I recently finished a Master degree in Social Sciences at L'École d'Haute Études en Sciences Sociales -- EHESS --  in Paris  where I focused my research on the resignification of the identities of rural families (Campesinos)  living in a colombian national park. 

      Despite recent international advances in environmental management that defend sustainable development processes, in practice, the notion of nature and environment is still based on ontological presuppositions that found Colombian environmental law and structure it around the classical duality that divides the world between humans and non-humans.  It is this perspective that is imposed on Colombia's PNN and the rural communities that inhabit them and have an already constructed relationship with the landscape. I therefore propose to study the processes of territoriality of rural families living in Nevado del Huila and its buffer zone, conceiving the landscape as a socio-ecological « system » that must be understood and administered both as a cultural and social subject and as an object that exists « independently of the observer. » (Bertrand 1978:1)

 

      The general hypothesis of this work is that the diversity of actors and interests in a PNN have already transformed a strict conservation area into a  « hybrid protection territory» (Sierra 2016) where institutions and the rural population are obliged to jointly set new criteria for the proper use of the landscape in favor of the conservation of the protected area, that is, a « New naturalism » (Larrère 2009), which has the direct effect of reconfiguring the identity of the rural person as a « parquesino »  (Zavala 2016), a term that suggests a differentiation in terms of identity and territoriality between the farmer living in a rural area and the one living in a protected area.

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Also read the recent article published in ES about this project.