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Contribution short abstract

This presentation develops a critical (art-)pedagogical framework through the project Atlas Brasiliensis, to activate the transformative potential of cura - healing - as a collective and processual practice.

Contribution long abstract

Building on João Paulo Tukano and Ivan Barreto’s conceptualization of the Palace of the Dead and their call for a Renascimento (revival or rebirth), we understand museum artifacts not as inert heritage but as “dismembered bodies” that require healing through Indigenous expertise.

Drawing from a collaborative research and artistic production experience between Munich, São Paulo and in Manaus, with Anita Ekman and members of the project Atlas Brasiliensis (Goethe-Institut), we propose incorporating the concept of cura - healing - into anthropological and critical (art) pedagogical frameworks. Distinct from health, the term healing highlights medicinal plants and museum artifacts as relational agents with the potential to foster ecological restoration.

In this sense, planetary healing designates pragmatic practices that go beyond merely fixing socio-environmental harm caused by human actions. Instead, it suggests transformative recompositions of knowledges and ecologies, where Indigenous epistemologies and critical pedagogy together create new constellations of meaning. The images, maps, and collages that we have produced are not meant to close interpretation but to open it - activating dialogue, provoking contributions, and enabling further stories to emerge.

We argue that healing in this sense is not restorative but generative, unsettling dualisms - between Western and Indigenous medicine, humans and nonhumans, health and illness - and making visible the transformative potential of cura as a collective and processual practice.

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Contribution short abstract

With (practices of) planting and the speculative intervention of a wild apple tree in Berlin's "Moawald", this contribution stimulates thinking about urban nature as commons for multi-species city dwellers.

Contribution long abstract

Public urban space appears to be open to, at least temporarily, use by humans and non-humans. However, permanent or communal appropriations must be negotiated, or even fought for, with various authorities (van Dooren & Rose 2012; Stavrides 2016).

This paper explores the multispecies collaborative transformation of a public green space into a space for communal experimentation with urban spaces. Building on experimental and speculative approaches of ‘sensing of botanical sensoria’ (Myers 2014), this contribution undertakes a ‘sensing with botanical sensoria’, specifically with that of a wild apple tree. Together with about 400 others, it is growing into a Tiny Forest – one of the first in Berlin's public space. These vegetal city dwellers were planted by a grassroots initiative that introduces Tiny Forests as cross-species, collaboratively designed and used “Kiezwälder“ (“neighborhood forests”). “Kiezwälder” are intended to take root in urban soils, intertwine, provide living, feeding, and recreational space for birds, insects, rodents, humans, and many others. They are expected to provide shade, cool and filter air – in short, revitalize urban spaces of the Anthropocene in new and different ways.

Drawing together the practices of commoning urban land through planting, as initiated by the “Kiezwald” initiative with the speculative intervention of this wild apple in Berlin's “Moawald”, this paper reflects upon cities as spaces for more-than-human co-creation (Fincher & Iveson 2015). It stimulates thinking about urban nature as commons (Müller 2014; Bartoletti & Faccioli 2024) with value for others beyond humans, as well as about ethnography as a more-than-human collaboration.

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Contribution short abstract

Drawing on explorative fieldwork in Chile, this talk identifies actors shaping the ecological transformative imaginaries in the context of the Chilean constitutional process, centering how these actors address human-environment relations and thereby engage with practices of healing and communing.

Contribution long abstract

In times of planetary crises, a wide range of actors propose approaches to socio-ecological transformations. By drawing on the Chilean constitutional process, this talk aims to give insights into the links between ecological transformative imaginaries shaped by state and non-state actors and concepts of healing and communing.

In 2022, a democratically elected convention presented a draft for a new Chilean constitution, widely considered innovative. The constitutional process itself, which unfolded after the social upheaval in 2019, was equally remarkable as it aimed to replace the existing constitution installed during dictatorship.

One feature of the draft was the intensified involvement with the environment. Thus, the draft recognized climate change as an essential threat and declared the sea, glaciers, and the coasts as natural common goods.

Drawing on explorative fieldwork in Chile, this talk delineates potential state and non-state actors, shaping the intensified involvement with the environment in the context of the constitutional process and the transformative ideas that have accompanied these developments.

Doing so, the following questions will be discussed: How did different actors imagine ecological transformation and how did they address human-environment relations? To what extent did these transformative imaginaries refer to utopian visions or past ideals? What role did conceptions of healing and communing play in the intensified involvement with the environment and in what sense were these inspired by Indigenous and local concepts and practices?

Considering that Chile’s constitutional draft was rejected, it is of interest to analyze the draft’s transformative potential five years after the social upheaval.

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Contribution short abstract

Drawing on the perspectives of Amazonian healers this paper illuminates the entanglements of healing with other-than-humans. Processes of “(un)commoning” are evident in the (un)equal distribution of healing options and agency. Local healers strive to negotiate their roles within power relationships.

Contribution long abstract

This paper aims to conceptualize the complexity of human-environment relations in Archidona, located in the Amazonian region of Ecuador. Ecological landscapes in the area have been shaped by longstanding processes of urbanization and overextraction of resources. In this context, the perspectives of local healers can reveal the continuously transforming entanglements of healing practices with other-than-human environments. Navigating “damaged” landscapes, local healers strive to (re)connect to spirit dueños inhabiting surrounding ecologies.

