Dividing her book into seven chapters, Joanne Rappaport, a longtime researcher of rural lives in Colombia in the twentieth century, has produced an impressive volume on the works and doings of a Colombian colleague, Orlando Fals Borda (1925–2008). The book chronicles his efforts, in collaboration with the National Association of Peasant Users (Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos, ANUC), in the Department of Córdoba to unravel the underlying local history and the possibilities of translating a gained political consciousness into an engaged militant political project. Fals Borda himself called his research strategy “action research,” based on the participation of peasant cadres and conversations with agrarian leaders of Colombia's Caribbean coast, around Montería in the Sinú River basin.
“In this book,” Rappaport writes, “I try to make sense of what the authors of this methodology thought research was and how they organized the fusion of peasant knowledge and academic inquiry into a participatory endeavor. I probe the ways that the knowledge emanating from this extended conversation contributed to activism, particularly to ANUC's strategy of occupying large landholdings and administering them in novel ways” (xix-xx). Rappaport not only tried but convincingly showed the process by which this “translation” took place, based on archival materials Fals Borda left behind and several graphic histories drawn by Ulianov Chalarka, to whom the book is dedicated, between 1972 and 1974. Some of his drawings are reproduced and analyzed in great detail in the book. Another highly important source for Fals Borda's methodology and messages is an interview with Juana Julia Guzmán, who actively engaged in peasant movements in the 1920s (Lomagrande).
Chronologically, Fals Borda's endeavor began after the decade (1948–58) of La Violencia, when he uncovered the inherent impunity of Colombia's two-party system that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives. It was this moment in Colombian history that brought him to rethink the role of social science as a vehicle of change, as much as it triggered his active and more radical commitment to change and politics. It meant a shift toward collaborative research among—in contrast to “about”—victims of violence and its translation into the creation and diffusion of educational materials to promote political action, which, in turn, was widely criticized by the split but organized Left.
Orlando Fals Borda was also the founder in 1973 of a national network for research and social action, La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social. Some of its members and co-thinkers (like Fals Borda himself) were linked to the Presbyterian Church. The Caribbean Foundation (Fundación del Caribe), founded in late 1972, was a chapter of the regional network established in Montería, Sincelejo, and Barranquilla (Fals Borda's place of birth). Colombia's agrarian reform in the 1960s left most peasants in an uproar. At the time Fals Borda was experiencing and experimenting with his new action intended outlooks, he also worked as a supporting actor in the rise of the radical wing of ANUC. All this was preceded by “pathbreaking ethnographic research” (xii) on peasant economies in the 1950s.
Based on his earlier research in Colombia's highlands and his Caribbean coast experiences, Fals Borda developed evaluations of the research process and its outcomes, at a national and international level. Among the results were the books Historia de la cuestión agraria en Colombia (1975), Historia doble de la Costa (4 volumes, 1980–1987); and Knowledge and People's Power: Lessons with Peasants in Nicaragua, Mexico and Colombia (1985), which earned him recognition as a prolific social scientist. There are 30 titles in all, in Spanish and English; these are listed in the bibliography of Rappaport's book.
In Chapter 7, the last, we encounter the results of Joanne Rappaport's own research in conversation with Fals Borda and many other of his co-thinkers and co-workers along the way. Using the accumulated information and interpretation from the previous chapters, the author took the results of her research to Colombian grassroots organizations she contacted in 2018, engaging in a strategy of devolution (as Fals Borda had done in previous decades and including materials from “archivos de baúl”) and evaluation in how far his experiences in Córdoba in the 1970s were still of use for present-day researchers. Through a varied set of workshops, Rappaport attempted to exert her influence under the heading of a “critical recovery” in contexts where she noticed that participatory action research (PAR) had become “a collection of techniques rather than a set of principles” (198). In the wider international framework, PAR has found resonance among communities of color, immigrant youth, in schools and in prisons, and in Appalachia. More in Europe than in the United States, researchers have been associated with the operation of complex organizations (industrial cooperatives, local governments, and universities), rather than with social movements (199).
In the particular case of Latin America, social movements have reached a stage in which they are able to assume their own positions, occasionally resorting to social scientists for specific answers to local problems. Organic intellectuals of varied cultural/racial backgrounds emerged, instead of “action research.” On a downside from a social movement perspective, PAR has also evolved as a methodology appropriated by governments, lending institutions, and corporations to perpetuate the status quo rather than produce change. Such a recognition has led Rappaport to suggest the need to reinscribe Fals Borda's ideas within changed realities and power relations, now even more marked in Colombia and elsewhere by paramilitary violence, forced displacement, expansion of industrial agriculture, environmental degradation, and urban migration (206). Maybe it is time to once again resort to imputational representations, the collective work of the imagination, a collage of history of sorts.
