Making Authority Appear: Practices of Sovereignty Behind the Production of Peasant Territories and Governments

Abstract

Tania Li (2014) pointed out that the concept of land does not mean the same thing to all actors and that it takes on different uses and meanings. She also emphasized that land, in its various forms, is produced through a process of composition. Something similar happens with territory, a notion that, since the 1990s, has gained prominence alongside land in the vocabulary of peasant organizations in Colombia and elsewhere. As with land, the definition of territory and the source of its value are at the center of multiple disputes. Several ethnographies on processes of territorialization in Latin America have shown that territories, in their varied forms, are constructed through what we might call “practices of sovereignty.” I propose using this term to refer to those experimental practices, often ephemeral and precarious in nature, that manage to bring forth certain bodies as subjects of authority and certain geographies, biologies, and populations as their territories. Drawing on the de facto formation of the Agro-Food Peasant Territory of the Northern Nariño Massif and Southern Cauca in southwestern Colombia, and on the production of “assemblies,” “mingas,” “guards,” “mandates,” and “popular consultations” within that process, I propose reflecting on these practices of popular sovereignty and on how they blend forms of community, organizational, and state authority.