2026/04/29 by Cristina Cabrera Febles, Pablo Alonso González · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology #Historical Studies in Central America #Migration, Education, Indigenous Social Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/2201473x.2026.2664361
openalex publication_date 2026/04/29 · openalex created_date 2026/05/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/19
This article examines how the Canarian shepherd functions as a site of settler colonial elimination and heritage commodification. Pastoralists in the Canary Islands have long been produced as an ‘internal other’ within Spanish nation-building. In reconstructing the genealogy of that figure from the conquest to the present, we show how colonial and postcolonial knowledge technologies – cartography, chronicles, legislation, racial science, folklore, heritage policies and tourism – have alternately exoticized, romanticized, and marginalized shepherds. Drawing on a Foucauldian genealogical approach and the Latin American debates on coloniality of power, we compare heterogeneous archives (15th–20th c. texts, legal and scientific writings) with current patrimonial and media discourses. The analysis demonstrates a durable double movement: the material suppression through enclosure, regulation and dispossession, coupled with the cultural representation of difference as a marketable emblem of ‘authentic’ Canary identity. While pastoral practices are mobilized to brand landscapes and festivals, shepherds face land scarcity, prohibitions, and precarization. Situating the Canary case within Iberian histories of ‘internal others’, the article clarifies how racialized hierarchies were repackaged as folklore and heritage in the twentieth century and persist today. We argue for an agenda of epistemic and territorial justice grounded in co-governance with shepherds, redistribution and recognition.