Indigenous knowledges and power in friction with human rights and development discourses : the case of the Witoto Ethnic Safeguarding Plan in the Colombian Amazon

This dissertation analyzes the intercultural negotiations of the Amazonian multi-ethnic group of the People of the Centre with the universal discourses of human rights and development promoted by the Colombian State. I focus on the Leticia Witoto Ethnic Safeguarding Plan (ESP), which is one of the 73 plans formulated and implemented by the Colombian State to acknowledge the basic rights of indigenous groups endangered by internal forced displacement. I analyze the ESP through the notion of friction (Tsing, 2005), which refers to the complex, unequal, and changing character of contemporary encounters across difference between local and global knowledges. My analysis also draws on Foucauldian and/or subaltern approaches such as anti-colonial and decolonizing research, critical and counter-hegemonic perspectives on human rights, post-development, and feminist critiques of development. I analyze the knowledges (understandings of law, justice, and development), logics of thought (practices, epistemologies, roles, and spaces for sharing and producing knowledges), and power relations (forms of leadership, associations, networks, and forms of empowerment and disempowerment) that the People of the Centre produce and renew in their frictions with human rights and development discourses. I introduce the tri-border Middle Amazon as a region historically connected to unequal global relations of power. I argue that these historical power relations influence the conditions in which the People of the Centre struggle for their rights through the ESP.  I draw my case study on documentary analysis and on two instances of self-reflective and critical ethnographic fieldwork. My methodological reflection explores how researchers’ positions in fieldwork influence ethnographic knowledge and can contribute to inclusive and flexible intercultural relations connected to the needs of local groups. My analysis focuses on how power circulates on national, regional, and local scales in the ESP. I analyze how this circulatory power produces individual and collective subjects and is articulated with specific forms of knowledge, influencing both exclusionary and emancipatory possibilities for displaced indigenous people.  Research results suggest that the People of the Centre approach human rights through their indigenous knowledge on the “law of origin.” This law asserts their cultural difference as a central basis of recognition of their human rights as displaced indigenous people. Similarly, the People of the Centre appropriate development discourses and projects through the notion of abundance. Understood as a collective ability connecting spirituality, cultural values, and gender roles, the notion of abundance aims to ensure the physical and cultural group’s survival. I argue that, although they are tied to local and unequal forms of power, these indigenous knowledges and their logics of thought can contribute to plural, egalitarian, and situated concepts and practices of human rights and development.

Keyphrases: Communication interculturelle, Indigenous knowledges, Power, Human rights, Development, Amazon, Intercultural communication, Forced displacement, Self-reflective ethnography