Murderous spirits

Since the early 1990s, armed actors made intrusion deeply into Afro-Colombian and Amerindian territories in the Colombian departments of Chocó and Antioquia. The devastating effects of these inroads have been documented and denounced by anthropologists, lawyers, and NGOs in national and international media. Yet the transformations and re-ordering of native cosmologies and rituals under the pressure of these new actors and resulting violence on an unprecedented scale have rarely been studied. Based on long-term fieldwork among the Emberá Katio, the chapter details the emergence of a new moral economy of death that followed a “break of intelligibility” generated by the intrusion of multiple forms of armed violence. Thus, numerous suicides, hitherto completely unknown, occurred, mostly among young people and generated widespread anxiety. Shamans became accused either of being powerless and unable to ritually control the suicide epidemic, or of having even caused it by willfully sending evil spirits of predatory death. Both interpretations have undermined the shamans’ legitimacy, while the local framework of interpretation of the multiple impacts of armed violence still resorts to shamanic cosmology for an explanation. This paradox, central to the new moral economy of death among the Emberá Katio, is at the center of the chapter’s analysis

Political science · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Latin American Literature Studies · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

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