Territorialities of convivenciality and feeling-think with traditional community forests in Latin America

Abstract

The present text seeks to evidence the theoretical refections of four research groups about the Community Forests (the patrimonial agroforestry) of traditional Latin American rural territories. These Forests appear as central element in the discussion of policies of nature engendered in the rural spaces crossed by multiple socioeconomic dynamics. Socially appropriate, the forest is a symbol of the socio-cultural reproduction of the traditional way of life, connecting material and symbolic dimensions that drive the utopian projects of these collectivities in front of the hegemonic forms of the rationalization of the world of life. In the context of multiple modernities, the socio-political identity of traditional communities accesses a semantic network that connects Forest's imagery to the ontological concepts of Living, Habitat and Care, conferring, as a whole, a territoriality of coexistence that tensions in space and time. This territoriality confers resistance to the modernizing-mercantilizer project of rural spaces, giving new meanings and values to rural daily life. Based on an ecology of practices and knowledge, we will seek to highlight such ontological concepts from academic interpretations about the images, practices and regimes of nature engendered in this process and that confgure these agroforestry territorialities: the frst in a community Faxinalense and also Quilombola of the phytogeographic region of the Forest with Araucarias of Paraná, Brazil; another lived and interpreted territoriality is the Mapuche Williche of the Valdivian Temperate Forest region in Chile; the Paiter Suruí territoriality of the Brazilian Amazon Forest, and the Coconut Craters of the Cocos (Mata dos Cocais) of Maranhão are also presented. All these experiences allowed us to interpret the pluriverse of ontologies, from which the ways of feeling-think the sociobiodiversity of these territorialities of agroforestry coexistence are confgured.