrepo on the pre-Hispanic origins of these contemporary narratives probably
derived from a colonial indigenous context (cf. Pinzón and Suárez, 1992; Morales Gómez,
2001; Cárdenas Támara, 2002). But this traditional way in which the presence of encantos
or mohanes in the campesino accounts of their territory has been explained tends to become
problematic when approaching the case of today’s Muisca people, insisting on the idea of
an ‘influence’ to explain “the similarities compiled by many researchers (…) between the
‘campesino’ and Muisca thought” (Carrillo Avendaño, 1997: Chapter 6.4). The accounts of
Muisca informants are often described as an inherited “Muisca legacy” in raizal ‘culture’
(1997: Chapter 1), while these communities have conversely emphasized that they are
“NOT descendants of the Muisca”, in other words, they are not modern heirs of an extinct
people, but they are rather “[the] contemporary Muisca” (MICS, 1999: 9). Not less

32
problematic is the inadvertent discredit of people’s relation with the territory and the
imposition of the researcher’s modern rationale as a more accurate approach to reality. For
instance, Cárdenas Támara sees in Doña Ovaldina Puentes’ “tales of encantos [and]
mohanes” quoted above, a symbolic interpretation of nature and a link between the natural
and the social dimensions: “The landslides, the earthquakes, the disappearance of people
and objects are registered and explained from their own and very singular cultural codes”
(2002: 90). The analysis presupposes the superiority or accuracy of modern ontology and
science over local realities, assuming that the world described by campesinos is a cultural
construction that allows them to understand ‘natural’ occurrences, while his modern
scientific comprehension of nature allows the researcher to see the true reality of this
(foreign) territory and its phenomena.

The very same modern analysis of campesino territorial accounts is continued when
approaching the ritual innovations of Muisca communities today. From the conscious
exercise of scrutinizing “the past and its representations in the search for ideal models to
indigenize their mestizo ancestors and themselves, a new set of practices, values, aesthetics
and beliefs started to appear configuring what Muiscas call ‘spirituality’” (Gómez
Montañez, 2019; 346-347). This includes various forms of public and private performative
practices, such as dances, traditional clothing, cleansing and curative rituals, prayer and
offerings (Martínez Medina, 2009). Esteban Palma assures that this “indigenous
spirituality” has served the purpose of publicly demonstrating their difference and
indigeneity to distinguish themselves from the majoritarian society, and it has become the
“widely accepted, branded expression of Muisca alterity” (2017b; v-vi). The territory is a
fundamental element of this ‘awakening’, particularly concerning what they have
denominated ‘spirituality’, becoming the basis for the processes of remembrance through
“creative routines” and “ritual and curative repertoires” (Gómez Montañez, 2017b: 124).
According to the ethnographic studies of Gómez Montañez, walking across the territory has
become central in the reconstruction of Muisca memory, so that in the walks the
participants “weave a constellation of images, ideas, myths and places to shape stories that
juxtapose the mythical and day-to-day dimensions” (2017b: 113). But then again, the issue
of the differentiation between a ‘cultural’ and a ‘natural’ territory arises as the ethnographer
suggests the separation between the ‘mythical’ and the ‘everyday’ aspects: on one side the

33
things that are ‘otherworldly’ and therefore not part of ‘nature’, and on the other the things
which conform to the empirically acceptable or normal. The territory is thus understood as
a space where the physical and the discursive meet, yet, the modern criteria to distinguish
between what is considered material (part of this world) and what is mythological
construction, is a foreign categorization within which the raizal or Muisca—and, indeed,
campesinos as well—are not necessarily thinking and establishing relations.

Worlding

Gómez Montañez says that when he spoke with elder members of Muisca
communities, images of the campesino life emerged from their narratives: “the love for the
land, the ways of farming, the use of medicinal plants, the value of solidary and communal
life, and, additionally, those practices which amid the syncretism suggested various magical
aspects and elements of popular religiosity in the light of Catholicism” (2019: 163-164).
Following the idea of cultural influence, the researcher assures that these ‘magical’—in
other words, supernatural—features are an endurance of old indigenous ‘beliefs’ permeated
with Christian elements, pointing to the ethnographic work of Carrillo Avendaño (1997) as
evidence of this “long tradition of beliefs (…) in water beings and other entities of the
magical world” (Gómez Montañez, 2019; 206). These accounts of encantos compiled by
Carrillo Avendaño often emphasise the material everyday practices carried out by these
communities to relate with such beings: “This [pre-Hispanic] territoriality is reflected on
how campesinos and Raizales, when crossing the mountain ridges, weave or carve little
crosses to counter the action of Devils, Mo[h]anes, witches, etc., which are the permanent
enchanted characters in these places” (Carrillo Avendaño, 1997: 2.3). The fact that these
practices receive such special attention in ethnographic studies does not necessarily mean
they are particularly ‘otherworldly’ for the people carrying them out; it is only a sign of the
otherness they provoke for the researcher. But, according to both researchers, the aim of
these routines is beyond the limits of ‘nature’ and the physically possible; this is why they
are called ‘magical’ and presented only as ‘beliefs’. However, as in the cases of the mohan
stealing pigs and encantos producing landslides (the accounts of Inés Alonso and Ovaldina
Puentes), for the people engaging in such practices and relations these are often seen as part

