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- Convenors:
-
Valeska Andrea Díaz Soto
(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Eveline Dürr (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
This panel explores Indigenous practices of healing as commoning to address the planetary crises. Healing, as well as commoning, is a relational practice linking different scales, such as individual wellbeing, collective rights, and environmental justice.
Long Abstract:
In a time of planetary crises accelerated by climate change and the devastations of the Anthropocene, this panel brings into focus Indigenous practices of healing as an alternative way to address these issues. We contend that “healing” can be seen as a form of commoning as it points beyond the individual and calls for participation, sharing, and resistance. It is also highly relational, as it seeks to link different scales, such as individual wellbeing, collective rights, and environmental justice. It may also link different communities who then interact with each other. Healing may also speak to intergenerational traumas due to colonial conditions and refer to the communal, socio-political dimension as well as to the individual. These practices do not merely approach local (non)human-environment-animal relationships but also involve larger contexts, without losing sight of the importance of the local. However, exploring healing as commoning may also involve utopian dimensions, as the entanglement of environmental damage, healing practices, and (de)coloniality are complex assemblages. To analyze these processes, we propose to discuss the following questions: What challenges are involved in commoning and can it “fail”? How do the heterogenous actors involved (community-state-civil society) relate to each other and what tensions may arise amongst them? What is the potential of healing practices to re-configure human-environment relations and socio-ecological transformation more broadly? What role do researchers have in this context, in particular in a (de)colonial framework?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
This empirical investigation contrasts urban food sharing practices in community gardens of two global cities facing the problems of urban vacant land and the violation of the right to food.
Contribution long abstract:
This empirical investigation contrasts urban food sharing practices in community gardens of two global cities facing the problems of urban vacant land and the violation of the right to food. The central inquiry guiding this investigation is: How do the principles of the right to food relate to food sharing practices within Berlin and Rio de Janeiro community gardens, and what factors explain the similarities and differences in these connections within and between these cities? The hypothesis suggests that urban food sharing within community gardens can be linked to right to food. These connections may vary based on unique socioeconomic contexts and urban challenges in each city. To empirically assess this hypothesis, the study formulated the theoretical proposition that the human right to food, the concept of urban commons, and the establishment of community gardens serve as mechanisms for addressing urban land and food crises. Interviews and questionnaires applied between 2019-2023 characterized community gardens' territorial and sociodemographic profiles by engaging with gardeners and experts (40 in total). The data had a thematic coding and analysis, combining deductive and inductive reasoning. The results confirmed the hypothesis. However, agroecological food production emerged as a unifying factor across both cities, demonstrating a shared commitment to sustainable practices. This suggests a significant international step toward social-ecological transformation in urban food and land management. The findings expanded the existing literature on the role of urban agriculture and alert for the necessary promotion and protection of community gardens.
Contribution short abstract:
In dialogue with calls to integrate Western and Indigenous knowledge, our interdisciplinary team developed "planetary healing" (PH). From a case study of São Paulo floodplains, PH reimagines public policies to heal body, spirit, ecology, and social injustices.
Contribution long abstract:
In December 2024, Brazilian Indigenous scientists emphasized the urgency of bridging Western and Indigenous knowledge systems to foster reciprocity and care for human and ecosystem health (Levis et al., 2024). In dialogue with this and other calls for transformation, over the past two years, our interdisciplinary team of Brazilian and German anthropologists, biologists, Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian activists, and family doctors has developed the concept of "planetary healing" (PH). This framework merges Indigenous/ancestral knowledge and humanities perspectives with Western scientific approaches to planetary health.
Planetary healing proposes an expanded vision of health, transcending the absence of disease to focus on repairing body, mind, spirit, and ecology. It promotes pragmatic, ethically grounded practices aimed at healing rather than merely fixing the harm caused by human actions. Embracing decolonial approaches (Baquero et al., 2021), we argue that Brazil’s perspective, rooted in Global South realities, offers unique insights.
We develop our contribution form a case study in São Paulo’s urban floodplains, where the resurgence of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian medicinal practices symbolises healing strategies rooted in resistance and "re-existence." Such practices re-signify historically stigmatized spaces, like disease-associated waters and grounds, into regenerative systems. From our case study, we propose incorporating the concept of cura (healing) --which, distinct from saúde (health), emphasizes rituals, medicinal plants, and elements such as water and earth as sources of spiritual and ecological restoration--into public health frameworks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Contribution long abstract:
In this paper, I study the anthropogenic climate change induced health hazards and its impact on the bodies of the female climate migrants from the minority communities in India’s "Sundarbans".
Sundarbans (world’s largest mangrove forest spanning across the borders of Bangladesh and India) has unique geographical features, and its elevated status on a global level (it was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1997) brought in state government’s sustained interest in developmental projects and intense tourism in the region. This, in turn, has exacerbated the onset of environmental stressors, in the form of metal pollution of water from the painting of the boats as well as diesel, kerosene and oil spills in the river, contributing to severe health hazards, specifically for the disadvantaged groups. As water regulates everything in Sundarbans, the disruption in its source has necessitated forced migration out of the swamp land, that warrants further elaboration, particularly in tandem with the local women’s battle with chronic skin diseases, irregular menstrual cycle, miscarriages, preeclampsia and cervical cancer.
I will address this long-standing histories of environmental degradation in the minority communities of Sundarbans in relation to the markers of anthropogenic toxins on the female bodies. Additionally, I will discuss how such narratives of displacement is also shaped by an emplacement, in the survival strategies employed by the female climate migrants, through their stories, artwork and community involvement, rooted in the idea of commoning as a healing practice, that eventually produce crucial sites of new forms of knowledge production.
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork in NW-Amazonia the paper argues that the social attitude of a "Gemeinsinn" (common spirit) becomes a sort of cosmic „Gemeinsinn beyond the human". This commoning of care and cure consolidates the integrity of the person by rearranging their „dividual“ bundle of relationships.
Contribution long abstract:
The characteristic feature of the cosmic diplomacy of Northwestern Amazonian healing rites is to reach beyond the isolated individual to include the immediate environment and its human and non-human inhabitants.
The social attitude of a "Gemeinsinn" (common spirit) becomes a sort of cosmic „Gemeinsinn beyond the human". This commoning of care and cure consolidates the integrity of the person by rearranging their „dividual“ (Strathern) bundle of relationships and identities.
The cosmic diplomacy of the healing rites works primarily through making aware of the conflictual nature of the field of relationships beyond the human. Although it is known that common-spirited (gemeinsinnige) transformation processes that will be necessary to master the planetary ecological crisis will not be without conflicts and depotentiations, in the West these conflicts are kept under the carpet by strenuous efforts of repression, whose explosive potential is becoming increasingly worrying.