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The Resistance of the Karipuna Amazonian indigenous community against deforestation

Principal researcher: Hanmin Kim

Research group: Environment, Sustainability and Ethnography


Keywords

Resistance | Decolonising | Indigenous Movements | Political Ecology

Funding Institution

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

State

Open

Start date

01-09-2023

End date

31-08-2027

Reference

2023.03274.BD


Abstract

This project investigates the multi-faceted resistance of the Karipuna people in Rondônia, both in and outside of their heavily deforested indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon. It will focus on their territorial defense campaign and its recent “environmentalist turn”, trying to identify the ways in which the community members re/interpret the relationship of resistance and environmentalism, and how they translate it into social projects and quotidian life. Preliminary data suggests their territorial resistance is getting increasingly “decoupled” from cultural, linguistic resistance, as non-indigenous pressures overwhelm traditional lifeways. To understand Karipuna’s resistance by their own terms, ethnographic attention will be paid to the elusive, subtle dimensions of resistance, as well as not-doings, such as refraining from monetization of forestry “resource”. To understand what they ultimately resist for and articulate their aspiration for socio-political-cultural and ecological rights, the Karipuna conceptions will be put in dialogue with the re-emerging indigenous notion of "Florestania" (Forestizenship). 

Team

Andréa Carvalho Mendes de Oliveira Castro

Full members

Antonio Maria Pusceddu