Murderous returns: armed violence, suicide and exhumation in the Emberá Katío economy of death (Chocó and Antioquia, Colombia)
Since the early 1990s, armed actors have invaded territories in the Chocó and Antioquia departments of Colombia, inhabited by Afro-Colombians and Indians whose collective rights in these territories had recently been legally recognised. Based on long-term fieldwork among the
Emberá Katío, this article examines social, cosmological and ritual alterations and re-organisation around violent death. Following a national policy of post-conflict reparations, public exhumations and identifications of human remains reveal new local modes of understanding
and administration. In particular, suicide, hitherto completely unknown to the Emberá, broke out in a multitude of cases, mostly among the youth. Local discourse attributes this phenomenon to the number of stray corpses resulting from the violence, who are transformed into murderous
spirits which shamans can no longer control. The analysis focusses on the unprecedented articulation of a renewed eschatology, the intricate effects of an internal political reorganisation and the simultaneous inroad into their space of new forms of armed insurrectional violence. Thus the
article will shed light on the emergence of a new transitional moral economy of death among the Emberá.
Keywords: guerrilla; paramilitary; reparation; shaman; spirits
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
Publication date: 01 November 2016
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