Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
João Lotufo – 850122529100
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Wageningen University - Department of Social Sciences Sociology of Development and Change Group
Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
Spring 2017 Msc Development and Rural Innovation
JoĂŁo Paulo B. Lotufo Jr. (850122529100) joaonabao@gmail.com
Thesis code: SDC-80433 Chair group: Sociology of Development and Change Supervisor: Alberto Arce Institution: Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR)
Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to all (humans and nonhumans) involved in my process of writing this thesis that, somehow, started much earlier than last year.
Also, I am grateful to Wageningen university for the granted money to cover my travel costs, what allowed me to develop this research.
Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
Abstract This thesis is the result of an ethnographic research on a social-farm/therapeutic community in agroecology transition. This social-farm is the second stage of a free choice treatment-support for persons who are struggling with problems of addiction (mainly alcohol and crack-cocaine) from a Christian mission – Comunidade EvangÊlica Nova Aurora (CENA) situated in Juquitiba, Brazil. Under a multinaturalist approach, this reflection addresses the problem of how to manage such place of multiple realities (pluriverse). Also, using the assemblage approach, the issue of how do the social-farm's fluidity challenges its governance through virtual potentialities is discussed. Then, I conclude that, through the embodiment of care, the social-farm's flighty territory can emerge in another life politic where humans and nonhumans inter-subjective affections are as important as reason. Therefore, beyond challenging any fix management attempt, the everyday experiences in the social-farm suggest that a rhizomatic approach towards liferealities can represent a "would rather not" resistance to modern rationality.
Keywords: embodiment, pluriverse, rhizomatic management, bio-politics, governance
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Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
Table of contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................ i Table of contents ............................................................................................................. ii Table of figures .............................................................................................................. iii List of abreviations ........................................................................................................ iv Portuguese-English glossary ........................................................................................... v I.
INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 3 How I ended writing what I wrote .................................................................................. 3 The ontological turn ........................................................................................................ 6 Method ............................................................................................................................ 7 Research Questions ......................................................................................................... 9 Overview ......................................................................................................................... 9
II.
BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY ......................................................................... 12 Cracolândia (land of the crack-cocaine) ....................................................................... 12 Missão CENA ............................................................................................................... 16 Fazenda Nova Aurora ................................................................................................... 20 Pictures .......................................................................................................................... 27
III. PLURIVERSE .......................................................................................................... 28 Multiple worlds ............................................................................................................. 28 Modern ontology........................................................................................................... 34 Permaculture ontology .................................................................................................. 39 Spiritual ontology.......................................................................................................... 45 “More than one, less than two” ..................................................................................... 50 Discussion ..................................................................................................................... 57 Pictures .......................................................................................................................... 60 IV. VIRTUAL POTENTIALITIES ................................................................................ 62 Fluid realities of material things ................................................................................... 62 ‘Philosophers-gardeners’ and ‘farmer-poets’ ............................................................... 71 (re)Territorialization of the social-farm ........................................................................ 79 Discussion ..................................................................................................................... 84 ii
Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
Pictures .......................................................................................................................... 85 V.
POLITICS OF THE SOCIAL-FARM ...................................................................... 86 Permaculture, pluriverse and fluidity............................................................................ 86 Cosmopolitics ............................................................................................................... 95 Final thoughts and further questions ........................................................................... 107 Discussion ................................................................................................................... 115 Pictures ........................................................................................................................ 117
VI. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 118 Pictures ........................................................................................................................ 122 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 123 ANNEX....................................................................................................................... 129
