"Estudos Avançados" #112 presents the opposition of the peoples of the Amazon to the Anthropocene

The studies and essays in the dossier "Amazonia Against the Anthropocene" in issue #112 of the journal Estudos Avançados "highlight the complexity of the relationships between nature and culture, and the voices of those often silenced in colonial and official narratives," according to the publication's editor, sociologist Sérgio Adorno, a member of IEA's Board. The articles are available for free download from Scientific Electronic Library Online (Portuguese only).

"Recurrent scenarios of territorial plundering of indigenous peoples, quilombolas, and traditional peoples and communities have stimulated the search for a common political identity and the implementation of actions aimed at environmental conservation and the defense of collective territorial rights, which leads to the formulation of an archaeology of resistance in the Anthropocene," he states.

Coexistence

With ten papers authored by researchers from Brazilian and foreign universities and institutes, most of them from institutions in the states of Pará and Amazonas, the dossier begins with the article "Amazonia in Symbiosis: Traces of Humankinds Facing the Anthropocene," by an anthropologist and three archaeologists from the Federal University of Western Pará (UFOPA). They propose a critical discussion on some definitions of the Anthropocene. According to them, the indigenous marks in the Amazon rainforest are the result of forms of coexistence between humans and the landscape that contrast with the new marks of the Anthropocene.

"If the villages, terreiros, paths, farms, and other places promoted by the Amazonian peoples project connections between species, human collectives, political forms, languages, technologies, and worldviews in flows of constant interaction, Western initiatives develop disconnections between people, territories, and cultures, and interrupt multiple interspecies flows."

However, they emphasize that the criteria for identifying the Anthropocene are being constructed based on exceptionalist and universalist parameters, while "the 'forest-land' does not emerge as a passive place" where the impacts of the new geological epoch occur. "By making their differences in the ways of inhabiting the land count, humans and more-than-humans in the Amazon face the Anthropocene."

This thesis is reinforced in the following text, "An Archaeology of Forest Peoples," by two other researchers from UFOPA. For them, the Anthropocene, understood from the perspective of mercantilism and colonialism or the emergence of industrial capitalism, has been made possible by the "spoliation of traditionally occupied territories transformed into places for the extraction of raw materials and labor. Therefore, the countercolonial resistance of the forest peoples through the defense of their territories and ways of life are examples of an 'Amazon against the Anthropocene.'"

The authors state that archaeology, by providing historical understanding from material remains, "presents itself as a powerful tool for telling the history of these peoples, which has always been written from documents produced by outsiders." In the article they seek to demonstrate that the Amazon is a web of socio-ecological interactions as a result of the domestication of landscapes and populations of species.

Landscapes

The domestication of landscapes is the subject of an article by researchers from the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), the Juruá Institute, and the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). They comment that the Amazon is a natural biome in the popular imagination, which "denies the existence and agency of indigenous peoples, who arrived at least 13,000 years ago." This myth of the virgin forests ends up having repercussions on public policies for conservation and regional development, they note.

The researchers explain that indigenous peoples combine horticulture and domestication of landscapes, as well as sedentarism and mobility. According to them, it is widely accepted that the most intensely domesticated landscapes are more common where indigenous populations were largest. Along rivers, for example.

Regarding the debate about domestication in areas between rivers, they state that the objection to this having occurred is due to the lack of evidence in these regions. Studies are mainly carried out in areas close to large rivers due to their ease of access. The assumption that highly mobile peoples have not domesticated landscapes intensively is a thesis that has proven to be erroneous, according to the article.

Food production

The dossier also addresses specific aspects of indigenous cultures, such as food production techniques. The topic is addressed in an article by anthropologists from the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). Built over time and connected to cosmological formulations, the wealth of food preparation and consumption techniques “was and is used in the transformation of plants in a broad sense, cultivated or not, domesticated or wild, from agriculture or foraging, native or exotic, from the countryside, the forest, or the scrubland,” they say.

