The ritual dances and the healing of war: the Indigenous Amazon in post-peace agreements in Colombia

Abstract

The Murui-Muina indigenous of Colombian Amazon have performed ritual dances throughout their history, aimed on transforming the threatening forces of outside, of animality, into human experience (Griffiths 1998, 170), the dangerous in protection, the hostility in festivity. In the last twenty years, when the war between FARC guerrillas and military forces arrived in this territory, these armed groups were named as wild animals, predators of outside. The ritual dances, therefore, directed their purposes to the geopolitics of conflict, being used to transform the ferocity of war in mutual care, the risks of violence in defense of life. Nowadays, with the ending of the war through the peace agreement (peace making) and, with the historical challenges of implementing peace building content, ritual dances continue to act as a political tool aimed to building scenarios of encounter in local life, besides state and official agendas. In the face of this reality, this project proposes to research the political uses of ritual dances as cultural tools that can stimulate reconciliation in regional life. The hypothesis is that the ceremonial complex of the Murui-Muina exposes forms of collective political struggle capable of intervening and constructing history, while at the same time strengthening and nurturing indigenous unity and autonomy, as well as exposing a formative positioning of an Amazonian´s subject political collective. Therefore, this research aims to focus on ceremonial practices as spaces that promote a peace-building mentality, an indigenous citizenship that defends their cultural condition. The study will be developed from participant observation and the use of photography and video, based on the relevant anthropological bibliography and having the comparison as perspective of analysis. (AU)