Although only 2 percent of Colombia s population identifies as indigenous, that figure belies the significance of the country s indigenous movement. More than a quarter of the Colombian national territory belongs to indigenous groups, and 80 percent of the country s mineral resources are located in native-owned lands. In this innovative ethnography, Joanne Rappaport draws on research she has conducted in Colombia over the past decade and particularly on her collaborations with activists to explore the country s multifaceted indigenous movement, which, after almost 35 years, continues to press...

In Beyond the Lettered City, the anthropologist Joanne Rappaport and the art historian Tom Cummins examine the colonial imposition of alphabetic and visual literacy on indigenous groups in the northern Andes. They consider how the Andean peoples received, maintained, and subverted the conventions of Spanish literacy, often combining them with their own traditions. Indigenous Andean communities neither used narrative pictorial representation nor had alphabetic or hieroglyphic literacy before the arrival of the Spaniards. To absorb the conventions of Spanish literacy, they had to engage...