34
of the normal dynamics of the territory and, despite being somewhat rare (and every day
even more infrequent), they are definitely worldly and material. This set of practices,
everyday experiences, and ways to relate with the territory that different communities have
continuously enacted across time, is much more than narrative traditions or folk stories that
have circulated in the region or inherited by pre-Hispanic ancestors thus making them
widespread. In the ground and according to the people living there—which are the only
source of information about these beings and dynamics—these experiences of and in the
territory transcend the plainly discursive or narrative.

The ontological separation between the things that belong to the physical world—
landslides, mountains, rivers—and the ‘cultural’ interpretation of such—encantos,
mohanes, tunjos—undermines the knowledge of the communities about their own territory.
To take more seriously the experiences and accounts of these populations it would be
necessary to explore other ways of approaching these territorial accounts and practices
outside the categorical differentiation between a single constant empirical nature and the
changing cultures which interpret it. The modern worldview has led to the conclusion that
both Muisca and campesinos share a common cultural background inherited from the
indigenous peoples of colonial times, which includes a set of ‘beliefs’ in supernatural
elements—things that exceed the ‘natural’ order as defined by modern science and are,
therefore, an expression of this local ‘culture’. But instead of assuming there is a shared
way of interpreting the territory—constant and constrained by the limits of modern
empiricism—, we could alternatively think about a common territory, that has been shared,
known and experienced by these rural communities throughout time, but is different from
the territory that natural sciences and modernity have imposed from the outside. The
existence of these local worlds, says Arturo Escobar, does “not require the divide between
nature and culture in order to exist—in fact, they exist as such only because they are
enacted by practices that do not rely on such divide” (2016: 18). Thinking about these
practices as taking place with and within local alternative worlds, is a way of breaching the
modern ontological premise of ‘one world, many cultures’ and give priority in our analysis
to raizal and Muisca experiences of their territory. Marisol de la Cadena’s elaboration of
the concept of ‘worldings’ in the context of Andean indigenous political struggles is
potentially useful in the Muisca case. It describes the “practices that create (forms of) being

35
with (and without) entities, as well as the entities themselves. Worlding is the practice of
creating relations of life in a place and the place itself” (De la Cadena, 2015; 291). This
interconnection between actors, practices, relations and the territory is helpful when trying
to approach scenarios of competing realities without privileging the modern scientific
model of ‘nature’ as the material truth underneath local ‘representations’. In such case, we
could approach the accounts of mohanes, encantos and other phenomena present in the
territorial descriptions of different rural communities, as a common way of ‘worlding’, a
localized and alternative experience of relations and practices of life with and within the
territory. As the territory has changed significantly these relations have also mutated.
Because the city has transformed the territory, water beings start to disappear; as noted
before by Martínez Medina et al., “[a]lmost no one sees them nowadays in the Tunjuelito
river nor its polluted brooks” (2007: 10). The city poses a threat, not to the ‘culture’ but to
the territory; it interrupts the dynamics that took place within it, the relations and practices
between its human and non-human inhabitants, and weakens the roots of raizales, the deep
connection with a territory slowly replaced with an urban world.

Facing a changing territory, communities have reorganized themselves in the last

thirty years with the creation of the Cabildos and the process of indigenous ‘awakening’.
Nevertheless, the issue of authenticity was always an obstacle, as their mestizo background
and the social similarities with other rural communities of the region made their indigenous
claims seem “suspiciously constructed”: the majoritarian society wanted to see “a muisca
that truly looked indigenous and not campesino or proletarian” thus “communities needed
more and more elements that provided a content closer to the native and the primitive”
(Gómez Montañez, 2019:159). Indigenizing their campesino or mestizo background and, in
doing so, differentiating themselves from other communities implied evaluating their past
and expanding or further elaborating those elements that, in conscious deliberation, they
considered indigenous—or rather, they considered that could be articulated within the
modern frame of indigeneity and otherness. This transition towards “a new way of being
raizal”, in Martínez Medina’s words “to be the same while being other” (2009: 29), was not
simply a return to the past in search of more authentic or traditional ways of being; it was
an opportunity, a “possibility of inventing their own tradition, of creatively facing their
struggle for recognition (…), of building themselves the categories of truth and not-truth of

