Biocultural memory: culture(s)-nature(s) in the contrast of the Capitalocene

Aline Reis Calvo Hernandez
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
[email protected]

Summary: The objective article is to analyze the concept of biocultural memory as a policy of memory, in contrast to the crisis of civilization imposed by the neoliberal capitalist model in the Capitalocene. Initially I bring some reflections on the processes of forgetfulness in the rise of the crisis of planetary civilization. Next, I present the construct of biocultural memory and propose thinking about the politics of memory. Next, I present to you the question “How to recover lost memories?” and propose three topics to analyze: (r)evolve as epistemes and as practices; decolonize my thought and, finally, with the proposition of “we are not going to buy or what you want to sell to us.” The topics aim to present theoretical-practical strategies to resume biocultural memory in Western societies devastated by the colonial and expropriating development model. 

Keywords: Capitalocene, biocultural memory, ecology of knowledge, civilizational crisis

Biocultural memory: culture(s)-nature(s) as the antithesis to the Capitalocene

SummaryThis article analyzes the concept of biocultural memory as a politics of memory in the face of the civilizational crisis imposed by the neoliberal capitalist model in the Capitalocene. Initially, I discuss the processes of memory loss in this planetary civilizational crisis. Next, I present the construct of biocultural memory and propose considering it as a politics of memory. Then, I address the question of how to recover lost memories, through three lines of analysis: the (r)evolution of epistemes and practices; decolonizing thought; and not buying into what they want to sell us. These lines present theoretical and practical strategies for recovering biocultural memory in Western societies devastated by the colonial and expropriating model. 

KeywordsCapitalocene, biocultural memory, ecology of knowledges, civilizational crisis

Biocultural memory: culture(s)-nature(s) as an antithesis to the Capitalocene

Abstract: The article analyzes the concept of biocultural memory as a memory policy in the face of the civilizational crisis imposed by the neoliberal capitalist model in the Capitalocene. Initially, I discuss the processes of memory loss in the crisis of planetary civilization. Next, I present the construct of biocultural memory and I propose to think of it as a memory policy. Then, I present the question of how to recover lost memories, from three themes of analysis: (r)evolution of epistemes and practices; decolonize thought; not buy what they want to sell us. The themes present theoretical-practical strategies for the recovery of biocultural memory in Western societies devastated by the colonial and expropriating model. 

Keywords: Capitalocene, Biocultural memory, ecology of knowledges, civilizational crisis

Planetary civilization crisis

The biocultural concept arises with the intention of linking nature with culture, dimensions that are divided by modernity/coloniality as hegemonic ways of understanding the world. This mistaken notion, which has lasted for more than 500 years, reduces scientific development, relegating the social to a lesser status (soft) linking the humanities, the arts, therefore, without scientific rigor. Therefore, this separation does not correspond to the human dimension in relation to the planet, to the cosmos, nor to our ecodependence, because we live and are nature, a species more in nature (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2015). 

The social was built on the aegis of a single, delimited subject, but this construction shows its limits, mainly when we conceive that the social is never something in itself, ontologically separate, because “social relations include non-humans and humans as socially active partners” (Haraway, 1997, p. 8).

It is intended to dislocate it (or social) from its exclusive space of human beings, so that, in the end, most of the social theorists are really talking about social relations and history; It is basically a human form that constitutes itself over and against what is not human [...] I believe that “social” as a substantive is problematic as “animal” or “human”, but, as a verb, it is very interesting. In some way, we need to understand how it does not become a substantive, but without losing its positive qualities. Então, what could social mean? One cannot proceed by analogy because you do not want to anthropomorphize non-human partners as a way of finding them. (Haraway, 2021, pp. 135-137)

The notion of radical individualism gives primacy to the ideal, self-produced individual, free of all the moorings that, in reality, do not exist, because “any individual only sees the world through companions of his species, of other species and of other natures” (Silva e Silva, 2021).

Donna Haraway in “O manifesto das espécies companheiras: Puppies, people and significant otherness” (Haraway, 2021) sublinha a inseparabilite das “things” that moderns are accustomed to dividing. The author criticizes or Anthropocene that normalizes the idea of ​​the human being as a central species. He prefers to define the term Capitalocene, defining the inflexible imperative of capitalism It is the neoliberal logic of expanding and growing. 

The term Anthropocene was created by North American biologist Eugene F. Stoermer in 1980 and popularized by Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s. Crutzen proposed that we leave behind the era known as the Holocene, replacing nature as the dominant environmental force on Earth. The Anthropocene indicates the geological mark of the Human Era on Earth. In world terms, the expansion of inhabitants is growing at an exponential and explosive rate (UNESCO, 2018). A study published in a magazine Nature (Elhacham et al., 2020) demonstrates that the mass of everything that was built by human beings and the planet in 2020 (anthropogenic mass) surpassed, for the first time in history, the mass of two living beings (biomass). Only the mass of plastics existing on the planet is twice more than that of all terrestrial and aquatic animals. Our “planetization”, our human activities and interferences affect, directly or indirectly, the planet and its placement on the cliffs for humanity's own survival. These cities are perhaps an example of the geological mark of human impact: buildings, asphalt, lights, altered landscapes in contrast to natural areas. Ainda, or period with lower temperatures after the last ice age. Assim, the Anthropocene is mainly characterized by three factors: the accelerated technological progress following the Primeira Industrial Revolução; or dizzying population growth, days cities and infrastructure and transportation breakdowns; the increase in production and consumption, which caused a crescente increased non-consumption of natural resources, minerals and fossils (UNESCO, 2018).

