Representations about the indigenous and their link with globalized cultural trends

Abstract

 This article describes a set of representations about native cultures manifested in a sector of the non-indigenous population of Colombia, where shamanism is increasingly mentioned, and where natives are imagined as having a spiritual and alternative wisdom beneficial to western societies. The analysis of these and other ideas reveals similarities with the narratives used to represent other indigenous or ethnic cultures in different latitudes. Those similarities, it is argued, do not come from objective cultural resemblances between ethnic groups; they come from common sociocultural characteristics of the people who construct those representations of the ethnic. These findings support the conclusion that this kind of indigenism is the local manifestation of a globalized ideology centered on the ideals and needs of the modern self.