The Everyday Social Economy of Afro-Descendants in the Chocó, Colombia

Abstract

The Black communities which formed in the Colombian Pacific in the 1980s and 1990s claimed collective territorial rights to hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest. Rural Black activists—in some areas connected with the Catholic Church or with regional non-governmental organizations—mobilized, and over time won, legal titles to the territories where rural Black people had long combined subsistence production, artisanal gold mining, and itinerant labor. This chapter traces a Black social economy that can be found outside of these more formal political processes, through forms of production, savings, labor, exchange, and self-help unmediated by community politics or by household economies. The chapter shows how an everyday Black social economy exists at the margins of social movement politics and the household economy and is pre-discursive and not encompassed by the language of collective territories, collective titles, or community councils.

I would like to thank the Black community councils that gave me permission to work in their territory between 2010 and 2012, as well as the individuals I worked with. A Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University funded the fieldwork on which this chapter builds. A SSHRC-funded Visiting Fellowship at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University gave me the time to write this chapter and others.