Jason W. Moore (2016), environmental historian and historical geographer, is the author who suggests using the Capitalocene term in order to better understand the concrete human impacts on the geology of the Earth, because it is the capitalist system that produces a global ecological crisis that has led us to a change in the geological era (UNESCO, 2018). The Capitalocene proposes to think about the global ecological crisis in which the conditions of capitalist development are not reduced to technological development, nor to the logic of the global neoliberal market, nor to the separation between the means of production and the force of work. Thus, nature occupies the center of thought about work and work in the center of thought about nature. The human impacts on the digital Earth of capitalist societies, based on new ways of organizing relationships between work, reproduction and living conditions, radically externalizing the nature of these conditions. 

The limit is that the Anthropocene/Capitalocene means many things, including the fact that a huge irreversible destruction is really happening, not only for the 11 billion or more people who will be on earth until the end of the 21st century, but also for a myriad of others. beings. (The incomprehensible, more sober number, of about 11 bilhões will only be maintained in the birth rates of human babies, in the entire world today, will remain low; if they will rise again, all bets will fall to the ground). “A beira da extinção” is not just a metaphor; e “system collapse” is not a suspense film. Ask any refugee, of any kind. (Haraway, 2016, p. 141)

In Haraway's terms, there is no “living future” without capitalism. In environmental terms we live an absurd regress to obscurantism, in which we disengage ourselves from nature, outlining the deep relationships between biological diversity and cultural diversity, producing processes and effects of biocultural amnesia. 

Porem um lively future It involves inventing ways of living and dying together, even under increasingly adverse conditions. Even for humans, who have the pretension of being established as a maior força of this planet - simply because we can destroy Terra, in a pinch of olhos or in a slow agonizing death -, to live a full life and die in a dignified manner with enormous privileges. For other species in our game, the situation is also terrible: some few are multiplied infinitely to produce value, while others disappear forever. (Silva e Silva, 2021, s/p)

Industrialization, Positivist Science and the constitution of cities separate us from nature. This industrialization is carried out by the exploration of non-renewable resources, which concentrates energy in the city, generating urban and rural peripheries. The aggravated crisis of the civilizing model has no limit to growth (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2015). Before our eyes we see a real attack against the sociobiodiversity and memory of the human species, in which its accumulated knowledge is being exterminated.

Nature is disconnected from society from the origins of capitalism. A crisis of planetary civilization is, therefore, a deepening of separation. The current environmental crisis is characterized by the brands that we are leaving, “carbon glue”; to “water strike”; to reduce both energy and material resources; the change and climate crisis; the subtraction of biodiverse systems; There is a strong limit on the survival capacity of many ecosystems, directly impacting our food security. The environmental crisis is combined with an economic and social crisis, which allows us to predict a global socioeconomic collapse.

In order to overcome the traditional ontological cisão of modern metaphysics, Haraway (2021) proposes the term nature(s)-culture(s), interlinked, of "being together between humans and other living things." As nature(s)-culture(s) become a meeting place: of flesh and language, history and world (Silva e Silva, 2021).

The term nature(s)-culture(s), therefore, sublinha a inseparability of things that moderns get used to dividing. He also emphasizes undecidability at a theoretical level, and what he would say pragmatically, is something in culture or nature. Naturezas-cultures antecedent and succeed any attempt at definitive purification of these poles. Thus, it can be said that something is nature or culture only temporarily and tentatively in a very specific material-semiotic network, to the extent that it is separated or that it is together and is placed very closely in keeping them separated. (Silva e Silva, 2021, s/p)

The knowledge of the human species goes hand in hand with Western scientific knowledge and two modern theorems that see Terra as it exists outside of it, adopting global explanatory models that disregard local environments. More, “the project of inhabiting the world with attention and care to its companions and companions on multiple scales is an invitation to cultivate other ways of life […]” (Silva e Silva, 2021, s/p).

Thinking about local environments, in the rural periphery that resides with the possibility of recovering lost memories, including the relationships and human work with nature. Ancestral cultures are characterized by enriching nature by occupying a place, producing biodiversity that coevolves with nature and generates an important collection of biocultural memory that expresses costumes, rhythms, foods and relationships with other species integrated into territories. As languages, for example, are more than schemas of linguistic signs, only ecologies of practical communities, historical experiences (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2015).

Biocultural memory and memory policies 

A human species shares its memory processes with other species, or it seems that people coevoluíram with nature. Nesse sense, a history and cumulative interspecies. All the components of nature, the genes, the species have memory. Our human species has a very particular brain, which allows us to remember and, when we communicate, falarmos these memories and their meanings. We remember conjunctions, events, that allow us to adapt to nature's surprises (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2015).

