Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia

Jackson’s highly readable monograph makes an important contribution to the literature about ethnicity, identity formation, and interstate and ethnic-minority relations through a series of case studies that center on Colombian indigenous communities. This book, the result of fifty years devoted to the study of Colombia, discovers that Tukanoans (a Colombian indigenous group in the Vaupes) were supposed to marry people who were not members of their community and who spoke a different language. Jackson’s ethnography of the Tukanoans had led her to question the prevailing notion in anthropological studies of the 1970s that indigenous communities were closed. Hence, Jackson argued for the constructed nature of ethnic identities and rejected cultural essentialism early in her scholarly trajectory. Based on this approach, she was able to identify the key role that the state and grassroots regional indigenous organizations played in ethnic identity formation in Colombia. Although scholars have documented the role of...