Representaciones del Estado colombiano y construcción de ciudadanía en los márgenes

© 2017 Gabriel A. Ruiz. Colombian State Representations and Citizenship Construction at the Margins Based on ethnographic fieldwork done in a Colombian settlement of houses built on stilts (palafitos), this article studies what the form and significance are of being a citizen at the margins of the state. The peripheral forms used in the construction of citizenship, the legitimacy of certain social practices - oscillating between legality and illegality - that constitute the daily experience of state representation at the margins is examined. It is argued that the simulation of state power is more important than its actual practices at the margins, as this affects the reality that determines daily life there. It follows that the margins are not spaces where social processes have been curtailed because the state has not yet fully arrived, but are places in which these processes take place in the gaps allowed by the simulation of it.