Short Abstract

This panel explores embodied and material practices, such as ritual, dance, healing, and craft, among Indigenous and rural communities in the Americas, examining how bodies, land, and knowledge carry memory, healing, and relationships within histories of colonialism and dispossession.

Long Abstract

What moves through bodies, matter, territories, and generations? How do embodied practices carry and transform knowledge, memory, affect, and relationships? This panel brings together ethnographic and theoretical work on these questions within histories of colonialism, displacement, extraction, environmental degradation, commodification, and political struggle across the Americas.

How do Indigenous and rural communities respond to these conditions, and what do their embodied practices tell us about situated knowledge, healing processes and alternative ways of inhabiting the world? These practices may unfold in terms of performance, ritual, dance, craft, and other embodied and material expressions. They are more than cultural representations or repositories of tradition. Movements, gestures, sounds, objects, substances, and landscapes carry and transmit knowledge, bring memories into the present, transform affects, and sustain relationships and forms of belonging. We think of the body as a living archive, not a container of memory, but a place where histories, knowledge, and relationships are continually enacted. Movement, in this sense, is something bodies do, and also a way of making and remaking relationships across time and space. Embodied practices are closely tied to materials, places, and other forms of life, and can become practices of remembering, healing, caring, and transforming. We ask what they do and how they shape everyday and collective life and what challenges emerge in these processes. The panel attends to different contexts and asks how bodies, materials, affects, and movements open onto other ways of knowing and inhabiting the world.