Throughout 2000 and 2001 the Uitoto-Murui communities of the Cara Paraná River were mobilized by a debate on the notion of 'development.' Meetings were held between the indigenous population (including both local villagers and representatives of national organizations) and the non-indigenous population (government officials, NGOs and the military) to discuss the theme with the aim of producing 'diagnoses' and 'projects.' As part of this context, the San Rafael village- led by cacique Don Ángel Ortiz and the local cabildo or council- proposed a project based on the 'knowledge' acquired from nightly rounds of dialogue and ritual consumption of coca and tobacco, culminating in a corpus of symbolic, ethico-moral and material knowledge denominated 'The Word of Coca and Tobacco' (jiibina uai diona uai). This body of knowledge (spanning from the mytho-cosmological to the medicinal-therapeutic and including forms of governance) can be traced to the sociocultural configurations lived through by indigenous peoples from the region between the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers (whose symbolic epicentres are coca and tobacco), especially after the 1930s with the end of the Colombia-Peru War and the debt-bondage system associated with the rubber trade. In the heat of the debates, the notion of 'development' therefore acquired 'indigenous' contours, becoming read and articulated on the basis of local 'uses and customs,' as indeed required by Colombia's 1991 Constitution. Likewise, in response to the demands made from the development area, a concise outline of 'The Word of Coca and Tobacco' was also presented.
Uitoto-Murui; Cultural Politics; Ethnodevelopment
