Human Geography

Boasting Andean peaks, a port on the Amazon River, and coasts along both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Colombia's unique interrelation of climate, elevation, and topography creates sharply distinct regional and cultural differentiation. One way to sketch a simplified map of regions and subregions is to trace five broad areas:

1. Colombia's Caribbean: This is bisected by the Magdalena River; it extends westward to Panama and eastward to the Guajira peninsula and Venezuela.

2. The Eastern Cordillera: Known in the colonial period as El Reino (The Kingdom), this refers to a large region that coheres in cultural terms and includes Cundinamarca, Boyacá, the Santanderes, Huila, and Tolima — even though the last two are not part of the eastern mountains.

3. Oriente: The eastern grasslands, known as los Llanos, transition to the South into the Colombian Amazon. The grasslands and Amazonia are very different, but together they form a borderlands region that connects Colombia to Venezuela and the Orinoco watershed, as well as to northwestern Brazil.

4. Occidente: This complex area must be understood as a set of subregions: first, what Colombians will refer to as Greater Cauca, which includes the political departments of Cauca and Valle de Cauca and is often understood in reference to the cities of Popayán and Cali; second, a broad zone culturally bound by its having been an agricultural frontier in the late nineteenth century, including most of what are now the political departments of Antioquia, Caldas, Risaralda, and Quindío; third, the southernmost mountains, culturally rooted in an Andean indigenous experience that cuts across Colombia's borders with Ecuador and Peru.

5. The Pacific Lowlands: Colombia's long Pacific coast, from Panama to the Ecuadorian border and from the westernmost foothills of the Andes down to the sea, is associated with riches, in the form of enormous biodiversity and huge quantities of exported gold and platinum, as well as with immense poverty.

Texts in this introductory part provide glimpses of the historical, cultural, and political patterns that tie Colombian regions to a shared idea of "nation." We include extracts of well-known pieces, such as Jiménez de Quesada's chronicle of his conquest of what he named "New Granada," and José Eustasio Rivera's famous descriptions of the Colombian Amazon. Yet our geographic overview cuts in unusual directions as well — toward a cultural imaginary that stretches from attempts to recover pre-Columbian mythic spaces to New York City and the World Cup, myths in themselves.

Ahpikondiá

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

Indigenous peoples' knowledge of the rich biodiversity of Colombia's ecosystems has long enabled their cultural survival. Communities survived against violent colonial systems of control and then against development projects and natural resource exploitation in the national period. Today, eighty-five indigenous communities make up approximately 1.5 percent of the population and live in arid deserts, littoral mangrove swamps, tropical rainforests, and high-altitude grasslands. Their survival has depended on organized projects of self-affirmation and resistance, such as the political struggle that resulted in Colombia's 1991 Constitution, which officially recognizes cultural and ethnic diversity and cedes 25 percent of the country's national territory to indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. Although its implementation is riddled with complications, this legal achievement provided official acknowledgment of land as a foundational principle for indigenous and Afro-Colombian worldviews — something activists insisted on as the Constitution was drafted.

The compilation, transcription, and publication of indigenous oral tradition began as a colonial project and has been continued by local and foreign anthropologists since the early twentieth century, and Austro-Colombian Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (1912–94) has been a key figure. He became a Colombian citizen in 1942 and with his wife, Alicia Dussán, conducted pioneering ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous groups, as well as archaeological excavations of pre-Columbian artifacts nationwide. Later generations of anthropologists have debated his legacy and his understandings. For example, his version of a Tukano narration about Ahpikondiá, which some take as an underworld paradise and others understand as the Milky Way, may reflect the interest Reichel-Dolmatoff and his generation took in creation myths more than it describes a deep cosmovision for indigenous people living along the Vaupés River. Reichel-Dolmatoff often worked in contexts where indigenous people exercised little power, as in the Vaupés, and the narrations he collected reflect cultural influences that were more diverse than he let on, given that he wrote about indigenous communities that had been targeted by missionaries and military recruiters. Ahpikondiá and other invisible geographies are by now products of modern Colombia — a nation that has an anthropological sense of itself and that increasingly recognizes an inheritance that includes multiple creation stories.

The Sun had created the earth with its animals and plants, but there were still no people. Now he decided to people the earth, and for this he made a man of each tribe of the Vaupés; he made a Desana and a Pira-Tapuya, a Uanano, a Tuyuka, and others, one from each tribe. Then, to send the people to the earth, the Sun made use of a being called Pamurí-mahsë. He was a man, a creator of people, whom the Sun sent to people the earth. Pamurí-mahsë was in Ahpikondiá, and he set forth from there in a large canoe. It was a live canoe, in reality a large snake that swam on the bottom of the river. This Snake-Canoe was called pamurí-gahsíru, and its skin was painted yellow and had stripes with black diamonds. On the inside, which was red, sat the people: a Desana, a Pira-Tapuya, a Uanano, one from each tribe. Together with the SnakeCanoe came the fish; but they were not in the inside but outside, in the gills; the crabs also came, attached to the rear. It was a very long journey, and the Snake-Canoe was going up the river because Pamurí-mahsë was going to establish mankind at the headwaters. Whenever they arrived at a large rapids, the Snake-Canoe made the waters rise in order to pass by and caused the torrent to be calm. Thus they went on for a long time, and the people became very tired.

At that time night did not yet exist, and so they traveled in the light, always under the yellow light of the Sun. When the first men set forth, the Sun had given each one something, some object, for him to carry carefully. To one of them he...