Geographic Scale: Visibilities and Invisibilities in Afro-descendant Cultural Processes (Southwest of Colombia)

The scale is a highly contingent and fluid socio-cultural construction, which makes possible, in terms of spatialized articulations, to think of multiple cultural, social, and territorial processes at different spatial levels. The purpose of this manuscript is to analyze the recovery processes of cultural traditions in the Patia Valley initiated in the 80s until 2018, based on the conceptualization of geographic scale as a network. To accomplish this, we carried out a semi-structured interview with a social actor that has accompanied the recovery of traditions from the beginning. This, with the aim of understanding, from their experience, how the cultural processes developed in Patia have been articulated through multiple scalar networks, connected and interacted through visibility and invisibility geographical practices. This led us to establish that geographic visibility is linked to delocalized practices, while geographical invisibility is defined as "place-based" practice.