Purifying the earth, colonizing the spirit: armed struggle and religiousness in the mythical Marquetalia

Abstract

The hilly land of the central mountain range in Colombia has been the epicenter of political, military and especially spiritual fights in which the land being vied, namely, the mythical zone of Marquetalia, discusses beliefs and practices around power, blood and land. Different kinds of thinking that bind together the armed struggle, the spiritual conquest and the cosmology of the Nasa indigenous tribe – which lives in that zone –, seriously accentuate a tense relationship that simultaneously creates a clash and a bond, between political order and religious deeds. This paper, focused on the emerging relations of an ethnographic field, intends to account for the actions and relationships that configure and condense said clashes, and in turn suggests an interpretation framework from religious practices that accounts for the way how several elements of the armed struggle in Colombia have a spiritual motivation.