Cooking with Lévi-Strauss and the Enawenê-nawê Women: In Search of the Human Condition in the Details of Everyday Life
The Enawenê-Nawê women of Central Brazil have a close relationship with their staple food, wild cassava and toxic tubers when raw. Managing contact with cassava requires constant attention from household members (moving the kitchen to a different , taking shamanic precautions, preparing special dishes, etc.), as this is where people vulnerable to the plant’s harmful effects—conceived as a hyperanimated female entity—are found: menstruating women, their partners, and parents of newborns or adolescents. Following Lévi-Strauss’s lead and through the ethnography of this necessary yet sometimes unsettling daily coexistence, I explore how the human condition is “cooked” by processes that are always both practical and metaphysical. The idea is precisely to investigate how the sensory practice and experience of life are articulated with the myth and ideology surrounding the cassava woman. What I find useful in Lévi-Strauss’s work on cuisine is that he observes the small details of everyday experience and offers heuristic keys that turn these small things—which often concern women—into indicators of defining meanings. Through a critical re-reading of Lévi-Strauss’s “culinary triangle,” I therefore propose a feminist perspective on the act of cooking the human condition.
Chloe Nahum-Claudel
Chloé Nahum-Claudel is an anthropologist and professor at the University of Manchester (UK). After completing her dissertation at the University of Cambridge in 2012, she served as a researcher at EHESS (CERMA, Mondes-AM), Pembroke College Cambridge, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on the relationships between humanity and nature, gender, the political and innovative dimensions of ritual, and the diplomacy of indigenous peoples. Based on her fieldwork among the Enawenê-nawê of the Brazilian Amazon, she has published a monograph, *Vital Diplomacy* (Oxford, Berghahn, 2018), and numerous articles. Since 2015, she has also been conducting fieldwork in Papua New Guinea on witch hunts, which has led her to adopt a more explicit feminist approach, while also opening up new perspectives for her work in the Amazon.
Gardens, wild plants, and other vegetation among the Jarawara: notes on indigenous women and the ecology of care
I intend to examine the practices of growing and caring for plants among Jarawara women in their fields, gardens, and surroundings, as well as in their search for forest fruits, seeking to reflect on these relationships as forms of political and cosmopolitical agency. The idea is to consider the ecological practices of indigenous women as practices of entanglement with non-human beings—something Despret refers to as the ecology of attention. Thus, the discussion aims to engage with post-structuralist feminist studies that follow the insights and work of Lynn Margulis on symbiosis, which asserts that life on Earth evolves not in isolation and competition, but rather through multispecies entanglements where interspecific relationships shape beings in a process of coevolution. I will seek to shift the ethnographic narrative so that indigenous women are described in a way that more closely reflects how they describe themselves in their contemporary intellectual and political mobilizations—“warrior women of ancestry,” “biome women” —with an interest in both the relationships woven with nearby plants, cultivated by people, and those more distant ones, which emerge especially during the rainy season, when the most diverse fruits can be gathered in the bush (yama kabani ya).
Fabiana Maizza
Fabiana Maizza is a professor of anthropology at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and holds a degree in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo. Her current research focuses on gender relations and the relationships between humans and cultivated plants among the Jarawara, a people with whom she has been engaging in dialogue since 2004. She has published articles on female agency, feminist politics of life, ecology and feminism, and human-plant relationships. She is currently an associate researcher at the Center for Amerindian Studies (USP), the Société des Américanistes (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris), and Ayé: Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Nature, Culture, and Technology (UFPE, Recife).
In-person event
Free admission, subject to space limitations
No registration required
www.cesta.fflch.usp.br cesta@usp.br Instagram: cestausp