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research and insights from critical medical anthropology, “healing” will be perceived as an “(un)common good”, which is (un)equally distributed across human and other-than-human milieus. Practices of “commoning” are expressed in the ways healing is embedded in the social lives of local healers, which strive to negotiate their roles in power-laden relations with biomedical and state actors, as well as other-than-human entities. “Curing” individual biomedically defined bodies will thus be extended to “healing” social and ecological bodies, which are formative of local epistemologies (cf. Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987).

Critical medical anthropologists have illustrated how structural conditions shape the distribution of health and well-being across racialized, gendered and class relations (cf. Farmer et al. 2006). However, healing agency in Archidona is not only limited to humans but is extended to other animals, plants and spirit dueños. Local healing knowledge (e.g. samay, paju) is distributed among both humans and other-than-humans, which are perceived as subjects of healing and care. This paper argues that local healing practices are closely intertwined with land relations and the access of communities to resources.

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Contribution short abstract

Based on a research collaboration with a Canadian First Nation, this paper explores how the concept of healing as commoning can be used to reconcile relationships between different actors, while also examining the risks of reinforcing exploitative relations in Indigenous territories.

Contribution long abstract

The concepts of commoning and healing both appeal to ideas of re-structuring and re-thinking (exploitative) relationships in order to create healthier, more just forms of relating to humans and non-humans. This paper emerges from a research collaboration with a Canadian First Nation, working on one of the prime tragedy of commons scenarios – fisheries. It will explore where ideas of healing as commoning can reconcile exploitative relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors, the state and more-than-human environment as well as where commoning might challenge and contradict Indigenous approaches for healing. In a time of planetary crisis, commoning can be a powerful initiative to question current management of areas such as fisheries, however, it also bears the danger to re-impose colonial thinking that ignores Indigenous ownership and creates an open-for-all commons. The devastating effects of colonial politics in Canada still impact Indigenous people’s individual health, the health of their territories and their more-than-human inhabitants and on a larger scale the health of the planet. For coastal First Nations, these effects manifest in the state of fisheries, which have direct consequences for local diets and health, economies and more-than-human environments locally and globally. Here, healing is explored as a process that starts with the acknowledgement of what went wrong in order to find a joint way forward which underlines a cooperative aspect. This understanding expands to the research this paper is based on in its approach to acknowledges (historic) exploitative research practices and negotiate meaningful collaboration in partnership with an Indigenous community.

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Contribution short abstract

Restoration is a key concept to environmental damage, yet its application—whether to ecosystems or community dynamics—is fraught with complexity. This paper explores how activists, academics, and local communities re(define) knowledges and practices with a particular focus on the RoN framework.

Contribution long abstract

The Rights of Nature (RoN) framework has sparked ongoing debates, both theoretical and practical, regarding its implementation. More than 15 years after its adoption in the Ecuadorian Constitution, the framework continues to face challenges arising from misunderstandings, misinformation, and competing political agendas. Nonetheless, RoN provides a critical platform for stakeholders to address socioecological issues. This further establishes a foundation for social initiatives to engage in the commoning of resources and the collective meanings of life.

In 2020, a coalition of RoN advocates and academics launched a training program designed to prepare community leaders as courtroom experts. This training emphasized not only navigating the legal process during RoN lawsuits but also addressing the aftermath of successful litigation. Key questions include: How can ancestral practices and knowledge systems contribute to restoring fragile ecosystems? What actionable measures can be taken to repair damaged human–non-human relationships? If full restoration is unattainable, to what extent are expectations being reframed or obscured?

The collaboration between community leaders, activists, and researchers offers a unique opportunity for collective knowledge production concerning RoN and environmental legal frameworks. Given Ecuador's postcolonial history, it is crucial to explore how diverse forms of knowledge influence discourse, whose perspectives are deemed legitimate, and the strategies historically marginalized communities employ when advocating for RoN or collective rights.

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Contribution short abstract

Faced with fungal pathogens in the pasture soils, livestock farmers in Spain re-envision the dehesa woodland as a landscape in which humans and nonhumans alike participate. While some species have found refuge again, others have been endowed with the questionable role of landscape conservationists.

Contribution long abstract

The Spanish dehesa woodlands are traditional livestock pastures covered with numerous oak trees. Along with its agricultural importance, the dehesa has a high ecological value, not least for the conservation of endangered species such as the Iberian lynx and the griffon vulture. In the last 30 years, the tree disease Seca has become rampant and destroyed large areas of dehesa, threatening the livelihood of livestock farmers in the region. The Seca is caused by a soil-borne pathogen, the infestation with which ultimately leads to the death of the infected tree. Its spread is facilitated by soil compaction due to deficient livestock management. As farmers turn to Holistic Management to restore and preserve healthy soils, they re-envision the dehesa as a landscape that is constituted by humans and nonhumans alike. In other words, farmers open their eyes to the comprehensive soil community (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015) whose members provide the basis for the dehesa and its participants to flourish. Acknowledging the agency and key role of other-than-human beings in the conservation and commoning of the dehesa qualifies its long-vaunted anthropogenic origin. At the same time, the implementation of Holistic Management has ambivalent implications for nonhumans encapsulated in the contrast between feral species that are subject to conservation measures, and domestic animals and other nonhuman beings involved in the regeneration of the soil: Valued mainly because of their metabolic work in and above the ground, they are sidelined as resources without being given an equal share in the dehesa’s commoning.