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Abstract: This article is part of a colaborative project that seeks to develop alternative proposals for undertanding the Colombia conflict. The research was conducted by Nodo Aguja, a research team affiliated with the Comparative Social Studies Group (GESC) of the University of Cauca.
In this article we present our reflections concerning the symbolic, cul- tural, and economic processes that have developed in Andean communities around the coca plant and is transition from Mamacoca to Cocaine. We argue that since the pre-Columbian Coca has been valued as a total social reality, a gift, which symbolically condenses multiple aspects of social life. Thus, we seek to trascend a more tradicional mercantilistic view that reduces coca’s meaning to its economic value within a capitalist logic. “Modern rationality” has sought to destroy this gift through persecution. Not only the Church and public health polycymakers have chosen this solution, however. In the twentieth century this strategy has benn globalized wiht the implementation of a policy of eradication that has included fumigation. Like war, fumigation totally transforms the landscape and reorders the population in an effort to install a new hegemonic order. Notwithstanding the efforts to destroy the gift, Mamacoca has always been and continues to operate as a lkanguage of ritualised resistance.
Our methodology includes the combination of ethnographic materials from different Andean sites with a review of the literature.
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