Books by Pablo Jaramillo
http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/becas/20140114120036/Jaramillo.pdf
El jaibaná en la encrucijada / Ritual, territorio y política en una población embera EL JAIBANÁ E... more El jaibaná en la encrucijada / Ritual, territorio y política en una población embera EL JAIBANÁ EN LA ENCRUCIJADA: RITUAL, TERRITORIO Y POLÍTICA EN UNA POBLACIÓN EMBERA EL JAIBANÁ EN LA ENCRUCIJADA: RITUAL, TERRITORIO Y POLÍTICA EN UNA
Papers by Pablo Jaramillo
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024
This article analyses the relationships among speculative rumour, everyday storytelling, and fina... more This article analyses the relationships among speculative rumour, everyday storytelling, and financial speculation that impact small-scale gold mining towns in Colombia. By following the stories surrounding the visit of Arnold Schwarzenegger to Marmato, a mining town in central Colombia, and its consequences, I explore how people speculate about such ‘speculative’ visits so as to reframe the events as part of wider colonial histories. I aim to comprehend the affective constellation of lives criss-crossed by financial speculation and the political openings created by rumour, storytelling, and fabulation. I argue that people locate the Schwarzenegger visit as part of a crisis-ridden history that counters the narratives of modern and responsible mining. The argument contributes to the conceptualization of speculation in anthropology, as well as to questions of history, temporality, and politics of extractive frontiers. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2019 in the central Andes of Colombia and with governmental and corporate representatives.
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Anthropology News, 2024
Energy transition on an energy frontier frontier like La Guajira and Cesar demands that we think ... more Energy transition on an energy frontier frontier like La Guajira and Cesar demands that we think about justice in broader terms—like reparations to people who, amid extreme heat, have had to live through violence and who now live the legacy of the conflict. To create a just energy transition, Colombia must acknowledge heat—in all its senses—as part of the entanglements replicating injustice throughout its territories.
Institute for the Study of Man, 2019
Indigenous people have been frontline victims of armed conflict in Colombia. To counter violence ... more Indigenous people have been frontline victims of armed conflict in Colombia. To counter violence and harm, the general tendency has been to claim for fuller inclusion of these peoples in the state as citizens and subjects of care. In order to achieve that, the state has recurred to the distribution of cédulas, Colombian ID cards, so the indigenous persons can access the state assistance. Through an ethnography of such a device, this article argues that the IDs articulate into historic relations of mar-ginalization of ethnicized and racialized subjects and territories. I argue that, even in the context of caring and reparation strategies, cédulas are part of a wider strategy to sustain political stability in regions of Colombia that have been historically difficult to govern from the point of view of the state. Rather than solving basic needs and strengthening resilience, cédulas reproduce problematic, often deadly crises. Furthermore, cédulas are at the core of transactional notions of indigenous citizenship that produce troublesome affects about being an indigenous person in present day Colombia. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in La Guajira, northern Colombia over twenty months total since 2007.
Geoforum, 2022
The creation of spatial enclosures is a well-developed subject in the study of extractive industr... more The creation of spatial enclosures is a well-developed subject in the study of extractive industries. Less attention has been given to the control of time and the future within these socio-spatial contexts. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we followed two controversial projects aimed at expanding the biggest open-pit coal mine in Colombia, both of which implied diverting watercourses to extract coal from beneath their riverbed. We describe corporate strategies that give rise to what we call temporal enclosures, the process by which mining companies aim to restrict imaginable outcomes to those that favour them, producing the sense of a manageable and inescapable future in which forthcoming activities are presented as both inevitable and desirable. The temporal enclosure is configured discursively in practices of building engineered landscapes, refashioning relations between the mine and the people, and intensifying the language and practices of nurturing and caring for humans and non-humans around the operation area. However, in the context of increasing pressure regarding the consequences of extractive industries, the dispute over alternative futures becomes a highly relevant political site. We argue that this temporal dimension is interlinked with spatial, political, and economic dynamics around extractive industries and that understanding how temporal enclosures are produced and resisted is essential for envisioning sustainable alternatives.
Decentering Comparative Analysis in a Globalizing World, 2021
Cultural Anthropology, 2020
The Colombian government and large-scale mining companies accuse small-scale gold miners of lacki... more The Colombian government and large-scale mining companies accuse small-scale gold miners of lacking a sense of the future, thereby harming the future of Colombia. In this article, I argue that marginalized people who extract gold with small-scale techniques create an alternative sense of future by engaging with the leftovers of their gold mining practices. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who struggle to make a living in the wake of large-scale mining interventions in the town of Marmato. Small-scale mining constantly creates simple by-products—gases, rubble, and mud—that look like waste. Small-scale miners engage with such substances as a way to make sense of their lives and the future. Making the relationships between humans and geological substances, waste and technology visible elucidates alternative forms of life that “get in the way” of a multinational mining company, the national government, local mafias, and financial markets hungry for gold in tim...
