Kogi Ecology and the Becoming of the World: Systemic Balance, Deterioration and Renovation

Abstract

The Kogi indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, pertaining to the Chibcha family, preserve a sophisticated ecology that knows and follows clear cosmological principles to maintain a complex and organized system of life. Drawing on those principles, Kogi leaders have developed a political discourse and mobilization to safeguard their territory and tradition from increasing environmental threats and social pressures. Based on my ethnographic work, the aim of this article is to examine Kogi ecology within the framework of the becoming of the world and the transformations of living conditions and humanity. As a novel exercise on this indigenous group, I focus on the possible cataclysmic scope of Kogi approaches to present-day socio-environmental deterioration. In this way, I situate the Kogi in the theme of the Anthropocene and the ecological crisis in the social sciences, especially with respect to the Isthmo-Colombian Area. I thus seek to foster reflection on the relevance that indigenous ontologies might have for our approach to the Anthropocene, if we are willing to include aspects as wide as possible universal upheavals.