The study considers three plant species (açaí, mairá potato, and umari), observing the ways of obtaining fundamental ingredients (gum and paste) or altering the state of the plant matter (smoking, fermentation). Understood "as cosmotechnics, the ways of transforming plants are a clear example of anti-anthropocene practices, since their orientation is based on an indigenous equistatutory episteme between species and other subjects inhabiting the Earth."

Countercolonial autonomy in the face of the capitalocene. This is how two researchers, one from the University of Brasília (UnB) and the other from Lancaster University, define the indigenous movement in the Lower Tapajós River in their article. According to them, this countercolonial autonomy is manifested in the cultivation of cassava, worldview, and political self-organization. The focus of the text is on the Tupinambá people. To address the problem of conflicts between indigenous and non-indigenous people, the researchers propose four possibilities: a new universal approach to recognition; the idea of ​​insurgent universality; the idea of ​​traditionally occupied lands; and territories of common use.

Archaeologists from USP, UFOPA, the Max Planck Institute, and the University of Exeter present research findings based on data from four regions of the Amazon: 1) the geoglyphs of the state of Acre, in Brazil; 2) the raised fields of French Guiana; 3) the Amazonian dark earth of the Lower Tapajós River; and 4) the zanja sites (sets of ditches) in Iténez, Bolivia. The study has sought to answer several outstanding questions about the nature of the Anthropocene, including the role of deforestation in indigenous practices in the past, the extent to which black earths have been produced for cultivation, and the extent to which the Amazon rainforest has recovered after the demographic collapse.

According to the authors, the period that began 4,500 years ago "marked one of the largest-scale environmental transformations, with an abrupt increase starting 2,000 years ago." For them, considering this second period as the beginning of an Amazonian Anthropocene "is a topic open to debate." However, they state that paleoecological data suggest that such transformations, instead of causing negative ruptures in existing ecosystems, have managed to maintain vital ecosystem services by maintaining vegetation cover with the construction of new relationships between people and other beings in the forest. However, they point out that the most intense and destructive anthropogenic impacts occurred in several regions of the Amazon after the European invasion, especially during the 20th century.

Cosmological Aspects

Two social scientists from the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) are the authors of a paper on issues related to the Anthropocene based on indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, which according to them "disarrange non-indigenous understandings about humanity, nature, supernature, and consequently about life, death, and extinction."

From an ethnographic perspective, the article focuses on indigenous ways of thinking, inhabiting, and transforming the relationship between the consumption of natural resources and the capacity for environmental regeneration through the contact with beings other than humans, living and non-living, regulated by a series of precautions. The researchers' hypothesis is that multispecies kinship allows us to understand both the creation and sustainability of the fertility/vitality of coexistence networks as well as their depredation/extinction in terms of the rupture of relationships between beings through separation and abandonment, configuring what they call the cosmopolitics of care.

An article by a postgraduate student in anthropology at UFAM who is a member of the Tuyuka people presents the vision of the Amazon territory as tõkowiseri: "a ceremonial house that makes life bubble up." He reports that this vision comes from the ancient understanding of the cosmo experience by the "specialists (kumua, baya, and, yaiwa) who care for the cosmic levels and all their inhabitants."

Faced with any action that will affect the inhabitants of another house (forest, water, air, etc.), these "experts" from the northwest Amazon ask for permission through the performance of ritual ceremonies with the aim of obtaining fruits, fish, game, and offering protection, tranquility, understanding, and invitations to the ceremonial party, explains the author.

Another indigenous researcher, from the Waiwai ethnic group, joins the dossier with an article about moments that have significantly transformed the trajectory of his people in the Wayamu Territory, including the contact with missionaries. The author also addresses his discovery of archaeology and how this made it possible to reconnect with an important part of the Waiwai history. This contact with history made him think about the "need to talk about indigenous archaeology and change a little of what has been said about the past of the Amazon."

