Re-Meaning The Indigenous Muisca Cemetery 0f Usme, Colombia: Ethnography of Collaborative Project and Patrimonial Debate

Abstract

The paper exposes an ethnographic view of a collaborative field work, made in Hacienda El Carmen in Usme, Colombia, a terrain where an indigenous muisca cemetery was found. The analysis focuses on the struggles between the named “authorized patrimonial discourse” and the “cultural process of patrimony”.

In the first part, I want to expose the processes that led us to purpose a current collaborative research project implemented by the Universidad Santo Tomás’ Group of Memory and the Indigenous Muisca Community of Bosa. Based on a situational analysis methodology, this part is the result of an ethnographic field work of some spaces of dialogue and encounter among different logics to understand the patrimony and the heritage. In middle of struggles with the public institutions, the academy and other social groups, the muisca people build and negotiate their ethnic identity as part of their cultural and political project. In the second part, the situational analysis will be applied in scenarios where the muisca people began to interpret the archaeological territory of Hacienda El Carmen. In this part, I will try to expose some epistemological reflections about alternative and inclusive ways of knowledge and remembering. The new senses and narratives, produced as a result of this exercise, let us thinking about the symbolic strategies used by the muisca people to occupy an important place in the present and the possibility of understanding and purposing current citizen visions from creative and original ways of incorporate ancestral memories.