“Making crafts to make the land”: S ocio-technical dynamics in the Quilombola community of the Serra das Viúvas

Abstract

This article discusses the socio-technical dynamics related to practices carried out in the context of a self-declared Quilombola Community in the Serra das Viúvas, backlands of Alagoas. Such practices are addressed from the inter-relationship of various skills, techniques, stories and symbolic actions of (human and nonhuman) beings that are potentiated through the “engagement” of practical experience and constructed in social interaction. The analysis dialogues with propositions by Tim Ingold, in various theoretical contexts, and emphasizes the relationship of the concepts of nature and culture as inseparable from a field of interactions that relate to specific ways of being, doing and inhabiting the world. The emphasis of ethnographic research contextualizes the narratives of the women who founded the Association of Quilombola Women Artisans (AMAQUI), in the 1990s. The study reveals that the experience of knowing-doing of domestic groups within the community takes shape through everyday practices that point to a knowledge of the local ecosystem, but are permeated by a particular logic of belonging and reciprocity that produces meanings about the territory, in a given historical situation.

Keywords: nature, culture, socio-technical practices.