Chroniclers who make ancestral knowledge visible

Abstract

A central theme in inmaterial or intangible heritage conservation policies is the recovery of traditional trades and knowledge, understood as examples of manifestations, expressions, and practices that give the communities and human groups a sense of identity, belonging and historical continuity.  In this context, the Colombian Ministry of Culture and its Heritage Directorate has led an initiative that questions the political, economic and cultural invisibilization of the Afro-Colombian population and tries to claim the memory of resistance and construction of the territory, expressed in trades such as the construction of wooden vessels. This article presents the summary of an exploratory research on the office of the Carpinteria de Ribera on the Island of Tierrabomba, (Cartagena District, Caribbean coast of Colombia), narrated through the voices of masters and apprentices who preserve the knowledge and techniques to build these vessels. These masters participate in the research project that also includes interdisciplinary teams and in which learning courses and workshops are held. To interview the protagonists, the travel notebooks were used, which, like those used by chroniclers of yesterday, become tools to collect, recognize and transmit the experiences effectively and intimately. By means of  stories and drawings  is documented an ancestral tradition.  There are also an appropriate way of working today in the search for strategies to save and show recover trades and knowledge in the field of Cultural Heritage.