Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In this paper, I analyze how drought in the Caatinga biome acts as a creative force. Through ethnography with vaqueiros, I explore how multispecies genealogies – ancient trees and waterbeds – embody memories of labor, slavery, and resistance, uncovering a tension between scarcity and abundance.

Paper long abstract

Based on my long-term fieldwork with the vaqueiros of Pernambuco, in the Brazilian semi-arid region (sertão), I argue that the severity of the droughts does not simply erase history; rather, it fixes social memory onto the material landscape. Challenging the conventional framing of drought as a mere environmental lack, I propose instead to analyze drought as a creative force. In this "drying world," as proposed by the panel, I intend to analyze how social memories are etched into the landscape of the Caatinga biome, and how particular places create historical narratives – ranging from the labor of vaqueiros to the sagas of rural banditry, migration, and the legacies of slavery. I argue that these narratives are embodied into environmental traces of aridity ("veredas"), which include water sources and ancient trees. I focus particularly on the umbuzeiro, a native tree recognized as a symbol of drought resistance, but which I describe as a living archive, often carrying the names and personalities of ancestors. How does the Caatinga landscape share collective memories through multispecies genealogies? Notions of multispecies genealogies and mnemonic landscapes can uncover a tension between the official record of scarcity and the abundance that people and other beings carry with them, highlighting deep-seated polarizations of land, race, and power. By living with trees and waterbeds that keep the names and memories of families, the inhabitants of the sertão articulate an ecology of relations that contributes to environmental anthropology debates regarding social and ecological memory, kinship, landscape, and materiality.