A biocultural memory is this heritage, this memory that our species is part of our “passage” through Terra. This memory is, at one time, individual, social, civilizing, but also genetic and biological memory. Although culture differentiates us from other beings, it also aligns us with them (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2015).

We can think that culture allows us to place ourselves at the same level as the handles of birds, for example, because it allows us to imitate and invent those devices and technologies that allow us to fly. It is the sociogenetic plane of our development, in which culture extends our phylogenetic potentialities, as a human species, and promotes the development of a set of knowledge in a collective and inventive way (Vygotsky, 2013). 

According to Toledo and Barrera-Bassols (2015), since the Neolithic or agricultural revolution, 10-12 thousand years ago, agricultural people invented new species, new object-subjects and thus “molded” nature, created new landscapes. It is an eco-sociological construct that occurs in the inseparable encounter between nature(s) and culture(s). 

For the authors, biocultural memory involves an evolutionary process of diversification that passes through different waves: 1st. Biological diversification, adaptation and diversification of organisms throughout the planet; 2nd. The diversification of the human being, the processes of colonization and geographical expansion and, consequently, the genetic, linguistic and cognitive cultural diversity; 3rd. The breeding of new species, the agricultural revolution, the great diversity of two agricultural systems that domesticate a huge variety of animals, crop species, plants, landscape management, leading to an increase in biodiversity; 4th. The human breeding of new landscapes with ecological, geomorphological and hydrological management, in which agricultural societies modify the habitats to raise areas of production of benefits and services, generating new landscapes. 

Biocultural diversity involves a historically originated “biological-cultural complex”, involving biological, genetic, linguistic, cognitive, agricultural, livestock and landscape diversity. “This biocultural process of diversification is an expression of the articulation and amalgamation of the diversity of human and non-human life and represents, in the strictest sense, the memory of the species” (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2015, p. 40).

[…] It can be said, then, that there is a broad and complex collection of local knowledge, whose analysis together we must obtain key memories and identify events that have a profound and lasting influence on the entire species, which is found in the memory of the human species, or which still remains from it. These localized knowledges, which exist as community historical consciousnessOnce fully combined, they operate as the main headquarters of the species' branches. São, therefore, the hippocampus of the brain of humanity, the mnemonic reservoir that allows any animal species to continually adapt to a complex world in constant change. (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2015, p. 41)

In the conception of two authors, the essence of biocultural memory lies in traditional knowledge that is not restricted to the structural aspects of nature, but also to the dynamic dimensions, of processes and relationships, linked to natural and utilitarian events of natural resources and landscapes. 

Retaking biocultural memories and operating memory policies. In Political Psychology, “political memory” is a fundamental analytical dimension in the study of non-contemporary political phenomena, in their objective and subjective conditions. One of its central elements is its affective-emotional dynamics, including thermoremembering, re cordis In Latin, it means returning to passar pelo coração (Hernandez, 2020). 

Lifschitz (2014) indicates that all the people have different levels of memory in relation to political events, meaning that the field of practices around political memory is associated with the political processes experienced from the second half of the 20th century. According to Rancière (1995, p. 242), the historiographic models of the 20th century neutralize the “object” of historical knowledge, of the event, denying its own rationality “that of the real, which is not concerned with being able to precede, justify, substantiate by its possibility.” 

Assim, Ansara (2012, p. 306) considers that the great challenge of thinking about memory policies is that these have to do with the demands of the movements that are involved in the construction of a popular memory or, by Assim Dizer, of a “memória dos vanquidos”, or seja, hair groups and minorities that create new supports and “places of memory”.

Not that it relates to historical memory Pierre Nora (1993, in Lifschitz, 2014) refers that the State plays an active role in the construction of national memories, an intentional and official construction. In this sense, Pollak (1989) points out that there is always a list of two fragments that will be told and two that will be silenced. Há, pois, uma relação tension placed between intentionality de make some memories official and subjugate others. Likewise, Pollak suggests that “underground memories” when situated outside the present end up cutting into the verses of official History, tracing to the surface collective experiences and knowledge, of groups and common subjects. 

The problem that arises over a long period of time for clandestine and inaudible (underground) memories is that their transmission is intact until the day they can take advantage of an occasion to invade public space and pass the “não-dito” to contestation and claim. (Pollak, 1989, p. 9)

Memory Policies is one year of resumption of memories that need to survive. In this sense, retaking biocultural memories constitutes a policy of affirmation and visibility, because it remembers that it exists. Biocultural political memory is a record of resistance prepared and narrated by people, groups and communities based on their own interests and memories (Hernandez, 2020). Operating memory policies meant resuming, occupying contexts of narrative experience and practice not present. It will be essential that the subjects of the memories narrate their knowledge and experiences, exposing their intrinsic and unique relationship with the social and political event.

There is a historical concentration between sociocultural and biological diversity, or knowledge and cultures. In Figure 1 I present a synthesis of four waves of biocultural memory, based on three elements: Cosmos (1st wave), Corpus (2nd wave) and Praxis (3rd and 4th wave).

