latin america

It was past midnight and a gentle rain pattered against the roof of the shaman’s house, where we sat conducting a whispered interview on a pile of blankets by the fireside. The red record button of my handheld recorder blinked in the darkness. I strained my ears to catch what Taita Antonio, a shaman, ex-political leader, and land defender of the Kamëntsá people of southwest Colombia, said next: “Our fight is for life and for water.

Anthropology as a discipline may be more susceptible than most to infusion–not to say intrusion–by the political perspectives of its practitioners. This was certainly true of the outwardly colonial character of the discipline in its early days, when no attempt was made to hide the racist and imperialist beliefs and aims which underpinned its development. However, since the advent of a more critical anthropology in the early twentieth century which saw the advent of notions such as ethnocentrism and cultural relativism, and especially after the strengthening of critical trends in social science and philosophy in general in the postwar decades, anthropology has undergone considerable shifts in its political substrata.

Content Warning: Colonialism, Racism, Violence