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2018
This article analyses the implementation and operation of a wind farm in ancestral indigenous lan... more This article analyses the implementation and operation of a wind farm in ancestral indigenous lands in Colombia. A wind farm operates at different levels: creating energy, social programmes, jobs, carbon credits and revenues. However, such emerging objects are distributed unevenly. To understand the hierarchy in place in the carbon market, this article explains the disconnection between clean energy production sites and carbon funds in which credits are created. Given the fundamental need to understand the creation of objects of property that are, nevertheless, not fully interchangeable between the site and the fund, this article aims to draw renewed attention to the concept of spheres of exchange. The argument is built upon ethnographic fieldwork undertaken on-site in the Utility Company's offices and the World Bank headquarters.
Antipoda, 2012
R E S U M E N Mientras que la memoria ha sido un tema privilegiado de análisis para entender situ... more R E S U M E N Mientras que la memoria ha sido un tema privilegiado de análisis para entender situaciones de (pos)con icto, otras formas de regular la temporalidad de las víctimas han recibido menos atención. Las metáforas sobre la reparación como una "deuda con las víctimas" se encuentran fuertemente enraizadas en el lenguaje sobre justicia transicional. En este artículo, basado en un trabajo etnográ co con comunidades indígenas wayúu, se analiza el lenguaje de la deuda como parte de la labor de legitimación que tienen los procesos de verdad y reparación del Estado. El argumento central es que las nociones de reparación como deuda implican formas de inscribir soberanía estatal en las relaciones con sujetos antes marginados por la violencia, a través de la regulación de la temporalidad. Las reparaciones se convierten entonces en una espera permanente donde no se puede pensar el porvenir por fuera de la sumisión al Estado como soberano.
Ethnos, 2013
This article analyses the co-occurrence of two concerns often expressed by indigenous leaders inv... more This article analyses the co-occurrence of two concerns often expressed by indigenous leaders involved with reparations for victims of paramilitaries in Colombia. These concerns revolve around discomfort with the intense use of hegemonic ‘gender’ discourses in the context of the reparations, and a feeling that leaders' involvement in the latter brings about a betrayal of the family and of themselves. By engaging with the local category of eirruku (flesh), I argue that ways of engaging women in reparations entail the commoditisation of caring relationships. This article, based on 13 months of fieldwork with an indigenous organisation and the communities integrated into it between 2007 and 2008, contributes to the understanding of the articulation of gender and ethnic/racial identification in the context of contemporary forms of governance of indigenous peoples, while delving into ‘carnality’ as a concept to understand gendered forms of reproduction, reparation and selfhood.
Cultural Studies, 2021
In this article, we discuss and elaborate on some of the results obtained in the collective proje... more In this article, we discuss and elaborate on some of the results obtained in the collective project ‘Social Movements and Construction of the Common in Colombia Today’, particularly their methodolo...
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2011
Abstract Strategies to include indigenous populations in Colombia are often regarded as solutions... more Abstract Strategies to include indigenous populations in Colombia are often regarded as solutions for historically preestablished exclusion. Yet the participation of the state in the simultaneous marginalization, attention to, and care of ethnicized and racialized ...
Geoforum, 2022
The creation of spatial enclosures is a well-developed subject in the study of extractive industr... more The creation of spatial enclosures is a well-developed subject in the study of extractive industries. Less attention has been given to the control of time and the future within these socio-spatial contexts. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we followed two controversial projects aimed at expanding the biggest open-pit coal mine in Colombia, both of which implied diverting watercourses to extract coal from beneath their riverbed. We describe corporate strategies that give rise to what we call temporal enclosures, the process by which mining companies aim to restrict imaginable outcomes to those that favour them, producing the sense of a manageable and inescapable future in which forthcoming activities are presented as both inevitable and desirable. The temporal enclosure is configured discursively in practices of building engineered landscapes, refashioning relations between the mine and the people, and intensifying the language and practices of nurturing and caring for humans and non-humans around the operation area. However, in the context of increasing pressure regarding the consequences of extractive industries, the dispute over alternative futures becomes a highly relevant political site. We argue that this temporal dimension is interlinked with spatial, political, and economic dynamics around extractive industries and that understanding how temporal enclosures are produced and resisted is essential for envisioning sustainable alternatives.
In this article we analyze the use of numbers and commensuration in an environmental impact study... more In this article we analyze the use of numbers and commensuration in an environmental impact study for a small hydroelectric power plant in Huila, Colombia. W...
Resumen El analisis de los rituales como herramientas y medios de posicionamiento politico, ha si... more Resumen El analisis de los rituales como herramientas y medios de posicionamiento politico, ha sido una labor dificil ya que la misma categoria de ritual ha oscurecido aspectos fundamentales de la funcion de los rituales. A traves de la categoria de digresion ritual , el presente articulo examina como un ritual practicado entre los emberas se constituye en dispositivo para el posicionamiento politico tomando el ritual como un trabajo discursivo y performativo para producir identidades politicas donde es conflictivo definirlas. El presente articulo se basa en observaciones efectuadas en medio de un trabajo de campo etnografico realizado de manera intermitente del ano 2000 al 2004 en el resguardo La Albania, Risaralda y San Jose de Caldas, Caldas, Colombia. Palabras clave: ritual, politica, identidad, etnografia, indigenas embera. Kariburu: Ritual Digression and Political Positioning in the Healing Practices among the Embera Abstract The analysis of rituals as a way of political posit...
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Books by Pablo Jaramillo
Papers by Pablo Jaramillo
If you are interested in copies, please send me a direct message.
If you are interested in copies, please send me a direct message.