Arqueología del saber de la historia del arte prehispánico en Colombia: Un estudio de caso 1988

Abstract

The present work of Master‟s Thesis makes an analysis of the history of Pre-Hispanic art in Colombia. It took as a case study the “Colombian Art History” by Eugenio Barney Cabrera. As a method of historical analysis for this study, it has been taken into account the premises of The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault, as a way of tracking and identifying the elements that contributed to the construction of the categories of analysis and the approaches used in the creation of the discourse referents about the history of Pre-Hispanic art. In this sense of analysis, It has been determined that the history of Pre-Hispanic art in Colombia was developed on a scientific tradition and a shared discourse among the archaeology, the anthropology, the ethnography, etc. It was built on a complex network of interpretations that superimpose themselves until creating a continuity between the discourses that come from those disciplines and the discourses of art history, thus it is placed in consideration the fact that the discourses that were created to give an answer to anthropological and archaeological descriptions were used in the same way as in the art analysis without any differentiation, so it exists the evident limitation of categories that come from art studies in that History. The analysis shows the paradox that exists between the past of the Pre-Hispanic man, author of a splendid artistic production, and the existing decadence due to the arrival of the Spanish in the communities; and the later tension showed in the appreciation of the indigenous production, as art to the communities of the past; on the contrary as handicrafts to the subsequent communities.