Títol del projecte: Embodying Ecopolitics: Ethnonografic Futures and Elsewheres of Quilombola Swidden Horticulture
Descripció de la recerca:This project focuses on the embodied horticultural labor performed by Amazonian quilombolas (Brazilian Maroon descendants) as a locus for the elucidation of out-reaching temporal and ecopolitical connections. Such an analytical move involves important contradistinctions with respect to the vision of the body as the place where little-historicized, radical or ontological differences come into being, which is a dominant view in Amazonian anthropology. The proposed study starts from the assumption that quilombola embodied history, marked by slavery, escape and re-settlement, has not only been determinant for its own historical becoming; it has also left a significant imprint in general, contemporary imaginings of what it means to be a free and resilient human being. The project aims at actualizing (and project to the future) such history-making capacity of the body of slaves/Maroon/quilombolas by looking at their current swidden horticulture, a productive strategy based on bodily labor and inter-familial cooperation. The ethnographic focus on bodily and cooperative labor will, on the one hand, disclose relevant connections to other socio-cultural settings where people also practically cope with the balance between “traditional” economic systems and the tentacles of global capitalism. On the other hand, it will be suggested that instead of looking at the quilombolas’ embodied practices as mere remnants of an exotic (afro-indigenous) tradition, we consider them as a future-oriented ethnographic field, an ongoing experiment on bodily and collective forms of the organization of labor, which may well forecast ecopolitical challenges and strategies yet to be seen in other contexts.
Investigadors: Dr. Anibal Garcia Arregui (Universitat de Barcelona); Gemma Orobitg (Universitat de Barcelona)
Entitat financiadora: AGAUR (Marie-Curie COFUND).
Finançament: 94.000 + 11.800 (prorroga COVID) euros
Període: 01/01/2019-09/04/2021