Abstract:
Since the beginning of the 90s, indigenous peoples have become an important, symbolic population for the Latin-American legal and political regimens. This situation is rather astonishing. For centuries, being an “Indian” was synonymous of primitivism and savagery and the legal politics designed for them were written with the white ink of assimilation. Now, due to the favourable legal and political context for indigenous identity, peasants and other rural populations want to be and become Indians. This process of ethnic re-emergence has created the immediate need for legal operators of construct a strategy of constitutional adjudication that controls those processes, while at the same time helps to produce and reproduce such a valuable population. It is a specific form of bio-legality in which legal forms are designed to produce, reproduce and control a specific population. This paper analyses the constitutional creation of the indigenous legal subjectivity in Colombia from the perspective of legal-knowledge regimens. In this process, the anthropological knowledge blends with constitutional adjudication to create a regime that defines who can be regarded as an “authentic Indian” and, at the same time, excludes those populations that does nor fit the regimen’s discourse about indigeneity.
