Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes landscapes composed by cultivated plots, oil palm trees and sacred grooves in the Mayombe forest (DRC). We present the forest as a moral space, co-produced by humans and more-than-human beings and suggest that those landscapes are structured by and structure gender relationships.

Paper long abstract:

The paper discusses biodiversity conservation practices in Central African forest contexts. It focuses on a specific case study of the relationship between gardens, oil palm trees and sacred grooves in Mayombe, a transnational forest that it is part of the Congo Basin, the second largest tropical forest complex of the planet. On the one hand, landscapes of Yoómbe people villages are described to analyze how they are structured and structure gender relations which constitute the flows between palm trees, people and houses. On the other hand, we discuss the forest as a moral space, co-produced by humans and more than humans’ beings. In some sacred grooves, extractive activities and soil cultivation are forbidden. Such spaces are related to narratives of the time of ancestors and taboos that prescribe differences between living people from related lineages. In this sense, I show how Yoómbe narratives and rituals are fundamental to the conservation of a biodiverse landscape in territories touched by scalable oil palm reproduction projects, which led to ecological simplifications during the colonial period in Africa.