Table of figures Figure 1 - Cracolândia .................................................................................................................. 27 Figure 2 - Juquiá river (a 10 minutes’ walk from FNA) ............................................................... 27 Figure 3- FNA's entrance .............................................................................................................. 27 Figure 4 - View from the upper crop field of FNA....................................................................... 27 Figure 5 - Common area of FNA with kitchen on the right .......................................................... 27 Figure 6 - Scheme of the three main ontologies presented at the farm ......................................... 34 Figure 7- Cover’ s drawing of the book Permaculture: a design manual ..................................... 60 Figure 8- Interior of the chapel ..................................................................................................... 60 Figure 9- "Students" working on the garden ................................................................................. 60 Figure 10- A walk on farm' s preserved rain forest ...................................................................... 60 Figure 11- Potential products to be commercialized with Korean community ............................ 60 Figure 12- Wild fern prepared for lunch ....................................................................................... 60 Figure 13 - Theoretic agroecology class ....................................................................................... 61 Figure 14- Practical agroecology class ......................................................................................... 61 Figure 15 - Adding mato to the agroforest beds ........................................................................... 61 Figure 16- The "dirty" agroforest soil ........................................................................................... 61 Figure 17- Conventional "clean" plantation ................................................................................. 61 iii
Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
Figure 18 - "Messy" agroecological plantation ............................................................................ 61 Figure 19- The "office" ................................................................................................................. 85 Figure 20 - Agroforest being implemented .................................................................................. 85 Figure 21 - Painting the football field ........................................................................................... 85 Figure 22 – Fenced lake with a “forbiden swim” sign.................................................................. 85 Figure 23 - Machete being used to plant seeds ............................................................................. 85 Figure 24 - "Students" posing with the machete at the implemented agroforest .......................... 85 Figure 25 - Holmgren's 12th design principle: Creatively use and respond to change ................ 89 Figure 26 - Batismódromo .......................................................................................................... 117 Figure 27 - Consortium of corn, bean, sunflower and eucaliptus ............................................... 117 Figure 28 - "Students" checking the permaculture activity plan ................................................ 117 Figure 29 - Dorinha, the farm´s cow ........................................................................................... 117 Figure 30 - View of the back field .............................................................................................. 117 Figure 31 – Sheet with the daily tasks of the “students” ............................................................ 117 Figure 32 – Talking at the food forest ........................................................................................ 122 Figure 33 - Researcher and his family during a visit day at the farm ......................................... 122 Figure 34 - Group picture that closed the Syntropic agriculture course ..................................... 122 Figure 35- Fieldnotes example (a) .............................................................................................. 129 Figure 36- Fieldnotes example (b) .............................................................................................. 130
List of abreviations FNA – Fazenda Nova Aurora TC – Therapeutic community CENA – Comunidade evangélica Nova Aurora
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Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
Portuguese-English glossary missão - mission. "pinga-pinga" - name given to public transportation that is not direct, and stops in several points before arriving in its final destination, thus taking longer periods to cross short distances. fluxo - the Portuguese word for ebb and flow, is how the area for commerce and use of drugs is denominated by those frequenting Cracolândia. boca – place where drugs are sold. cortiços - buildings transformed in precarious low budget housing. Cracolândia - literally crack-cocaine land. A region where crack-cocaine and other drugs are commercialized without a strong interference by the government. mato – wild grass and bushes. Related to the wild, jungle. jaboticabeira – Plinia cauliflora, a fruit tree original from the Mata Atlântica rain forest. nóia - name given to those that are under the effect of drugs with high dependency features and vulnerability. operação Sufoco - name of a police operation that target drug dealers and users of Cracolândia. batismódromo – “baptism pool” build in the farm after the lake was closed. real – name of the Brazilian currency.
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Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
I.
INTRODUCTION
In this section I briefly present how my personal experiences helped me to develop this ethnographic research. Then, I situate the research theoretically. Finally, I give a brief overview of each chapter.
How I ended writing what I wrote I did my PDC (permaculture design course) in January 2007. Back then I was in the middle of my studies to become a biologist. I had an attraction for natural patterns and ecology. During my undergraduate years, I also discovered that I really liked to work with people, and on the boundaries and overlapping of "social and natural worlds". In 2009, I graduated as a teacher and in the following year I finished my bachelor in biology. Already “exploring the edges”, my final report was about conceptions of science and its relations between scientists and objects of study. In that moment, I was already part of Curare, a permaculture study group. I found in permaculture1 a way of dealing with the social-natural “encounter”: a system of thinking that integrated people and nature through design. I became an enthusiastic. Everywhere I could, I would present the permacultural principles through an educational approach. Among those experiences, there were a permaculture club in a
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"A creative design process based on whole-systems thinking informed by ethics and design principles (…). This approach guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation" (retrieved from permacultureprinciples.com - accessed in 28/03/2017). I argue that to experience permaculture can promote another possibility of existence that blurs the basic concepts of what is nature and culture trough an actualization of "ancient-modern"/"modern-ancient" knowledge/wisdoms in a hybrid narrative; that is, it builds another ontology.
