Politics of Care: ecological doing of indigenous women and ethnographic writing

• Grant number: 25/01822-1
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: June 30, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Fabiana Maizza
• Grantee: Fabiana Maizza
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to rethink what has been traditionally called "domestic domain" in Lowland South America indigenous communities' studies, a domain that has been assimilated to women, kinship, and nature - in contrast to the public domain: shamanic, political, cosmopolitical and assimilated to men. My main hypothesis is that indigenous women daily actions, especially in the gardens, are political, thus the name of the project: politics of care. The project will mobilize the revisited concept of care as an ethic-esthetic-politic practice that involves action, relation, and subjectivity in composing with Earth. The aim is to rewrite the domestic domain as a locus of political and cosmopolitical agencies that reveal indigenous women ecological practices as practices of co-constitution with nonhumans. This discussion wants to open a dialogue with feminist post-structuralists studies that follow the intuitions and work of Lynn Margulis about symbiose, which states that life on earth evolves not in an isolated, competitive form but through multispecies entanglements in a co-evolution process. Another focus of the project is the ethnographic writing and the stories that are told, especially the creation of narrative matrix such as discussed by Despret (2016), where any academic theory is a story that is proposed, a story that will enable other stories and will determinate not only what is written but also what is observed. One of the intents of this project is to create a feminist multispecies narrative matrix that enables indigenous women to be described in ethnographies in a manner closer to the way they describe themselves: "ancestral warriors' women", "biome women", as we can see in the contemporaneous political articulation of the so called "feather headdress front" in the Brazilian congress. (AU)