36
their own indigeneity” (2009: 17). Recovering their territory—which they considered a
foundational element of what made them raizal or indigenous people—was a struggle in
which consciously producing novel performances and perspectives became a way of
reactivating practices and knowledge gradually lost among new generations of both
campesinos and Muiscas as modernity penetrated and established its One-World16
naturalistic order. The struggle to recover the land is therefore not only an issue of
ownership, but also a battle to preserve an alternative form of worlding against an imposed
modern world. As suggested by Arturo Escobar, “whereas the occupation of territories by
capital and the State implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological, and often armed
aspects, its most fundamental dimension is ontological” (2016: 20). Reclaiming the
territory—the Muisca territory—is, therefore, also an ontological struggle. This means not
only re-establishing control of transformed spaces but also restoring practices and relations
with the territory, alternative forms of worlding which older generations had in the region
before the further expansion of globalized modernity. This is a restoration that deliberately
takes a new form, which they have strategically determined to be ‘indigenous’.

Despite the historical similarity between the campesino and raizal ways of
worlding, the Muisca started to reflect on their practices—especially the practices of their
elders—and to propose other relations with and within the territory that highlighted their
indigeneity and their link with the pre-Hispanic Muisca ancestors. Mohanes, for example,
which have always been present in the campesino territory, start to be engaged in a
completely different way by new generations; these people of ancient times are now
recognized by Muiscas as their ancestors who “did not want to surrender themselves to
baptism”; as Don Bernardo Tibaquichá, from Cota, explains: “The Mo[h]anes are the voice
of my people. They are the water that flows from the mountains and brings us messages
from our brothers that live far away. They are the voice of God” (in Gutiérrez Calvo, 1999:
46-47). Already existing relations with the territory—a campesino worlding—start to be
rethought from a contemporary framework of indigeneity and the new perspective of self-
recognized Muiscas looking back to the lives of their ancestors and their younger selves.
By revaluating and re-signifying ‘traditional’ practices and relations, they produce new

16
According to Arturo Escobar (2016) a “world allegedly made up of a single Word, and that has arrogated for
itself the right to be “the” world, subjecting all other worlds to its own terms or, worse, to non-existence” (15).

37
understandings and new approaches to a territory already known and inhabited by many
other communities. Suddenly their relation and bond with, among others, the mohan
changes: they recognize that these often feared characters “were, so to speak, like our
fathers (…) and they are the ones up there in the mountains, the hills, guarding the water
which they truly appreciate” (Doña Beatriz Chiguasuque in Martínez Medina, 2007: 31).
The new sense of familiarity that connects today’s Muiscas with their pre-Hispanic
ancestors is a reinterpretation of the traditional campesino practices as ‘indigenous’
relations with the territory and a way to differentiate themselves in connection with that
ancestral past.

Muisca Cosmopolitics

Not only have the Muisca changed the way they interpret these particular non-
modern practices and relations of the rural past, but they have also developed innovations
of the practices and relations themselves. Don Bernardo Tibaquichá recalls his discovery of
a new form of relating with mohanes: “The first time I spoke with a Mo[h]an I didn’t know
that I was actually doing it. I doubted my indio being” (in Gutiérrez Calvo, 1999: 47).
Despite always been there in the territory, people who nowadays identify as Muisca had
historically related with these beings very much like other campesinos in the region do: “I
remember many years ago when they started to introduce the railway, that workers were
very afraid of the female Mo[h]an, because when they were doing something she damaged
something else” (1999: 48). Relations with certain elements of this territory are now
different, reinterpreted, re-elaborated and further developed (like being able to speak with
the mohan), but they are still material practices, within a material world, and with the same
material beings: “The Mo[h]an is the wisdom of my people. It’s been many years, that I
know of since anyone spoke with this Mo[h]an. (…) Well, I gave him a pig and he paid me
for it. The Mo[h]an says he has not been back because here he finds many bad things, a lot
of smoke, a lot of our people who do not believe in him, in the weapons he hides and the
treasure he defends” (Bernardo Tibaquichá in Gutiérrez Calvo, 1999: 47). Confronted with
the territorial and ideological changes of modernity, the Muisca have not only adopted the

