Gestión : ambivalence and temporalities of kinship and politics in Mocoa (Putumayo, Colombia)

Abstract

Located in the Amazon-Andean foothills, Mocoa is the administrative and bureaucratic center of Putumayo. In this place, indigenous leaders capture resources for communitarian activities through engagements within a diverse institutional landscape. Such interactions between indigenous leaders and multiple institutional others are locally known as gestión. In this article, I focus on the ways in which gestión connects political leadership practices with intimate worlds of kin and kith relations. Following gestión in the lives of two Inga women who lead local indigenous communities, I argue that gestión entails the making of an ambivalent kinship with institutional and political agents, which in turn brings material benefits as well as mistrustful relationships of intimacy. Yet, in everyday life, gestión is not only a matter of kinship and politics, but also of time. Leaders need time to do gestión in a highly institutionalized city. By focusing on the relation between gestión, kinship and time, I conclude by pointing to the incorporation of institutional temporalities of gestión as a self-making process in which leaders became state-like actors.