Recomposiciones espirituales y resonancias cosmopolíticas: una teoría etnográfica del encuentro en el Pacífico sur colombiano

This article explores the emergence and transformation of Afro-diasporic religious practices in Tumaco (Nariño), a city in Colombia’s southern Pacific region. This process began in 2005, sparked by a political mobilization of local teachers that gave rise to a political and spiritual movement of resistance and experimentation. Rooted in the recovery of ancestral traditions—such as the veneration of spirits and wakes for living saints—the movement also fostered a (re)connection with African-based deities and religious practices that, from the participants’ perspective, had always been present and inherently their own. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Tumaco between 2017 and 2019—including participant observation and interviews—the article follows this process of spiritual and existential reconfiguration. Some interlocutors described it as a movement to “return to what is ours,” which unfolded through dynamic entanglements between people, deities, political currents, and ritual practices. Taking this proposition seriously, the article develops an ethnographic theory of encounter between religious practices—one that avoids both the reduction of these practices to a supposedly authentic African past and the deconstructive impulse to dismantle such narratives entirely. Ultimately, building on this ethnographic theory of encounter and the concept of resonance, the article proposes a way to rethink anthropology itself—as a resonant and intercessory practice.