Life and Death Movements around the waters of the Ribeira river: bodies, lands, and fights between the riverine quilombolas of the middle Ribeira Valley-SP.

• Grant number: 19/16385-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: November 25, 2019
• End date: November 24, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Anna Catarina Morawska Vianna
• Grantee: Alessandra Regina dos Santos
• Supervisor: Susana Dores de Matos Viegas
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
• Associated to the scholarship: 17/02557-3 - On the trails of the elders: knowledge practices and mapping techniques on the Ribeira Valley, BP.DR

Abstract

My ethnographic incursion is about the people who live in the region of the middle Ribeira river. Those places are cohabited by indigenous people, quilombolas and a multiplicity of beings that, in their ways of existing and resisting to the life-imprisoning blows, move in defense of earth and water. The permanent fight against the projects of imprisonment of the waters of the Ribeira river helped to compose the fight for the continuity of the life on the land. As long as there is life in movement, people born and raised in that land, the waters of the Ribeira river will continue being happy, dancing, because they are free. However, the world that emerges after the flood event is not a stable and predictable one. That way, in contrast to the life that flows free, there is the power that is limitless, from the anti-god, that drags everything and destroys house and farm. Those contrasting images related to those movements of life and death around the river mark the everyday practices and the fights of those people - and look like extensive to the concepts of land, body, and person. It is about those poetics and cosmopolitics which create and recreate bodies, lands, and fights between the quilombolas of the middle Ribeira Valley that this article deal with.