Heritage, Land, Labor, and Competing Claims for Afro-Colombian Rights

This article examines the different meanings that rights to land and culture hold in San Basilio de Palenque, an Afro-Colombian community whose cultural space was declared by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to be intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2005. I investigate how the language of rights-both communal and individual-operates simultaneously at various registers and is strategically put to work in distinct political spheres. Drawing from ethnographic field research conducted between 2009 and 2013, I argue that while communal rights are invoked to garner recognition from state and transnational organizations like UNESCO, individual rights, conceived as exclusive prerogatives, serve to mark hierarchical distinctions between community members. I examine the paradoxical coexistence of two contradictory claims: one of cultural cohesion and another of social hierarchy. I conclude by questioning how a more nuanced examination of rights discourses in Palenque might contribute to understanding the multiple meanings of rights, not simply across time or space but also in relation to their perceived strategic purpose.