Abstract
This chapter presents Campesina women’s body-land experiences in Colombia. It addresses the main questions of how rural women in Colombia experience violences in their territories and body-lands? And how coloniality manifests in place? Drawing from an understanding of violence as embodied, epistemic and experienced in a continuum, I illustrate how the continuum of violence is felt in women’s bodies, not only due to the armed conflict, but also in relation to the dispossession of rural territories. To illustrate this argument, I present a case study of the development of agro-industries in Toca and its links to territory body-land dispossession, and then I narrate a case study of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in which tourist mobilities are linked to dispossession and to environmental devastation, on the basis of ‘green pretexts’.
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Notes
- 1.
Approximate translation: ‘bush’.
- 2.
A colloquial expression that relatively translates to being ‘scared shitless’.
- 3.
The reconstruction of historical memory in the country is not unproblematic as, in the context of the ‘post-accord’ period, the government-led construction of memory through the National Centre for Historical Memory has faced deep scrutiny. That is due to the appointment of the Centre’s director, Darío Acevedo, who openly supports Duque’s government. Under Acevedo’s direction there has been a national debate on the militarisation and instrumentalisation of the institutionalised construction of historical memory in the country (see Orozco Tascón 2019).
- 4.
People from the State of Santander in Colombia.
- 5.
Colloquial term used in Colombia to refer to people who do not possess ‘high culture’, are extravagant and dress with ‘bad taste’.
- 6.
I conducted a small project in town in 2013 as outlined in Table 1.1.
- 7.
The local transport service in Toca to the different veredas is made up of informal and privately owned four-wheel drives. Young men who just graduated from high school are usually the drivers.
- 8.
The triple shift encompasses the domestic labour of household chores, the reproductive work of bearing and raising children, and agricultural and farm labour (Suárez 2005).
- 9.
A taxi service on motorbikes offered by the locals in Minca.
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Rodríguez Castro, L. (2021). Violences in the Territories and Body-Lands. In: Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4_5
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