Introduction
public middle school (Lotufo jr., 2013) and low cost theoretic and practical permaculture classes we offered in different places. Also, I did some “practical consulting� for social-farms2 initiatives3. These experiences already raised questions on the challenges of teaching permaculture to a diverse public. In 2015, I had the opportunity to accompany my wife to the Netherlands where she would pursue her PhD. Once in the Netherlands, I found in Wageningen's MDR program an opportunity to continue to explore "the edges" by using my natural-scientific background together with social sciences; an opportunity to tackle the questions that my prior experience had already planted in me. During my theoretical preparation, Umans and Arce (2014) referred me back to the challenges of one of the projects I helped advised in Brazil, a therapeutic-socio-farm initiative in agroecology transition4. My experience at the socio-farm seemed to dialogue with the con-fusion concept. Moreover, reading about the ontological turn, I linked such ideas to the clashes between permaculture and the "economic rationality" often presented at the planning/doing of the farm. Further on my studies, the LaCadena (2010) was another fundamental step in this process of choosing my research framework. "Slowing down the reason" seemed to describe a fundamental step for a better management of the social-farm and its transition to permaculture. I can say that those articles were the main influence for choosing where I would do my ethnographic research: CENA's social-farm.
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A project in which its practices produce social gains as well as the main agrarian products and environmental services of a traditional farm. 3 See https://borapermaculturar.wordpress.com (accessed in 28/03/2017) 4 Process of agroecology practices incorporation to achieve an organic production with ecological succession strategies.
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Introduction
This therapeutic community5/social-farm is the second stage of a free choice treatmentsupport for people struggling with addiction (mainly alcohol and crack-cocaine), run by a Christian mission – Comunidade Evangélica Nova Aurora (CENA) – and situated in Juquitiba, São Paulo, Brazil. In thinking about the farm and its management challenges, I returned to Umans and Arce (2014), and found that the fluidity of material things 6 seemed to describe my experience with CENA. Complex, the management of the farm dealt with a fluid reality, in an ever-changing stage that was related to Deleuze and Guatari's assemblage approach7. Influenced by Arce and Long (2000)’s actor oriented approach, but shifting the research focus from actors’ lifeworld to the management of the social-farm, my research proposes a middle range dialogue: a rhizomatic8 approach towards the "politic[s], of the daily relations". This is an opportunity to raise awareness to the relevance of a multinaturalist approach on agroecology initiatives, which challenges modernity 9 from its ontological level, as well as recognizes the fluidity of such experiences and emphasizes the importance of less rigid management initiatives.
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An institution structured to offer care for people that have mild cases of dependency through labor and socialization. Admissions are always on a free will basis. (cf. ANVISA' s RDC 29). 6 The change of one reality without changing its materiality; the "actualization of its virtuality" or "virtualization of its actuality". 7 According to Deleuze and Guattari (1988), reality is composed by virtual and actual ontologies that are not fix and are rearranged according to entities affections. DeLanda (2006) refers to it as a theory of "flat ontology" of which core aspects are irreducibility with emergent properties and possible of decomposition. Also, Dewsbury (2011:148) explains it as. an attempt "to fit together all the ways in which the world is now characterized by flows, connections and becomings whose functioning logic is more about folds than structures, more complex than linear, more recursive than dialectical, more emergent than totalizing". 8 In the book A thousand plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1988) also refer to assemblage as rhizome. Thus, it is a fluid state of being driven by its entities affections. 9 A socio-politic-economic-scientific phenomenon that I approach from 3 main concepts: dichotomy between human and nature, economic rationality and reliance on the scientific-technological improvement (progress).
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Introduction
Furthermore, this research problematizes Foucault's bio-power concept (1990) of “centralized control through bureaucracy” (Foucault, 1978 in Blanco, Arce and Fisher, 2015:180). The therapeutic community/social-farm Fazenda Nova Aurora ethnography 10 present some examples that can be related to what Braidotti (2013a) called the posthuman. That is, social-farms assemblage is an example of "power formations [that] are time-bound and consequently temporary and contingent upon social action and interaction" (2013a:188-9). And, also, the embodiment11 of care (after Fisher, Arce and Díaz Copado, forthcoming) actualizes social-farm's fluid-pluriverse12 realities as "alternative representations and social locations for the kind of hybrid mix we are in the process of becoming" (Braidotti, 2013b, prologue iii).