38
elements they consider latently indigenous in their ancestors’ rural practices, but they have
also produced new relations, rituals, interpretations and other forms of engaging in their
own terms with the territory claimed. This appeal to the ways of Old is not a nostalgic
attempt to return to more ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ ways of life; “[f]ar from an intransigent
attachment to the past”, says Arturo Escobar, “ancestrality stems from a living memory that
orients itself to the ability to envision a different future—a sort of ‘futurality’ that imagines,
and struggles for, the conditions that will allow them to persevere as a distinct world”
(2016: 19). It is not only a new and indigenous perspective of the territory which
differentiates them from other campesinos who have similar ways of worlding, but an
active development of new relations of life with and within this territory and an alternative
project of life for the future.

Like indigeneity itself, this process is also a political practice. Firstly, because it is a
way in which they have actively differentiated themselves from campesinos to claim their
particular demands from a more beneficial stance17 and, secondly, the recovery of the
territory and their relations with and within it, is in and of itself a conflicting dispute with
the settler urban communities and modern economic interests that have occupied and
transformed the Muisca lands for centuries. Since, at least, 1999 one of the explicit aims of
the Cabildo in Suba was:

recovering the Traditional Territories, as one of the pillars of our cultural

reconstruction will be practising celebrations, myths, rites and many of our habits and
customs in sacred places that are today invaded by illegal urban developers (…) and
builders that devastate with their official permits, complicit friends in government, and
big bank accounts (MICS, 1999: 12).

These restored and re-elaborated territorial practices and relations start appearing in the
political discourse as a means to confront urban expansion and capitalist interests. They
start introducing in the arena of ‘politics as usual’ (De la Cadena, 2010) elements that
question de Oneness of the modern world and, instead, they reveal the presence of other,

17
Historically, the split of indigenous groups out of campesino organizations that were also demanding access
to land, was met with accusations of reverse racism and of trying to divide the movement using a strategic
indigeneity based on ‘artificial’ grounds (Gros, 2013: 52). Actively differentiating themselves served as a way
to legitimate their specificity when facing the State, the majoritarian society, and even allied groups with
common aims.

39
alternative worlds and ways of worlding in the territory. Considering that the urban
expansion over Muisca land is an “ontological occupation of territories”, according to
Escobar the “struggles against them constitute veritable ontological struggles” (2016: 14).
As these practices emerge in public discourse, accompanied by the different beings and
dynamics of the Muisca territory, the political field becomes one of multiple worlds in
dispute, which some have called ‘cosmopolitics’ or ‘pluriversal politics’: the disruptive
exercise of transforming the concept of politics from “power disputes within a singular
world, to another one that includes the possibility of adversarial relations among worlds”
(De la Cadena, 2010: 360).

The unquestioned dominance of modernity over these territories and beyond is

challenged as things that belong to alternative worlds, and forms of worlding that have been
historically silenced, start appearing in public discourse. In occasions, this has led to
communities having successful outcomes with their specific demands. In 2016 the Cabildo
of Bosa won a legal battle against the Major’s Office of Bogotá arguing that two pieces of
land that were going to be urbanized were “part of the ancestral Muisca territory and a
ritual site for contemporary Muiscas of Bosa” (Goubert, 2019: 99). Two years later, in a
related legal lawsuit against (again) the Major’s Office, the Cabildo argued that the
disputed land was the “last rural stronghold in Bosa” and was a “sacred place where waters
converge (…), as well as being within the archeo-astronomical lines of spiritual connection
of the community” (Mhuysqa Indigenous Cabildo of Bosa, 2018: 5). As different worlds
meddle within the extremely regulated spaces of political and judicial disputes, there is an
implicit demand to be included and to stop being silenced. It is, in Marisol de la Cadena’s
words, an “insurgence of indigenous forces and practices with the capacity to significantly
disrupt prevalent political formations, and reshuffle hegemonic antagonisms, first and
foremost by rendering illegitimate (and, thus, denaturalizing) the exclusion of indigenous
practices from nation-state institutions” (2010: 336). Far from the bucolic and tame ‘folk
stories’ of the vanishing rural world that, as ‘culture’, presented no danger or valid
alternative to the predominant modern ontology, and were therefore eagerly compiled
during the twentieth century (cf. León Rey, 1942; Pardo, 1947), this re-elaborated
indigenous worlds—with their practices and beings—disturb the dominance of the One-
world world and actively interrupting its accelerated expansion.

