Paper short abstract:

Quotidian actions of horticulture production and vegetables gift giving constitute the basis of the moral economy in the village of Corgas. Cultural practices of reciprocation are equally present in the local mundane religious routines. This paper focuses on how these scheme of persisting actions are used to address new contextual realities.

Paper long abstract:

Following André-Georges Haudricourt analysis on man/nature modes of technical efficacy, I will argue that ordinary religious routines in the village of Corgas (Proença-a-Nova, Portugal) can be understood as systems of actions aimed at the cultivation of the local social milieu and to ritualize the local life.

The seasonal actions of seeding, pruning, grafting or harvesting the horticultural plantations belong to a genealogy of local techniques to care for the land. Similarly, the quotidian and the seasonal local practices of worshiping the ancestors – daily praying, commending the souls every day during the 40 days of Lent, the weekly auction of smokehouse outside Sundays’ mass to collect money for worshiping the souls, or the quotidian devotion of the alminhas (small niches dedicated to the Souls) – also belong to a historically constituted system of actions rooted on the consensual values of reciprocation and belief in deferred exchanges.

Domestic and religious moral economy is thus part of an integrated system of actions comprehending exchanges between human and non-human. In that sense, religious and/or horticultural routines constitute analogous delicate activities which co-participate in a seasonal regeneration of people’s and nature’s lives.

Based on my ethnographic research this paper will look at 1) the mutually constitutive nature of these forms of seasonal and quotidian cultivation/worshipping; and, on 2) the present relevance of this social system of moral economy to address new crisis, as in the catastrophic forest fires that destroyed the village’s fields in 2003, and neighbouring villages in 2017.