GSSC Seminar Series
09 July 2024
The forest beings and the alterity: an ethnography of Ndyuka historicities
Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha (Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
12:00-13:00
The paper aims to explore how maroons Cottica Ndyuka who live in the Easter Suriname reconfigure and transform the places they and their forebears have created before and after the Civil War (1986-1992). The conflict is frequently articulated with other forms of violence linked to the expansion of mining and logging industries and other capitalists’ development policies that have threatened and damaged traditional territories since the early 20th century. They provoked the destruction of the earth, forests, rivers, and villages. From the maroon point of view, they are sentient landscapes in which the present-day maroons’ ancestors - the runaways who escaped colonial plantations - created new societies based on matrilineal ties and the solidarity grown during their flight. Earth and forest beings, spirits, gods, and humans participate and are indistinct parts of the maroon ontology. The encounters with these sentient landscapes and forest beings turned the runaways into Businenge.
Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Currently, she is a Research Visitor of Mecila in at University of Cologne. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Amsterdam, and a Tinker Professor at the University of Chicago. From September 2024, she will be a fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and visiting research at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include creativity, plantation, and plantationocene effects in the Caribbean and Amazonian region, focusing mainly on the Maroon and traditional people's cosmopolitics. Her recent publications include The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artifacts (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2020) and the edited volume Maroon cosmopolitics: Personhood, creativity, and Incorporation (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2018).