40
 It is, however, true that these other orders and worlds are often adapted to the forms
of modernity, being presented as ‘cultural’ or ‘spiritual’—despite the materiality of the
practices and relations described by the Muisca and raizal—to ensure particular victories in
their legal battles. But, in any case, the presence and insistence of these struggling worlds in
the regulated spaces of modern politics have enormous significance, at least, in the context
of Bogotá. As worded by a news outlet explaining similar land disputes: “It might be
strange for many Bogotans that in Suba, a locality crossed by the Transmilenio18 and
crowded with nightclubs and cybercafés, an indigenous Muisca community has been for
years worshipping the condor and their great icon, the moon” (Rico, 2010). Bogotá, the
centre of power and representation in Colombia, which by the end of the eighteenth century
had become the “most important civilizing focal point of the New Granada” (Castro-
Gómez, 2005: 294), and its legitimacy as the proper and more developed model of
territoriality, is being questioned by even the smallest Muisca victories. These ontological
alternatives relativize the modern/colonial projection of a single reality. The triumph of
these alternative worlds and ways of worlding in the grounds of modernity—both the
judiciary and, by extension, the territorial—apart from ensuring the preservation of local
worlds—as well as other political and economic goals of the communities—is a triumph
against a widespread project of domination beyond the local disputes of land.

18
Bus rapid transit system.

41
Final Remarks:

Sous les pavés, la plage!19

—May 1968, France

Muisca people have been in a long struggle to ensure their right to exist. The roots
that connect them with their territory have not been enough to guarantee their protection as
a historically marginalized community. Indigeneity provided a framework in which raizales
could articulate and elaborate their difference, giving them a political platform in which
they could voice their struggles and dispute the occupation of their ancestral territory. This,
fundamentally, ontological occupation (Escobar, 2016) has been responsible for the
deterioration of their land, which includes not only the ‘natural’ reality recognized by
modern rationale, but a number beings and dynamics materialized through the practices and
relations that the raizal have with and within the territory. However, the active innovation
of the Muisca communities and their political exercise—often in confrontation with the
State and capital interests—have made visible within public discourse and politics the tense
existence of alternative worlds that put into question the all-encompassing supremacy of
modernity/coloniality, at least in Bogotá, the regional heart of this modern ‘civilizing’
project.
The struggling worlds in the peripheries of modernity do not require us researchers
in order to exist. However, we cannot start to encounter them in solidarity if our own
practices and theoretical frameworks are still firmly grounded in the paving stones of the
expanding modern ontology which denies their existence. The critical approach to
indigenous contexts that have actively resisted the expansion of this globalizing ontological
and economic models, has benefited much from de acknowledgement that ‘religion’ is not a
universal and transparent category. The deconstruction of ‘religion’ as a modern notion
segregated from opposite dimension of the ‘secular’ (Asad, 1993) is an ongoing
breakthrough of religious studies. Yet, just as the ‘secular-religious’ dualism, the project of
modernity/coloniality has displayed other analogous oppositions and hierarchical dualities

19
"Under the paving stones, the beach!"

42
that are still perpetuated in research. Moving away from these categories not only implies
the development of theories that provide an alternative to already matured and reinterpreted
notions of ‘religion’, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’; it also requires a reassessment of
methodologies in order to approach alternative worlds in more horizontal academic
practices, taking “seriously (perhaps literally) the presence in politics of those actors,
which, being other than human, the dominant disciplines assigned either to the sphere of
nature (where they were to be known by science) or to the metaphysical and symbolic
fields of knowledge” (De la Cadena, 2010: 336).

43
Figures:

Figure 1: Muisca Indigenous Cabildos in the Bogotá Savannah. Photo: Google Earth.

Figure 2: Approximate perimeters of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense (Red) and the Muisca territory
at the arrival of the Europeans (Yellow). Photo: Google Earth.

44
Sources:

Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity

and Islam. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Barnard, Alan. “Kalahari revisionism, Vienna and the ‘indigenous peoples’ debate” Social
Anthropology. Vol. 14. Issue. 1. 2006, pp. 1-16.
Blaser, Mario, and Marisol de la Cadena. Introduction. A World of Many Worlds, edited by
Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, Duke University Press, 2018.
Burman, Anders. “‘Now we are Indígenas’: Hegemony and Indigeneity in the Bolivian
Andes”, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2014. pp
247-271.
Canessa, Andrew. “Who Is Indigenous? Self-Identification, Indigeneity, And Claims to
Justice In Contemporary Bolivia”, Power, Indigeneity, Economic Development and
Politics in Contemporary Bolivia, special issue of Urban Anthropology and Studies
of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall 2007,
pp. 195-237.
Cárdenas Támara, Felipe. “Indios, curas e imaginarios”, Antropología y ambiente.
Enfoques para una comprensión de la relación: ecosistema-cultura. Pontificia
Universidad Javeriana, 2002.

