Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the political potential of the recent recognition of BCPs on land tenure for local communities in Madagascar. We examine to what extent BCPs offer a suitable space for communities to assert their right to self-determination and their rights to their territories.

Paper long abstract:

Inherited from colonial times, land tenure policy in Madagascar is responsible for a profound land insecurity: customary rights over ancestral lands are not recognised; and local communities are generally unable to meet the legal requirements for land titling and end up being deprived of their lands by local notables.

On the bright side, recent domestic texts, adopted within the framework of the Mutually supportive implementation of the Nagoya Protocol and Plant Treaty, offer a growing recognition of the rights of local communities and even recognise biocultural community protocols (BCPs), understood as a broad array of expressions, rules and practices generated by communities to set out how they expect other stakeholders to engage with them and embedding their worldviews and their understanding of their bio-cultural heritage.

We posit that BCPs hold out hope that local communities may assert both their right to internal self-determination and their rights to their territories, lands, resources, traditional knowledge and culture. However, comparative analysis of the BCPs developed within two Malagasy pilot communities (Analavory & Mariarano) with other BCPs implemented in Benin and Kenya show the idiosyncrasy of the Malagasy case that deserves to be questioned: the absence of any explicit reference to rights over lands and veiled allusions to rights over cultural heritage and normative autonomy. The article attempts to understand this singularity by questioning, based on extensive ethnographic work, the political potential of such BCPs, which seem to gloss over the key issues of biocultural heritage and land rights.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the connection between identity and space patterns on the basis of the ethnographic record of so-called egalitarian societies. Its point will be that despite the trascendental deviation of State societies, principles structuring all human experience are essentially the same.

Paper long abstract:

Despite that was not its original purpose, the term "centrifugal logic" used by Pierre Clastres in 1977 to characterize the so-called primitive societies -which he himself had better defined as societies against the State- gave some insight on their spatial arrangement, at least in the middle range. Not for nothing, Cultural Ecology was pointing at the same time to "environmental blockages" as the most probable historical scenarios for increasing social stratification towards the State; an hypothesis not debunked, but merely ignored together with virtually all materialist approach during the following decades. This paper has a twofold aim given that context. Firstly, it implies an attempt to define such a centrality, avoided by human actors within society but in turn starting point of any social interaction. In order to do so, it will readress the processes of identity construction in Lowland South America from the point of view of current Theories of practice. On the other hand, it will explore the spatial materialization of this kind of operative logics in an even lower, basic level by broaching and linking together another discussion thread: the one regarding village structural patterns, boosted by the wellknown reflections of Claude Lévi-Strauss on circularity and segmentation. This last exercise will be of particular relevance since case studies on recently reduced populations stress how national and international foreigners are experimented and signified beyond "cultural humanity"; a phenomenon that might shed new light on the precise nature of the political accidents which historically resulted in longstanting State societies.

Paper short abstract:

Identity dynamics between quechuas from Peruvian Central Andes allows them to obtain political power required to sustain capitalist projects of investement in the territories of their Comunidad Campesina (Peasant Community), birthplace they left decades ago as it was related to poverty.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, quechuas —migrants from peruvian Andes— inhabit in the capital city of Lima, have appropriated discourses of development and consumption acquired from global market. This local appropriation dinamizes their identification with their origin comunidad campesina (peasant community), birthplace they left in the mid-20th century, pursuing the dreamt progress in the metropoli. Such is the case of navinos, today successful inmigrants and businessmen inhabiting Lima. Navinos are reassessing their identification with the rural territory of their origin community, the Comunidad Campesina Santo Domingo de Nava, in central peruvian Andes: decades ago community meant backwardness and poverty, today it represents a chance for developement inside a global context. Currently, navinos from Lima are leading enterprise projects inside comunal territory, bringing urbanization to Nava. However, this capitalist investment in their original community generates a field of political tension: while navinos inhabiting Lima consider their capitalist investment in comunal territory will bring progress to Nava, the residents of the community consider this actions as an instrumental thought from global market that pursues own benefit. According to the multisited ethnography that has guided our fieldwork, identity plays a decisive role in this political dispute: it articulates socioeconomic relations with discourses of development and consumption, a main feature of current quechuas urban-rural fluxes.

Identity mediates capitalist investment in comunal territory and also allows the politic power required to sustain enterprise projects. Navinos in Lima foster an integration of their origin community to their socioeconomic sphere sustained by identity and its influence on political relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to pursue the way Eastern Tukanoan's male and female knowledge is engaged with scientific discussions about climate change in projects accomplished by indigenous and non-indigenous organizations after the demarcation of the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Land.

Paper long abstract:

This paper intends to pursue the way the Eastern Tukanoan's male and female traditional knowledge is engaged with scientific concepts and discussions about climate change in projects accomplished by indigenous and non-indigenous organizations after the demarcation of the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Land. I am taking the challenges of articulating discussions of the anthropocene, gender and decolonization and of contributing to the understanding of how the anthropocene has been experienced by the Eastern Tukano peoples. The Tukanoan cosmology is centered in the setting of the time year from the articulation between constellations movements (winters) and fruiting and flowering time (summers), with theirs economic activities and with the performing of male shamanic actions with the aim to "order the Universe". For the Tukanoan this actions ensures that each time happen correctly. From the 2000s, with the implementation of the indigenous cultural valorisation and environmental management projects promoted by FOIRN (Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro) and ISA (Instituto Socioambiental), new indigenous generations begun to take an interest in the knowledge of the elders, which earned prestigious in the communities and engaged the global network debates. Daily feminine's knowledge of the garden and cuisine, which includes the domestication of wild cassava and the mastery of planting and cultivation of its numerous varieties, that persisted for Centuries after the contact with the non-indigenous and are an important part of the Eastern Tukano's way of life and their conception of management, have only recently been considered in such projects.