Alchemy in un mundo al revés: Gold, “Raw Law” and Indigenous Law in Colombia’s armed conflict
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the concept of alchemy as a conceptual backbone, this article explores the effects of diverse legal pluralities on the Embera Chamí Indigenous people living in the gold-rich ancestral homeland of the Resguardo Indígena Cañamomo Lomaprieta in Caldas, Colombia. Drawing on ten years of collaborative research and ethnography, I develop a concept I call “Raw Law,” the law of outlawed, armed actors and their norms, sanctions and modus operandi, contributing insights that push conceptual boundaries and add complexity to analyses of “the law.” I show the “inter-il-legalities” at work, as the Embera Chamí exercise their own law over their self-named and centuries-old “ancestral mining,” as a counter-proposal and exercise of self-determination in the face of State Law that criminalizes this gold mining and attempts to impose unilaterally developed formalization schemes. I tease out the effects of “nefarious alchemical” technologies deployed to erode the Embera Chamí land base and constrain their autonomy and decision-making, highlighting the “positive alchemies” the traditional authorities use to assert their self-government and push for their rights to be upheld. I consider the types of transnational flows intruding on the Embera Chamí and what this distinct and violent context means for analysis through the lens of legal pluralities in Colombia, Latin America, and beyond.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".