Agathe Faure (LSE): Moving and settling in history: Indigenous Emberá people between the city and the rainforest
| Dates: | 10 April 2024 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Agathe Faure |
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Part of the research seminar of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. This event will be face to face, room Samuel Alexander A116. But it can also be followed online: https://zoom.us/j/95860231166
This paper draws on twenty months of fieldwork set in Colombia and conducted with Emberá Dobidá people who moved from the department of Chocó to the city of Medellín. Starting with the official formation of Indigenous villages in the Chocó since the 1980s, I argue that the reorganisation of rural space has impacted the mobile and fluid social formations with which the Emberá Dobidá had once lived. Sedentarisation in the rainforest is, as a result, experienced by my interlocutors as a crucial moment in their history. It has also been intrinsically linked to an important process of urbanisation. Emberá Dobidá leaders moved to cities and back to gather others in settlements resembling towns, making the Emberá Dobidá ‘civilised’ (civilizados) as a result. In this paper, I therefore emphasise the tension between movement and non-movement to explain how the Emberá Dobidá distinguish between various times of history, give meaning to certain spaces, and value the categories of people populating them. More specifically, I use this tension to explore the ambivalence my interlocutors showed towards their own migration to Medellín and to decipher the ethical weight that the decision to move or to settle takes for the Emberá Dobidá today.
Agathe Faure is a Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of LSE.
Speaker
Agathe Faure
Role: Fellow
Organisation: LSE
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A116
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
