Photography of the ancestral: visual narratives about Kankuamo people in Colombia

Abstract

This article focuses on the analysis of some of the photographs belonging to the collection produced by researchers Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff and Alicia Dussan de Reichel, in the municipality of Atanquez, current Indigenous reservation Kankuamo (Colombia), between 1951 and 1952. The collection was published in their book The People of Aritama: The Cultural Personality of a Colombian Mestizo Village (1961). We ask the following question: Have these images served as a framework for looking at self-history or to perpetuate discourses defining what is to be Indigenous? The results include views from three categories: the connotation procedures of the image, the image statute, and polarizations between the top and the bottom.