Figure 1. Fluxogram of biocultural memory

.

The fluxogram seeks to illustrate how the cosmos, the corpus and praxis foram are integrated and formed and what we know as biocultural memory. Thinking about an example of this integration, it could be said that when a field plants, it also “is planted” in its territory, or seja, its knowledge is transposed into cultural forms that produce its food, or nourishment, in turn, or sustains, or identifies and (re)produces. At the same time as planting and producing food is: transgerational action, technological-practical action, sacred action, cognitive action — that transmits knowledge. Know, believe and know how to make the plots of biocultural memory. As Maria Carpi refers in her poem:

Everything that I planted is the goal of everything that is planted. Or what I plant is um by um; or that it is planted and without counting. O que planto é semente comum, em tempo comum, acordo como el zenite do sol, distributed em valas e règuesia. It is planted in a special planting, with a fixed light and a real, mobile boat. Or what I plant, water contained; or that it was planted without sealing, chuvas, rios, pranto. Or that I plant, I see and recline, or that sou planted I see and hurry. Or what I plant, disperse and colho. O que sou, planted, brings me together and heals. (Carpi, 1996, p. 18)

Camponês take care of the territory, specifically, before producing food. Almeida (1988) ao estudar o saber camponês chamou atenção para o “governo da lua”. Those of us who study do not conceive the lunar cycle as lua cheia, minguante, nova, crescente. When moving between the conditions of “forte” and “fraca” and the labor had to follow that “governo” that established the different tempos for the plantation. Strong plants should not be planted in broken soil, but must be removed forcibly alone. Country labor expresses an ethic of balance, which involves care with nature, based on an ethnoecological perspective (Woortmann, 2009).

How to recover lost memories? 

The history of the human species is in regressive contagion. Western thought, modern science, with Eurocentric and anthropocentric views objectify nature and we end up becoming disgusted with it. We need a radical return – from the roots – to our biocultural memories. It is urgent to sow again. 

In this sense, only the original people, the traditions that manage to preserve a direct and evaluative relationship with nature by considering it an “intelligent entity”, with the capacity of agency, with the capacity to establish dialogues and relationships with humans.

But, since our biocultural memory depends on a sensitive policy, which pays attention to and cares for the knowledge of the native, traditional and rural people, the question arises: Where and how are the native people in Brazil? In a brief historical contextualization, going back to the year of the Portuguese invasion in 1500, it is estimated that in Brazil there was a population close to 10 thousand indigenous people, divided into hundreds of ethnic groups and more than 1300 languages ​​and dialects (Bezerra, 2022).

Porém, the XVI century was marked as a project of progressive extermination of populations. The colonization, orchestrated from the coast to the interior of Brazil, called the original Brazilian people. These people are resisting colonial annihilation, always facing state policies, facing serious problems caused by an accelerated development project: destruction of forests and forest areas to open roads, urbanization of rural areas, advancement of mining, wood exploration, The garimpo, the monoculture agriculture, or seja, the systematic subtração das lands and biocultural riches. Many tribes that, even now, have survived thanks to geographical isolation, will face problems related to the expansion of agriculture, plant extractivism, extensive livestock farming and the development activities already described. In decorrência, many of these things will disappear (Bezerra, 2022).

However, we have never had robust indigenous policies in Brazil. In 1970, the Brazilian law established State guardianship so that indigenous people become “integrated” into national society, maintaining the logic of a colonial State that catechizes, converts and guardianship, in a hierarchically superior position. Only with the Constitutional Charter of 1988 was the indigenous right to land, biocultural preservation and self-determination recognized. Therefore, there is an abysmal distance between what is enacted in the Federal Constitution and what happens, de facto, as the indigenous people. 

In our colonial social imagination, the original people occupy a lesser place, two farms, when in reality there is a living record (or what remains of it) of the intrinsic relationship between culture(s)-nature(s) in territory. The possible future of upcoming societies lies in the fact that, in the present, we can resume these collections of biocultural memory that have already been accumulated. 

In the 21st century, the extermination follows its course. Our indigenous people are jogados along the streets or in the middle of the city streets, famigerated, adoídos. One of Bolsonaro's first measures, after being elected president, was transferred to the demarcation of the indigenous lands and the lands of two quilombolas for the Ministry of Agriculture, delivering the future of the forest and its lands to those who destroy us, the ruralist groups, the defenders of agrobusiness, mining, extrativism and do Brazilian latifúndio (Brum, 2019). 

The Brazilian State always supports and remains alongside a rural model, first colonial and exploratory, later neocolonial and exploratory, to advance the world capitalist model in its technicist developmentalist logic. This advance has made an important contribution to the State, through public policies and programs. The agribusiness is the main expression of the capitalist project in the countryside and “Brazil is the most latifundiário than anyone thinks” (Fabrini, 2008, p. 48).

According to the 2010 census, carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 817 thousand people declared themselves indigenous, which represents a percentage of 0,42% of the Brazilian population. More than 60% of the population is located in Legal Amazon, a region formed by the states of the Northern Region, by Tocantins, Mato Grosso and part of Maranhão, but the indigenous presence is spread throughout all Brazilian states.

