A cosmopolítica da comunidade quilombola do Indaiá(MG)

Abstract

In this ethnography, I analyze a set of practices that make up the resistance of the Indaiá Quilombola Community, located in the Rio Doce Valley. It is a rural community made up of twenty-four families, certified by the Palmares Foundation in 2006. The community members establish a relationship of companionship with nature through extractive processes, planting crops, backyards and vegetable gardens, walking through the forest and using medicinal plants and herbs. The ecological alliance with the Indaiá Palm Tree stands out, which gave rise to the group's name, since its stem, the heart of palm and the fruit, the coconut, served as food for the community members and contributed to the quilombolas' permanence in the territory. Since 1970, the community has suffered intensely from the social effects of development policies, which operate in the territory through eucalyptus monocultures. In this context, they face sev-eral socio-environmental conflicts over natural resources and the use of their traditional terri-tory. In response, the community members sought to continue and strengthen their resistance system developed since the period of slavery, through practices, dynamics and discourses aimed at defending themselves against these ontological attacks. In this sense, I use the concept of cosmopolitics, based on I. Stengers, to think about this process of resistance. This approach encompasses the interrelations between cosmos and politics, from which alliances are formed between humans and non-humans, to combat the imposition of hegemonic policies. Thus, I seek to argue that in the Quilombola Community of Indaiá, the cosmopolitical practices man-aged by the community members create a memorial heritage for the group, reinforce identity, kinship, spirituality, ancestry, ethnicity and promote belonging to the territory through alliances between different entities, orders and dimensions. When analyzing these practices, a network of relationships, alliances and bonds built by the Quilombola Community of Indaiá was ob-served, that is, a cosmopolitics of defense of the territory.