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Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between José Eustasio Rivera’s service on a mapping commission to chart the border between Colombia and Venezuela and the novel he wrote during the expedition. La vorágine (1924) was not only an extension of Rivera’s political campaign to denounce the state’s approach to the cartography of its frontier zones as negligent, but it is also allowed the author to explore the possibilities of navigating the Colombian Amazon sensorially. In this chapter, the senses become a pedagogy to forestall the violence of official cartographic omissions, but despite this critical intervention in situatedness, the legacy of the novel has involved the perceived exaggeration of Rivera’s descriptions of rubber industry violence.

Murui, a Witototan language spoken in southern Colombia and northern Peru, has at its disposal a number of linguistic features that mirror the structure of the Murui society, the Murui belief system, the environment the Murui people live in, and their means of subsistence. Demonstrable associations between linguistic and non-linguistic features (the so-called “integration points”) discussed here are: classifiers (and their significance in terms of the Murui beliefs, religion, spirits, and dreams, and the means of subsistence), possessive marking (vs. the relations within the Murui community, social hierarchies, and kinship categorization), spatial adverbs (vs. the means of subsistence and physical environment), and linguistic avoidance terms (vs. the beliefs, religion, spirits, and dreams). As the Murui people are gradually being drawn into the Colombian market economy and relevant cultural practises become obsolete, some correlations described here are more prone to disintegrate than others.

The label Putumayo and the various music businesses of Starbucks offer occasions to consider the relationship between affective marketing and world music. Considering a range of scholarship on world music, I argue that their similar—but significantly different—strategies have led to a form of distributed subjectivity that I term “distributed tourism.” Using the idea of entanglement from quantum physics, I argue that listeners are distributed across two places in the act of listening, and that that phenomenon underpins a particular form of affective marketing addressed to the group that Putumayo calls “cultural creative” and that Bryant Simon has termed the “creative class.”

This essay analyzes two civilizing elite projects produced in order to incorporate the Putumayo’s population, its history and its territory, to Colombia during the first decade of the 20^th century. By proposing a reading of General Rafael Uribe Uribe’s Reducción de Salvajes (1907) and Miguel Triana’s Por el sur de Colombia (1907), Martínez-Pinzón shows how these projects negotiated language and heterogeneity in the southern border province of Putumayo. Alternatively mixing military strategy with an appeal to “science” Uribe Uribe’s “nationalizing strategy” proposed expropriating Putumayo indigenous populations from their language, their land and finally their bodies by way of bringing in white immigrants to dissolve “indigenous blood” through miscegenation. Martínez-Pinzón argues that, in contrast, Triana produces in his travelogue a self-criticizing stance in order to exhibit the ignorant hubris of civilizing creoles that contradictorily saw indigenous cultures as being anti-national at the same time needing their labor for the agro-export economy. Finally, the author contends that Triana’s proposal of constructing an indigenous history of Colombia is a political tactic to legitimize Colombian state control over the Putumayo territory amidst the turn of the century diplomatic tensions and military conflicts over the Amazon.

This essay performs an analysis of the highly controversial and rarely studied personal diaries of this Irish diplomat and traveler. Within the Black Diaries it is possible to find the description of bodies in intense suffering, of dismemberments, torture, and death, alongside descriptions of beautiful near-perfect bodies that provide the narrator with moments of intense pleasure. These are, to a certain extent, the same bodies; bodies of indigenous peoples living in the Casa Arana’s reign of terror. Reconciling the simultaneity of bodily pain and pleasure in this writing is one of the centers of Uriarte’s analysis, which links the Black Diaries to the more traditional utopian discourse about Amazonia of which the myths of El Dorado ––and the violence the promise of untapped, virginal riches provoked––are a significant part.

This introductory chapter discusses how the Amazonian region of Putumayo figures significantly in Colombia and beyond, politically, socially, economically and culturally. It describes Putumayo’s situation as a frontier between different nations and cultures. The Putumayo continues to have many of the features of a ‘frontier’ culture — crime, poverty, prostitution, drug trafficking and insurgency — a throwback to the colonial era when the Putumayo was perceived as marking a boundary between ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’.