In the map that follows (Figure 1) we can see the distribution of two indigenous peoples in the five regions of Brazil, and the already demarcated lands concentrated in the Northern region, but we also see the amount of land to be identified and those that are still in the demarcation stage. 

Figure 1. Indigenous peoples and lands in Brazil

Source: Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 2010 Census.

According to the census (IBGE, 2010), there are 305 groups non-Brazil ethnics. Among them, there are two main trunks: 

1. Macro-Jê, which includes the groups Boróro, Guató, Jê, Karajá, Krenák, Maxakali, Ofayé, Rikbaktsa, Yatê, Caingangue e Xokleng. 
2. Tupi, Where are the Arikém, Awetí, Jurúna, Mawé, Mondé, Mundurukú, Puroborá, Ramaráma, Tuparí and Tupi-Guarani.

In the book Ideas for postponing the end of the world, published in 2020, Ailton Krenak refers:

In 2018, when we are on the verge of being assaulted by a new situation in Brazil (referring to Bolsonaro's government), I ask myself: “How are the Indians going to do when they say everything?” Eu falei: “It's been five years since the Indians have been resisting, and I'm worried like the whites, what I'm going to do to escape from this.” People resisted by expanding our subjectivity, not oiling that idea that we are all equal. There are still approximately 250 ethnic groups that want to be different from one another in Brazil, which has more than 150 languages ​​and dialects. (Krenak, 2020, p. 31, nossos taps)

Please note that, in a decade, between the disclosure of the IBGE Census and the publication of Krenak, Brazil has lost 55 ethnic groups (from 305 non-Census ethnic groups to 250 registered by Krenak). This data records the denialist and extermination policies originating from the “colonial matrix of power”, according to Quijano (2011).

Therefore, it is these indigenous people, peasants, who still coexist in their ways of life with the preservation of biocultural wealth. For Toledo and Barrera-Bassols (2015) these are the last points of health of the planet. Therefore, it will be necessary to return to them, and look for devices for negotiation, dialogue, speeches, with learning effects that we have not been able to learn in the last 500 years. These are the reasons why the greatest possessors have two deepest knowledge that the human species has about nature: 

Or what's wrong with our rivers, our forests, our landscapes? We are so disturbed by the regional dislocation that we are experiencing, we are so out of touch with the lack of political perspective, that we cannot stand up and breathe, see what matters for the people, the groups and the communities in their ecologies. To quote Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ecology two knowledges should also integrate our daily experience, inspire our schools about the place in which we want to live, our experience as a community. We need to be critical of this embodied idea of ​​homogeneous humanity in which much of the time or consumption takes place in the same place that was previously a city. (Krenak, 2020, p. 24)

Science presents its limits as an interpretative key that objectifies and rationalizes nature. These limits must be discussed as the groups and communities that possess embodied knowledge — situated knowledge, because there are cultural groups capable of expressing and reconnoitring nature from another perspective, because ecology two knowledges must be integrated into our daily experience. 

But how to build a biocultural network of conservation, development and sustainability? How to operate an ecology of knowledge in what traditional knowledge and scientific dialogue? How to appropriate knowledge based on the exchanges between different worldviews? 

(R)evolution epistêmica e prática

The ecology of knowledge implies dialogues between knowledge, it implies openness, synergy, in order to understand reality(s) in their multiplicities, different cosmovisions and points of view. Nesse sense, the role of science must be to translate reality into concepts and heuristic models, but to accompany the learning processes in which the original people, Camponese, possam ensinar farmers. The ecology of knowledge is intended to overcome the ontological and epistemological deficits imposed on these people. 

It is within this panorama that the important work of valorization carried out by this army of scholars of traditional knowledge and, especially, those who are dedicated to documenting, analyzing and reassessing pre-modern traditional knowledge about nature, stands out, an intellectual effort that goes against the current and has grown in the last four decades. These studies focus on the analysis of the accumulation of knowledge, not scientific, that has been in the minds of rural producers (farmers, shepherds, fishermen, livestock keepers, hunters, collectors) and has been used for millennia so that the human species can appropriate the benefits and services of nature. (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2015, p. 34)

Establish dialogues between knowledge and innovation, from tradition. For this, it will be necessary to leave two laboratories and hermetic spaces of the University and enter the territories of pluridiversity, in which the technical aspects take center stage and culture(s)-nature(s) take center stage. 

As Krenak states, “we have five years that the Indians are resisting,” therefore, it is not about a political insurgence, but about ways of facing, resisting and (r)existing in the face of the adversities and violence that they have imposed since the invasion. These ways of existing, of being, of acting demonstrate that these people are adapting in defense of diversity, against globalized cultural homogenization. These povos are many other worlds possible. Only because there is no passivity as a response. 

In Krenak's words, two effects of global capitalism are the production of a feeling that “we are not able to stand up and breathe, to see what matters for the people, the groups and the communities in their ecologies.”

