Grow the Plants and Harvest the Childhood: An Ethnography with Children of Céu do Mapiá and their links with the Forest.

• Grant number: 25/04153-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2025
• End date: October 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Edmundo Antonio Peggion
• Grantee: Matheus Lopes Hengles
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This is a proposal of ethnography situated in the Child Anthropology that has as locus at the Vila Céu do Mapiá, Pauini (AM), integrant of the Floresta Nacional do Purus and a religious symbolic center of Santo Daime. In this sense, the central objective of this work is to understand how children relate to the environment from their cosmological links, having in mind the difficulty of equating social justice and environmental conservation in protected areas, especially in relation to traditional management practices and conservation discourses. Therefore, we work in a territory categorized as a Unidade Protegida de Uso Sustentavel. Our specific objectives are: (1) to understand what it means to be a child at Vila Céu do Mapiá, (2) to identify children's relationships with plants, spiritual entities and animals, and (3) to map biodiversity conservation actions. Thus, through nuances of the ethnographic method associated with the mobilization of authors that allow us to think of children as producers of culture with relative autonomy, as well as the mythic-ritual link in the production and consumption practices of this community, we work observing and participating in the daily life of children, as well as in their ritual life. In fact, the raised material, consisting of drawings, photographs, interviews and field notes, allows us to think about childhood conceptions, the relations with non-humans and the link of the Mapienses with their territory from the spiritual knowledge of environmental order. Finally, our contributions are based on the recognition of children's agency through the work ethnographic and their forms of traditional occupation in the Amazonian biome that allow us to raise information not yet glimpsed about the management of biodiversity by populations in protected areas. (AU)