The dossier is completed by a review of the book Sob os Tempos do Equinócio: Oito Mil Anos de História na Amazônia Central (2022), by archaeologist Eduardo Goés Neves, director of USP's Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Other sections

The issue also includes three other sets of articles. The first, “Climate Change,” includes analyses of the climate disaster in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in 2024, the influence of deforestation on climate refuges in the Amazon, the impacts of climate change on the Amazonian sociobioeconomy, and the effects of climate change on agriculture.

Two articles comprise a section dedicated to the work of German philosopher Hans Jonas (1903-1993), one of Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) disciples but a strong critic of the latter's adherence to Nazism. One of the texts addresses Jonas's critique of the dualism that led to the separation between human beings and nature, and how this is the basis of the "wave of innovations in the current agri-food system, whose technological frontier seeks precisely to emancipate human nutrition from its dependence on soil, climate, and animals." The other article discusses the current relevance of Jonas's thinking based on the three axes that characterize his philosophical concerns: gnosis, life, and the relationship between technology and ethics.

The final set of texts in issue #112 brings three complementary articles to the dossier "Municipal Elections in São Paulo: Problems and Challenges," published in Estudos Avançados #111. They are studies about the performance of elementary school students in the city and the management of educational policies, the challenges for public cultural policies in São Paulo, and a discussion about the possible profile of an ideal voter who investigates candidacies in a multifaceted way and not just based on a single criterion.

The list below contains the names of the authors who have contributed with each one of the addressed themes:

Amazonia Against the Anthropocene

Amazonia in Symbiosis: Traces of Humankinds Facing the Anthropocene - Miguel Aparício, Claide de Paula Moraes, Anne Rapp Py-Daniel, and Eduardo Góes Neves
An Archaeology of Forest Peoples - Vinicius Honorato and Bruna Rocha
Domestication of Amazonian Landscapes - Charles R. Clement, Maria Julia Ferreira, Mariana Franco Cassino, and Juliano Franco de Moraes
Forest Cuisine – Indigenous Techniques in Amazonian Food Production - Gilton Mendes dos Santos and Lorena França
Tõkowiseri: Kumuánica, Bayaroánica, and Yaiwánica Cosmovivences - Justino Sarmento Rezende
Countercolonial Autonomies Against the Capitalocene in Amazonia: the Lower Tapajós Indigenous Movement - Raquel Tupinambá and James A. Fraser
A History of How the Waiwai of Amazonia Have Been Building and Now Telling Their Archaeologies - Jaime Xamen Wai Wai
What do Paleoecological Data Tell Us About the Amazon Anthropocene? - Jennifer Watling, S. Yoshi Maezumi, Myrtle P. Shock, and José Iriarte
Kinship With the Land and Indigenous Cosmopolitics of Care - Ana Gabriela Morim de Lima and Nicole Soares-Pinto
Archaeology to Live in the Future - Marcia Bezerra

Climate Change

Brazil’s Worst Climate Disaster: Rainstorms and Flooding in the State of Rio Grande do Sul in April-May 2024 - Jose A. Marengo et al.
Deforestation Restricts Climate Havens in Amazonia - Calil Torres-Amaral, Luciano Jorge Serejo dos Anjos, Everaldo Barreiros de Souza, and Ima Célia Guimarães Vieira
Impacts of Climate Change on the Sociobioeconomy of Amazonia - Diego Oliveira Brandão, Julia Arieira, and Carlos A. Nobre
Climate Change, Agriculture, and Cattle Farming: Impacts, Mitigation, and Adaptation. Challenges and Opportunities - Eduardo Delgado Assad and Maria Leonor Ribeiro Casimiro Lopes Assad

Hans Jonas

The Agrifood System Through the Lens of Hans Jonas' Philosophical Biology - Ricardo Abramovay
Hans Jonas, a Philosopher of Our Time - Jelson Oliveira

Municipal Elections in São Paulo: Problems and Challenges II

The Issue of Elementary Education in the City of São Paulo - Bernardete A. Gatti
Contemporary Challenges for Cultural Public Policies in the City of São Paulo - Lia Calabre and Ana Paula do Val
How to Be a Demanding Voter and an Ideal Candidate - Marcos S. Buckeridge and Arlindo Philippi Júnior