Carrillo Avedaño, María Teresa. “Los caminos del agua: Tradición oral de los Raizales en
la Sabana de Bogotá”, Thesis in Anthropology, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
- Bogotá. 1997. Online version in:
http://www.luguiva.net/invitados/subIndice.aspx?id=29
Castro-Gómez, Santiago. “The social sciences, epistemic violence, and the problem of the
‘invention of the other’”. Nepantla: Views from South, Vol. 3, No. 2. 2002. pp. 269-
285.
____________________. La hybris del punto cero: ciencia, raza e ilustración en la Nueva
Granada (1750-1816). Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2005.

___________________. “Descolonizar la Universidad: La hybris del punto cero y el

diálogo de saberes” El giro decolonial: reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica
más allá del capitalismo global edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón
Grosfoguel, Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007.

Correa, François. “Interpretaciones Antropológicas sobre lo «Indígena» en Colombia”

Universitas Humanística, No. 62, July-December 2006, pp. 15-41.

45
______________. “Los Muiscas y el Derecho a sus Derechos.” Muysca: memoria y
presencia, edited by Maria Emilia Montes Rodriguez and Costanza Moya Pardo.
Universidad Nacional de Colombia. 2016.
De la Cadena, Marisol. “Anterioridades y externalidades: Más allá de la raza en América
Latina” E-misférica, Vol. 5, No. 2, December 2008, 1-24.
_________________. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections
beyond ‘Politics’” Cultural Andthropology, Vol. 25, No. 2, May 2010, pp. 334-370.

_________________. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Duke

University Press, 2015.

De la Cadena, Marisol, and Orin Starn. Introduction, Indigenous Experience Today, edited
by Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn. Bloomsbury Academic, 2007.
Del Castillo, Lina. “Surveying the Lands of Republican Indígenas: Contentious Nineteenth-
Century Efforts to Abolish Indigenous Resguardos near Bogotá, Colombia” Journal
of Latin American Studies. vol. 51, no. 4. 2019, pp. 771–799.
Durán, Carlos Andrés. “Ser Muisca Hoy: La Identidad Muisca como Proyecto Colectivo de
Organización Política y Cultural en la Localidad de Bosa (Bogotá D.C)” In
Muiscas: Representaciones, Cartografías y Etnopolíticas de la Memoria, edited by
Ana María Gómez Londoño, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. 2005.

Escobar, Arturo. “Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological
Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South” Revista de Antropología
Iberoamericana, Vol. 11, Issue 1. January-April 2016, pp. 11-32.

Esteban Palma, María Fernanda. “Etnogénesis y diversidad: el resurgimiento muisca en el

territorio ‘mestizo’ del centro de Colombia” Territorios y Memorias Culturales
Muiscas: Etnografías, Cartografías y Arqueologías edited by Pablo Felipe Gómez
Montañez and Fredy Leonardo Reyes Albarracín, 1st ed., Ediciones USTA, 2017a.
_________________________. Branding the Muisca-Self: Indigenous Sincerity Amidst
Colombian Multicultural Coloniality. University of Pennsylvania, PhD thesis.
2017b. ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations
/AAI10638345/

Fajardo, Darío. “Estudio sobre los orígenes del conflicto social armado, razones para su
persistencia y sus efectos más profundos en la sociedad colombiana.” In:
Contribución al entendimiento del conflicto armado en Colombia, Comisión
Histórica del Conflicto y sus Víctimas. 2015.

Faust, Franz. “Apuntes al sistema médico de los campesinos de la Sierra Nevada del
Cocuy”. Boletín del Museo del Oro, No. 26, Bogotá, 1989.

46
Fernández Varas, Diego. “Memorias mhuysqas, ¿recuerdos, imaginación, tradición o
reconstrucción?” in Territorios y Memorias Culturales Muiscas: Etnografías,
Cartografías y Arqueologías edited by Pablo Felipe Gómez Montañez and Fredy
Leonardo Reyes Albarracín, 1st ed., Ediciones USTA, 2017.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. 1973
Gómez Montañez, Pablo Felipe. Los chyquys de la Nación Muisca Chibcha. Ritualidad, re-
significación y memoria. Universidad de los Andes and Centro de Estudios
Socioculturales e Internacionales (CESO). 2009.

