“No more modern Yanaconas”: time and historical legitimation in a Misak historiographical experiment (Cauca - Colombia)

Abstract

Focusing on the intellectual production developed recently by the Misak who inhabit the territory of Guambía, in Andean Colombia, we will try to demonstrate how the creative reappropriation of the national historical discourse functions, in this context, as a political device of internal and external legitimacy. Through the analysis of an historiographical experiment created by the Comité de Historia del Cabildo Guambiano on the late 1980’s and the 1990’s, we argue that the social conceptions of time and the indigenous resignification of written historical records can be read as complementary parts of the same movement, namely, a political struggle for historical legitimation that takes place within a cosmological dispute.

Keywords:
historiography; time; Misak; Colombia