AQUATIC GEOGRAPHIES, ETHNOKNOWLEDGE, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR LAND IN THE AFRO-COLOMBIAN PACIFIC

Abstract

The groups of black communities in Colombia have established through their journey through the territory we now call Colombia, a particular way of relating to the environment, which, for the particular case of the Pacific, we propose to understand through the lens of the Aquatic Cultural Landscape. These adaptive forms to the environment were in turn responsible for the construction of forms of local knowledge, which before trying to dominate nature, have deciphered, through it, symbiotic ways of weaving life in the framework of an aquatic space. These particular forms of appropriation would be the fundamental support for an organizational process that later, in the last part of the 20th century, would have its turning point with the enactment of Law 70 of 1993, which would make viable the possibility of awarding collective territories to black communities that demonstrated their historical survival in the Pacific basin based on their traditional production practices. Although the scenario of materialization fixed its interest in the Colombian Pacific, -establishing it in passing as the referent of blackness in Colombia-, later experiences will show us how this imaginary has been gradually and necessarily overcome.