The River Spirit and the River Citizen: Epistemic Forms of Violence and the Languages of Transformative Critique

Abstract

Current conflicts in Colombia and Latin America over the uses and forms of inhabiting rural territories have an ontological and epistemological dimension. Beyond their juridical and economic aspects, which are often more salient in public debates, they also confront us with a question regarding different forms of experience of the territory, of being with it and inhabiting it; and also with the question regarding the different forms of knowledge that render these experiences intelligible. This chapter enters into dialogue with the works of Viveiros de Castro and Marisol de la Cadena and their contributions to our understanding of this dimension of the increasing conflicts over the uses and forms of inhabiting rural territories. The chapter argues that despite the advances performed in these valuable workws, the attention they give to language at the semiotic level of a “structure” constittutive of meaning and intelligibility as conditions of experiencing the world, falls short of a question raised by the recent appearance of mountainds, rivers and other natural beings, in these scenes of political conflict: what is the language through which these natural beings’ silence, the river for instance, gains such an intriguing expressive force? The chapter explores this question through two interrelated paths: on the one hand, through a discussion with the works of these two Latin American anthropologists, one working in the the Amazon region, and the other in the Andean region; and second, through a contrasting reflection of two recent dissimilar political appearances of rivers in Colombia’s current historical juncture. These two political appearances are: Nicolas Rincon’’s 2010 documentary The Embrace of the River (Los abrazos del Río), and ruling 622 of 2016 of Colombia’s Constitutional Court which recognized the most important river of Colombia’s pacific region, the Atrato, as a subject with rights; and they motivate a preliminary analysis into a political semiotics that may account for the entanglements between language and river, language and territory.