My Grandfather’s Castanhal: Plants, Community, Territory, and Memory in the Brazilian Amazon

Summary

In contemporary Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, life is largely shaped by movement of, and among, plants. Plants here are mobile, but spend most of their lives stationary. In this paper, I examine the relationship between people and plants – as living, but nonetheless spatially rooted elements of the landscape – in these agroextractivist communities. I explore the significance of planting and plant life in regulating territorial use and notions of rights, access, and possession, as well as social relations and family ties. Through trabalho de campo (field labor), both communal and solitary, Gurupaenses continually transform this forested landscape into a mosaic of greenery of varying sizes, shapes, shades, and meaning. The work of tending, weeding, cutting, and harvesting shapes gardens, dooryards, trails, and interstitial spaces, simultaneously configuring identities and social relationships within and beyond kinship groups. The present landscape is the result of generations of management of plants, as gardens, fields, stands, or trees – which are, importantly, individuated and associated with specific community members or families. These features regulate and communicate access to the spaces and fruits, literal and metaphorical, of trabalho de campo. Simultaneously, they materialize social relations, history, memory, and genealogy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21704