Our time is a specialist in raising absences: the meaning of living in society, the very meaning of life experience. Isso gera a very big intolerance in relation to those who are capable of experiencing or praying to be alive, to dance, to sing. And it's full of small constellations of people with their backs to the world who dance, sing, face each other. The type of humming humanity that we are called to integrate does not tolerate so much prayer, so much fruition of life. So, we hope to end the world as a possibility to make people give up on our own dreams. And the least provocation about adding to the end of the world is always being able to tell more of a story. If we can do this, we will be adding the end of the world. (Krenak, 2020, p. 27, nossos taps)

Only those people who care about nature (indigenous people, quilombolas, rural people, family farmers, ribeirinhos, etc.) are movements capable of telling more of a story, recovering the most important memories to defend these precious portions of planetary biocultural memory. 

Only the ecology of knowledge will promote this reapproximation, allowing us all to find solutions or remedies to two complex socio-environmental problems that we are currently experiencing: the climate crisis, the climate refugees, agribusiness, the production of genetically modified foods, the water and energy crisis, etc. It should be noted that we can learn from these things, for those who know nature was never a mere “resource” or economic source. For indigenous people, people from Campo and forests, nature is sacred, an emancipatory biocultural resource, producer of identity and cultural diversity. 

This is an epistemological and practical (r)evolution that promotes and enriches the autonomies of these people, so that we decide the life and development projects that we want to pursue in relationships with others. For science it will be necessary to innovate with tradition, establishing new connections, starting from dialogue between knowledges. The farmers will be able to find and tell the food manufacturers how we have been producing healthy, non-transgenic and sustainable food.

Agroecology is, therefore, that discipline that arises from absences and emergencies, mainly in societies that go through a long process of colonization and development of a “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano, 2011). The current discipline in academic and scientific circles and curricula does not imply the environmental, food and civilization crisis that we live in. Agroecology proposes this transition, a way to recover this direct relationship with nature. 

The sociological aspect of agroecology became popular in Andalusia, in Spain, in the understanding of the interaction between scientific disciplines (natural and social) and rural communities, of ecology applied to agriculture (Caldart et al., 2012, p. 57). In Latin America, it is a theoretical and practical conception that dialogues, for example, with indigenous agriculture, traditional crops, which are directly linked to ancestrality and the history of two peoples, possessing a sacred dimension (Rebollar, Bicalho e Semeraro, 2022).

From an agroecological perspective, all forms of life present in an agricultural cycle (alone, animals, microorganisms, trees, plants, people) have importance as parts of a complex structure. 

No documentary released by Vallente Films (2020) entitled “Guardiões da Terra — Agroecologia em evolução”, academics, rural producers, activists and scholars believe that Brazil and the agroecological movement began in the 1960s and 1970s in the Ecclesiastical Base Communities (CEB). spread throughout the country, as a response to the actions that the Green Revolução draws for various rural groups. Falava-se in the era of alternative agriculture. In the 2000s, popular social movements in the countryside, mainly linked to Via Campesina, incorporated agroecology into their political strategy. A strategy that seeks to build another field project in contrast to the capitalist exploration model, and tends, as some of its leaders, to food and energy sovereignty. (Rebollar, Bicalho e Semeraro, 2022, p. 203)

In this sense, agroecology places traditional and scientific knowledge in confluence, demanding a new ecology, which is epistemological, political and cultural, perspective other modes of societies. Agroecology recovers the traditional knowledge of two indigenous and rural people who, in some way, resist the advance of the capitalist development model in agriculture. It is an interdisciplinary scientific proposal and, as a political practice, it takes up traditional management practices, promoting even the autonomy of families in the countryside, “affirming itself as a model of agriculture and society that has the Education of the Countryside in its entirety” (Silva e Santos, 2016).

Agroecology, apart from a theory, represents a political and cultural practice with a view to environmental preservation, healthy nutrition, and the valorization and protagonism of direct producers, aimed at producing and marketing food locally, respecting the culture and ways of life of the people of a place. 

Nessa perspective, including urban and peri-urban agroecological production, the ability to produce food in the city and in its contours, making city groups return to touch the earth, to care for and dialogue with nature, producing part of their food.

Therefore, as the criticism of the capitalist agrarian model expands, the terms “agroecology” and “sustainability” are co-opted by sectors representing capitalist interests (Guhur and Toná, 2012). Critics deny the capacity of the agroecological model to produce on a large scale, making it impossible to satisfy global food demands. 

Furthermore, agroecology discusses new economic foundations, in contrast to the capitalist model and the different forms of oppression, such as colonialism and patriarchy that, despite being different, are allied to capitalist interests. In this sense, we cannot fail to affirm that agroecology is a struggle for working women. 

Before being exposed, agroecology can be a vertex in the (r)evolution of thought and action in the redefinition of civilizational paths, as it proposes exequivel and necessária to new economies and ecologies of life. 

Decolonizing thought 

According to Acosta (2016), the fact of South-South epistemologies constitutes an epistemological and political project still in construction should not be considered a problem. In the absence of a predetermined path, we are freed from lines drawn by modern, anthropocentric and Eurocentric visions. The horizon becomes the imagined line where you want to go. The horizon is the starting point, never ending. 