_________________________ Introduction. Territorios y Memorias Culturales Muiscas:

Etnografías, Cartografías y Arqueologías, edited by Pablo Felipe Gómez Montañez
and Fredy Leonardo Reyes Albarracín, Ediciones USTA, 2017a.
________________________ “Territorios que curan, abuelos que guían: memorias muiscas
en Facatativá y Suba” in Territorios y Memorias Culturales Muiscas: Etnografías,
Cartografías y Arqueologías, edited by Pablo Felipe Gómez Montañez and Fredy
Leonardo Reyes Albarracín, Ediciones USTA, 2017b.
_________________________ La Danza Del Cóndor y El Águila: Etnografías y
Narrativas Del "Despertar Muisca". Ediciones Usta, 2019.
Gómez Londoño, Ana María. Introduction. Muiscas: Representaciones, Cartografías y
Etnopolíticas de la Memoria, edited by Ana María Gómez Londoño, Pontificia
Universidad Javeriana. 2005.
Google. Map showing Colombia. Google Earth https://earth.google.com
/web/@5.14415183,-70.99519365,991.14926175a,2549794.8422724d,35y,-7.0652
4381h,0.10075239t,360r Accessed: August 10, 2020.
______. Map showing the Altiplano Cundiboyacense. Google Earth
https://earth.google.com/web/@5.56434534,-73.49578005,2839.38695028a,413905
.30532755d,35y,-7.50893921h,0.07663055t,-0r. Accessed: August 10, 2020.
______. Map showing the Bogotá Savannah. Google Earth https://earth.google.com
/web/@4.7749952,-74.03045795,2556.31619342a,90908.67692554d,35y,102.4428
0254h,0.17412111t,360r. Accessed: August 10, 2020.
Goubert, Beatriz. Nymsuque: Contemporary Muisca Indigenous Sounds in the Colombian
Andes. Columbia University, PhD thesis. 2019. ProQuest:
https://search.proquest.com/openview/4be5695dfaf7541a378f592afb57df2a/1?pq-
origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y
Gros, Christian “¿Indígenas o campesinos, pueblos de la selva o de la montaña? Viejos
debates, nuevas perspectivas” Revista Colombiana de Antropología, Vol. 49, No. 1,
2013, pp. 45-69.

47
Guarín Martínez, Óscar. “De bárbaros a civilizados: la invención de los muiscas en el siglo
XIX” in: Muiscas: Representaciones, Cartografías y Etnopolíticas de la Memoria,
edited by Ana María Gómez Londoño, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. 2005.
Gutiérrez Calvo, Orkar Benjamín. “La reivindicación de un pueblo en reconstrucción” In:
Los Muisca: Un pueblo en reconstrucción. Edited by Oskar Benjamín Gutiérrez
Calvo, 1999.
Johnson, Greg and Siv Ellen Kraft. Introduction. Handbook of indigenous religion(s),
edited by Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft. Brill, 2017.
King, Richard. “The Copernican Turn in the Study of Religion” in Religion, Theory,
Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies, edited by
Richard King. Columbia University Press, 2017.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard
University Press. 1993.
León Rey, Antonio. Tierra embrujada. Ediciones Centro S.A., 1942
Luna, Leonardo. “Colombian Violent Conflict: A Historical Perspective” International
Journal on World Peace, Vol. 36, No. 4, 2019.
Martínez Medina, Santiago. Poderes de la mimesis: Identidad y curación en la comunidad
indígena muisca de Bosa. Universidad de los Andes, 2009.
______________________. “Mohanes, Candilejas y Santos: Perspectivas De La
Comunidad Indígena Muisca De Bosa Sobre La Contaminación Del Río Tunjuelito
En Bogotá.” Desarrollo y Conflicto: Territorios, Recursos y Paisajes En La
Historia Oculta De Proyectos y Políticas, by Margarita Serje, 1st ed., Universidad
De Los Andes, Colombia, Bogotá, D. C., Colombia, 2010.
Martínez Medina, Santiago et al. Los Seres del Agua: Memoria, contaminación ambiental y
cultura en el Cabildo Indígena Muisca de Bosa. Bogotá: Hospital Pablo VI Bosa
E.S.E. 2007.
Mejía Pavony, Germán. La ciudad de los conquistadores 1536-1604. Pontificia
Universidad Javeriana. 2012.
Mhuysqa Indigenous Cabildo of Bosa, “Oficio no. 4956. Notificación admisión acción de
tutela”. Secretaria Distrital de Planeación, 2018.
Morales Gómez, Jorge. “Los encantos: escenarios de relaciones interétnicas”, Boletín
Museo del Oro. No. 50, 2001.
Moreno, César. Mítica y paisaje en el desierto de la Candelaria. Un planteamiento de
religiosidad campesina como religiosidad popular. Thesis in Anthropology,
Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Bogotá, 1994.

