The Guardians of the Forest and indigenous ways to conserve disappearing landscapes.

• Grant number: 24/07071-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2024
• End date: December 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Fernanda Arêas Peixoto
• Grantee: Giulia Villas Caselato
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/07886-8 - Arts and semantics of creation and memory, AP.TEM

Abstract

This project aims to bring together different subfields of Anthropology, based on the notion of creation, understood in a broad sense. It is about investing in expanding the uses and conceptions of creation, deliberately exploring its polysemy, the varied relationships it establishes with memory and the possibilities of relationships it allows us to infer. Our objective is not only to contribute to the specific debates of the five axes that make up the project - kinship, indigenous thought, ecology, crafts, inventions in science and techniques - but to extract broader theoretical and pragmatic consequences, through the reciprocal illumination of the themes in question. focus. The central hypothesis is that the prism of creation, tested in precise ethnographic loci, resizes, expands and displaces certain canonical discussions in Anthropology, for example: kinship analyzes which, taken in a pragmatic way, allow us to associate kinship with the domains of politics, productive life, family and religion; the notions of animality and species, generally considered as given, can be redefined based on indigenous formulations that interconnect hunting, creation, relationship and care in more-than-human and multi-species entanglements; the conceptions about "popular" actions, housed, on the one hand, in the controversies surrounding the notions of tradition and heritage and, on the other, in the debates about ethnic-political identities and resistance, are renewed from the angle of creative mixtures and contaminations; finally, discussions about ecological and ontological conflicts, as well as certain debates in the field of science that, taken from the angle of creation, allow for dialogue with contemporary theories about destruction, the "end of the world" and the Anthropocene.