In the colonial-imperial matrix, countries like Brazil - and our countries in Latin America - are constituted through logics of domination operated with the objective of controlling the lives, nature, spirituality, and culture of "subalternized" people. Assim, foram also being controlled the knowledge, the subjectivities, the imaginaries, the bodies-lands-territories. In this sense, Guatemalan indigenous activist Lorena Cabnal (2019) clarifies that community feminism, from a decolonial perspective of South-South Epistemologies, seeks possible alternatives to a dignified life on Earth, aiming to overcome social inequalities and regimes of oppression. It is a radical defense of the body as a way of occupying and caring for two territories. Part of the memories, knowledge and experiences of women in their communities: no confrontation between conflicts; nas lutas pela terra; in defense of agroecology and saudáveis ​​food production; in the formation of activist networks and movements; gives social participation and control of public policies; the invention of new markets; defends two emancipated bodies in disputed lands etc. Community feminism challenges the logic and neo-liberal processes of commodification that give life to Earth and bodies and seeks, together with women and their communities, to bring together a set of practices possible to decapitalize and decolonize our bodies-terra-territories. 

Nessa perspective, at the end of the nineties, a set of studies on coloniality passed to be articulated from two studies by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2011). These studies have attempted to return to a series of historical and epistemological problems that were given as resolved in the Social Sciences. For Quijano, the concept of coloniality refers to the conditions established by capitalism, as a model of functioning of power relations in modernity, through the imposition of a racial-ethnic classification of the population. 

Capitalism operates through a logic of subjective and collective penetration, subsidizing a new paradigm of empire: a “coloniality of power”, gives social classification through the cultural aspects of control and domination of two people who are formerly subalternized by colonialism (Quijano, 2011). 

For Guerrero Arias (2010), two ideological-political-social constructions become key to the exercise of coloniality: universalism and racism. Universalism naturalizes and legitimizes the superiority of two dominators. The colonizers will legitimize the right to exercise domination and justify the “civilizing” task over other peoples. 

Racism naturalized the inferiority of the dominated and became the result of the geopolitical configuration that determined the production and reproduction of colonial differentiation, impossibly classifying, hierarchizing and subalternizing some people, their knowledge and their cultures. The colonial difference originated in a dichotomy, which is still valid in our history, two civilized-developed-modern versus The primitive-underdeveloped-pre-modern, the first part of the opposing pair being considered superior. 

Colonialidade is equivalent to a “colonial matrix or fatherland of power”, a complex of relationships that hides behind the rhetoric of modernity, the story of salvation, the progress that will bring happiness (Mignolo, 2017). The colonizer imposes itself as a universal civilizational horizon, a reflection that other people must fix and reflect. As two years passed, a hegemonic cultural order was legitimized that did not extinguish the riches and memories of biodiversity and other plural forms of life (Guerrero Arias, 2010).

For Mignolo (2017), decolonizing thought is a necessary response to the fallacious development promises that modernity propagates. Decolonizing epistemologies implies interdisciplinary articulation of different cultural and scientific knowledge, detached from great Western narratives. Decoloniality does not consist, however, in a new universal, but in a new way of thinking unrelated to two modern paradigms, post-modern, anthropocentric and eurocentric.

According to Mignolo (2017), a decolonial option is not only an option of knowledge, but an option of life, of thought and of action, in political praxis. Decoloniality seeks to transform the structures and materialities of power, transforming its institutions from within. But, above all, facing and transforming the subjectivities, the imaginaries and the sensibilities that colonize our thoughts. 

We are not going to buy or what do you want to sell to us?

The thermos Bem Viver is a translation of two thermoses used by the people who live in the States of Peru, Equador and Bolívia, referring to their ways of life, intrinsic to the practices of the original people of America (Quijano, 2011). Based on two studies and systematizations by anthropologists in contact with the experiences of indigenous Andean communities, it was possible to perceive the existence of inherent logics in the elaboration of the beliefs, behaviors and values ​​of those communities. 

For Cubillo-Guevara, Hidalgo-Capitán and García-Álvarez (2017), Bem Viver's concept has gained great academic relevance since it was remade and incorporated into the constitutions of Equador and Bolívia. From then on, secondly we comment on the authors, there has been a great expansion of thought about Bem Viver, involving discussions linked to Andean, Latin American and, even, European authors. 

In the work of Cubillo-Guevara (2017) it is possible to find some of the systematizations on the concepts linked to the different currents of Bem Viver: the indigenist or cultural current is characterized by the relevance that the authors give to self-determination of the indigenous peoples in the construction of Bem Viver, to identity and the spiritual elements of the Andean cosmovision. A socialist or eco-Marxist trend, highlighting the state political actions of Bem Viver, as well as elements related to social equity, leaving environmental, cultural and identity issues in the background. Third, the current of post-development or ecological development that gains relevance to the preservation of nature and the participatory construction of Bem Viver, including two social movements. 

In all concepts, there is a point of convergence, that Bem Viver is opposed to the Eurocentric notion of development, seeking to analyze the problems already caused, assuming an alternative proposal to development as an opportunity to collectively build new ways of life and learning as spaces and spaces. places, returning to the communities and their practices, their ancestors and cosmologies. 