48
Muisca Indigenous Cabildo of Suba. “«El pueblo indígena Muisca de la Sabana de
Bacatá»: Una historia de desconocimientos” In: Los Muisca: Un pueblo en
reconstrucción. Edited by Oskar Benjamín Gutiérrez Calvo, 1999.
Mususú Rico, Alba. “‘Chahas suas aga, mecuycuyz ybsunsuca’ Hoy me amaneció
pensando sólo en ti” In: Los Muisca: Un pueblo en reconstrucción. Edited by
Oskar Benjamín Gutiérrez Calvo, 1999.
Nieto Olarte, Mauricio et al. Ensamblando la nación: cartografía y política en la historia
de Colombia. Ediciones Uniandes, 2010.
Niviayo, Iván M. “El rostro, la tierra y la ciudad: reflexiones sobre la etnicidad de los
muyscas de Suba” in Territorios y Memorias Culturales Muiscas: Etnografías,
Cartografías y Arqueologías edited by Pablo Felipe Gómez Montañez and Fredy
Leonardo Reyes Albarracín, 1st ed., Ediciones USTA, 2017.
Ocampo, Javier. El pueblo boyacence y su folclor. Caja Popular Cooperativa, Bogotá, 1977.

ONIC. “Muisca” Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia. 2020.

<https://www.onic.org.co/pueblos/1126-muisca> Accessed 26 June 2020.
Pardo, Aristóbulo. “La leyenda de Juan Díaz o el Mohán del Tequendama”. Revista del
Folklore, No. 2., December 1947.

Peña Montoya, Pompilio. “En Bogotá Hay Segregación Y Racismo Hacia Los Indígenas:
Iván Niviayo, Gobernador Muisca”. Hacemos Memoria, 26 June 2020,
http://hacemosmemoria.org/2020/06/26/en-bogota-hay-segregacion-y-racismo-hacia
-los-indigenas-ivan-niviayo-gobernador-muisca/?fbclid=IwAR2S_C7YMwKjV4iF
GoQ9-nl0L5_AU8DaHiSC_R48pcaF1hLJNl3QXK13D4I, Accessed July 7, 2020.
Pinzón, Carlos E. and Rosa Suárez. Las Mujeres Lechuza: Historia, cuerpo y brujería en
Boyacá. Bogotá: ICAN y CEREC, 1992.
Rama, Ángel., and John Charles Chasteen. The Lettered City. Duke University Press, 1996.
Restrepo, Luis Fernando. “Los límites de la razón occidental: La ‘naturaleza’ muisca y los
proyectos intelectuales de los jesuitas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, siglo XVII” in
Figueroa, L., & Ledezma, D. (Eds.). (2005). El saber de los jesuitas, historias
naturales y el Nuevo Mundo. Frankfurt am Main, Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert.

Rico, Laura. “Pedro Gómez vs. los Muiscas: la disputa por la tierra en Suba” La Silla
Vacía, January 18, 2016. https://lasillavacia.com/historia/5646. Accessed: June 23,
2020.
Rivera Andía, Juan Javier (editor). Non-Humans in Amerindian South America:
Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs. 1st ed., vol. 37,
Berghahn Books, 2019.
Rubio Rosas, Daniel. El silencio de las brujas: estudios literarios y perspectivas periféricas
sobre modernidad, colonialidad y práctica ex-céntrica en Chíquiza, Boyacá.

49
 Undergraduate thesis. 2018. Institutional Repository:
https://repository.javeriana.edu.co/handle/10554/35181

Sack, Robert David. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
Santamaría, Ángela, and Pedro Rojas Oliveros (editors). Diferentes Maneras De Conocer:
Las Experiencias Recientes De La Escuela Intercultural De Diplomacia Indígena.
Editorial Universidad Del Rosario, 2015.
Stengers, Isabelle. “Ontological Politics” In: A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol
de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, Duke University Press, 2018.
Vengoechea, Consuelo de. Los Tunjos en la tradición oral de los campesinos andinos.
Thesis in Anthropology, Universidad de los Andes, 1992.
_____________________. “Los tunjos en la memoria de los campesinos andinos. Revisión
a la luz de la literatura antropológica” in Muysca: memoria y presencia edited by
María Emilia Montes and Constanza Moya Pardo. Universidad Nacional de
Colombia, 2016.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled
Equivocation” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South
America. Vol. 2, Iss. 1, Article 1. 2004.

50

View publication stats