Paper short abstract:

This paper looks into the politics of 'biocultural landscape' through mobilizations against transgenic and extractive projects in Mexico among Totonac and Nahua indigenous communities. It points out how local cosmopolitics and knowledge are mobilised in the defense of Indigenous territories.

Paper long abstract:

Taking the perspective of the Totonac- and Nahua-speaking inhabitants of the Sierra Norte of Puebla in Mexico, I reveal the epistemic distance that exists between the local cosmopolitics of territory (and 'world-making', Descola 2011) and the abstract notions of landscape and biocultural heritage. Following the approach of the 'apprehension of the environment' (Ellison 2013), I show how the relationship between person, community and territory is based both on a socio-cosmic relationships and praxis-based perceptions of the environment (Ingold, 2000). This, beyond its symbolic aspects, is concretely anchored in the practices of cultivation (especially of 'native' maize) and of daily reproduction of life. Taking the example of community responses to both transgenic contamination and top-down conservation of agrobiodiversity (in the form of local land-races of maize), I thus point out how local knowledge systems are mobilized in the patrimonial dynamics used in the defense of Indigenous territories, at the same time that they are transformed by these.

The proposed paper therefore addresses both the "ecologies of practice and care in ontologically complex landscapes" and "the deployment of ‘traditional’ knowledges and practices in place-based environmental politics".