According to the proposition of Cubillo-Guevara (2017), the project claims an epistêmico espaço do Sul global, which places Latin America as a locus of enunciation. Assim, o Bem Viver is an epistemological and practical proposal to re-signify modern notions of development towards progress “custe a quem custar”. Acosta (2016) highlights that Bem Viver is not limited to Andean and Amazonian realities, but is a universal philosophy that, based on Amerindian cosmology and way of life, is translated into the most diverse cultures. 

O Bem Viver is an opportunity to collectively build new ways of life, part of which is the search for alternatives forged in the struggles of human groups and other species for an autonomous life emancipated from capitalist modes. In practice, it seeks to build alternatives to development, seeking a confluence of nature(s)-culture(s), in the logic of sensitivity and care, with a view to sustainability. 

The Bem Viver agenda is based on the living, dynamic characteristics that communities establish and produce in their territories, different pasteurized ways of life in Westernized societies. For Gudynas (2014) o Bem Viver is an open field, plural, in which a critical analysis of realities must lead to alternative collective actions in relations with the territories. 

For Gudynas (2014) or Bem Viver, it is not a manual to be followed, but an epistemological and practical project that requires a willingness to invent and build. In this sense, Ibáñez (2016) refers to the possibility of thinking about alternatives based on the existing one. As lutas, (r)existences, local experiences two people in their territories are the starting point to democratically establish sustainable societies (Acosta, 2016). 

Therefore, it is not about reforming or mending the current State or against indigenous and non-indigenous proposals. The construction of a plurinational State is a process of intellectual decolonization in the political, social, economic and cultural spheres, not confrontation of the coloniality of power. 

O Bem Viver challenges us to rethink our relationship with nature and interspecies forms of life. For Acosta (2011), Bem Viver has a holistic and integrative vision of the human species, immersed in the large community of Earth that includes many species other than humans, or the water, the mountains, the trees, the animals and, even, the beings that we do not see and are not substantial in nature. our existence (such as fungi, bacteria, etc.). 

It is a story of a European researcher from the beginning of the 20th century who was in the United States and visited a Hopi territory. He has asked that someone in that village facilitate or find him with an elder he wanted to interview. When I found her, she was standing on a rock. The investigator was waiting for him to say: “She's not going to talk to me, right?” Then his facilitator responded: “She is talking to her mother.” But it's a stone. And my comrade said: “What is the problem?” (Krenak, 2020, p. 17)

For Escobar (2014) we have to remember again, remember two ancestral knowledges and two original peoples, so that we can put them into practice in their ways, we see that the logic of the model and the neoliberal market is not the only possible logic. The indigenous peoples and communities show us other ways of approaching life, of relating to the territory and nature(s). It is an opportunity to build alternative cultural practices to global coloniality. Groups, communities, societies in which we find other possible worlds, sustained by coexistence in diversity, two knowledges divided between the various peoples and their culture(s)-nature(s).

O Bem Viver forces us to rethink the current way of organizing life in cities, in the peripheries, in the countryside, demanding a profound review of the lifestyle of contemporary societies. Today's Brazil, under Bolsonaro's (dis)governance, can be told of precarious and deteriorated lives through the political, economic and environmental crisis that devastated the country. Sovereignty is lost in all areas. We return to the table of poverty, misery, unemployment and, consequently, the marginalization and criminalization of poverty.

These are logically antagonistic to Bem Viver, because we turn off the biocultural memories and feedback on the materialities and modes of neoliberal subjectivity, not the framework of a minimal State aligned with private initiative. Faced with adverse contexts of production and reproduction of life, Bem Viver is interested in “sufficiency”, seeking what is sufficient based on what is really needed to live with dignity. It is about confronting the production of capitalized, individualized, competitive subjectivities, which we consume in an unrestrained way “or which we want to sell to us.” Strong relationships, of bond with the planet, with the earth is on the cliff, for those dizzying ambitions. 

But, we don't want to buy. O Bem Viver fiercely condemns the economy with a view to accumulation, controlled by monopolies of speculators (Acosta, 2011), and proposes a dynamic and balanced relationship between markets, the State and society. Instead of a market society - large and non-singular, committed to promoting multiple and alternative markets for the distribution of inputs, food and goods. This new social and economic organization must respect the limits of nature and eradicate the misery of the popular majority.

Faced with the environmental and economic crisis, experienced in most two countries of the world, what concepts of culture, of nature, of development serve life on the planet? Sustainable development must be placed, as Loureiro (2012) proposes, in terms of sociocultural capacity, societies coexist with their culture(s)-nature(s) in balance. For this, it must be assumed that it is impossible to exist a single, linear and universal model of be-being to be achieved. 

Finally, it is a civilizing change, a path that must be imagined to be built by diverse human groups, through political, cognitive, emotional, cultural circuits with our companion species. A world where other worlds are possible and sustained. “When, for times, I fail to imagine another possible world, there is no sense of reordering the relationships and two spaces, of new understandings about how we can relate to what is admitted to be nature”, because we are nature (Krenak, 2020, p. 67). 

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