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Montes de Maria, near Macayepo, in northern Colombia
By Anna Vogt, MCC Colombia
I have been delighted to discover the writing of Wade Davis this year. An ethno-botanist and anthropologist, his writing serves as a helpful lens to view my experiences. Describing his experiences in Colombia, Canada’s Arctic, Tibet, Kenya, Haiti and elsewhere, Davis explores culture, from language, to religion, to food, to everything that people use to help them understand, and thus function, in the world they believe they inhabit.
We all operate in a way that makes sense to us. Whether aware or not, we all follow cultural norms and patterns that instinctively allow us to move through our world with ease.
Rapid Culture Loss
Cultural loss, which takes place at an alarming rate worldwide, results in a sense of bewilderment and a lack of understanding of how to function, because the world has stopped being the world people believed they inhabited. Cultures change and adapt constantly, but there is a difference between a forced and an empowered adaptation.
A number of different causes, which include the rise of the nation state with the creation of artificial boundaries and development strategies that have very little to do with the most heavily impacted, contribute highly to forced cultural loss.
The Case of Colombia
In Colombia, this plays out with displacement. People who are forced to leave the rural life they have always known, often due to an international development strategy, of which they were never consulted, lose part of the ability to be themselves.
As Colombians flee the Montes de Maria, first because of armed conflict in the late 90s and early 2000s and now because of avocado crop failure and basic lack of services, to the city of Sincelejo, an instinctual way of functioning is lost, because their former way of life does not exist anymore. This includes how to access food, how to work, how to be in relationship with others, how to ride a motorcycle instead of a horse. Of course people adapt, find new community, and learn how to function in a new environment.
But it is not the same and they did not have a choice. Often, especially for youth, a new community means urban gangs and crime or sex work as a way to earn money to buy food that is no longer possible to cultivate. The skill set especially adapted to a rich life in the country has no place in an urban environment.
The Impact of Culture Loss
It is a tragedy, not because of a romantic notion that rural life is better than urban or that change is always negative, but because another understanding of what it means to be human is gone forever without permission or care. Wade Davis remarks:
Indigenous peoples do not stand in the way of progress; rather, they contribute to it if given a chance. Their cultural survival does not undermine the nation state; it serves to enrich it, if the state is willing to embrace diversity. And, most important of all, these cultures do not represent failed attempts at modernity, marginal people who somehow missed the technological train to the future. On the contrary, these people, with their dreams and prayers, their myths and memories, teach us that there are indeed other ways of being, alternative visions of life, birth, death and creation itself. When asked the meaning of being human, they respond with ten thousand different voices. It is within this diversity of knowledge and practice, of intuition and interpretation, of promise and hope, that we will all rediscover the enchantment of being what we are, a conscious species aware of our place on the planet and fully capable not only of doing no harm but of ensuring that all creatures in every garden find a way to flourish.
(Wade Davis, Light at the End of the World, 202.)
This is why I support movements like Idle no More in Canada and the non-violent march communities in the Montes de Maria are planning to demand their rights to take charge of their own future. Not because I want communities to be stuck in the past, but because they have the right to decide their own future and should be allowed access to the tools, like health care, education, political representation, and whatever else they decide they need, that allow them to do that best. And without these communities making their own choices, we all lose.
For more information on the Montes de Maria march for their rights see:
Photos of Montes de Maria, Colombia, by Anna Vogt