The ontological turn This research is based on the "ontological turn" of social sciences studies. Previous to the ethnographic research itself, I inquired on how to approach the social-farm’s reality(ies) from an ontological ground; a multinaturalistic13 initiative towards what worlds are there, and how they come into being. I explore how such coexistence of worlds happened and how they are shared and
10 "A collection of qualitative methods used in the social sciences that focus on the close observation of social practices and interactions"..."usually involving work by the researcher with participants as they go about their daily lives", which "enable the researcher to interpret and build theories about how and why a social process occurs" (ERIAL, n.d.). 11 "'The phenomenon of the body' and the part it plays within the intersubjective ground of lived experience" (forthcoming Fisher, Arce and Díaz Copado). 12 Is to conceive multiple worlds. The opposite of an universe; a multiverse which stands in opposition to the “universal and homolingual thrust of modernity” (Escobar, 2012:xxviii). 13 "Builds on the 'multinaturalist' understanding that there are many kinds of 'natures'. Thus, in contrast to the 'multiculturalist' focus on how different cultures go about knowing the world or on whether the world is knowable at all (an epistemic concern), a 'multinaturalist' approach focuses on what kinds of worlds are there and how they come into being (an ontological concern)" (Blaser, 2009:11).
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Introduction
experienced. I close the analysis with some insights of how such fluid-pluriverse management practices embody care as resistance to liberal bio-politics. After choosing this ontological approach, I revisited my previous volunteering experiences at the social-farm re-conceptualizing the multiplicity of realities not anymore from a cultural diversity perspective, but from a pluriverse one, what enabled me to conceptualize and highlight three basic world models among the several complex realities present at the social-farm: modern, permaculture, and spiritual. From this multinaturalistic starting point, my research would then explore such propose through an ethnographic study of the everyday life at the social-farm. Ontology is understood as the different "process[es] of becoming" as "expressions of being in the world through the life course" (Fisher, Arce and DĂaz Copado, forthcoming). Although I understand that each person has his or her own ontology, this research focuses on the aforementioned levels, simplifying the individual anthologies to fit in the model.
Method The data for this ethnographic research was collected along three months (November 2016 to January 2017) at the social-farm Fazenda Nova Aurora – CENA in Juquitiba, SP, Brazil, through participant-observation and unstructured interviews. Triangulation of the collected information was made through comparisons between the daily observation, interviews, and official documents (such as house rules) in order to ensure validation. Since "participant-observation involves going out and staying out" (Bernard, 2011:258), I challenged myself to be involved in the daily labor therapy activities with the "students," from working at the garden to backing bread in the bakery, as well as taking part at eventual management planning meetings. Furthermore, I helped coordinate agroecology activities together with other
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Introduction
permaculture volunteers and gave an introductory course of permaculture for the "students". Although I lived at the social-farm for three months and participated in its daily activities, I also had moments where I removed myself from that immersion (some weekends and an entire week after the first six weeks of field) in order to intellectualize my experiences, "put it into perspective, and write about it convincingly" (Bernard, 2011:258). All my field notes and interviews were done in Portuguese and later translated into English. My choice for unstructured interviews was due to the time available that I had to talk to people at the social-farm. Although unstructured, it is important to highlight that such interview method is "based on a clear plan that you keep constantly in mind, but are also characterized by a minimum of control over the people's responses" (Bernard, 2011:157). Nonetheless, the interview is centered on the following topics: memories of the farm that most affected them, and examples of what they considered the challenges of managing the farm. I collected a total of 7 recorded unstructured interviews of around 50 minutes each and another 3 in which I only wrote its content on my field notebook. I annexed to the research a section of a transcribed interview, as well as selected field notes. The remaining of the collected material is archived at the Wageningen University. Moreover, this study gives some degree of independence to each fragment/chapter. Such approach allows chapters be read independently, for they are structured around sub-questions. For that reason, each chapter (III, IV and V) presents the collected data together with a preliminary discussion.
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Introduction
Research Questions General Research Question (GRQ) How the interface of ontologies and (re)territorialization affect the management of a social-farm in agroecological transition in Juquitiba?
Specific Research Questions (SRQs) •
What are some main divergences between modern, permaculture and spiritual ontologies?
•
How does social-farm actors' lifeworlds relate to those ontologies (resulting in pluriverse)?
•
How can this social-farm be understood through the assemblage theory?
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How this fluid reality is influenced by the multiple ontologies presented in the farm through process of territorialization/deterritorialization (enabling virtual potentialities)?
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What are the challenges that arise in managing a social-farm as a potential pluriversal political ecological experience?
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How do these multiple realities influence the virtual possibilities of the social-farm’s politics?
Overview This thesis expands concepts both from anthropology and philosophy in order to better understand the relations and interactions that happen inside social-farms. For that, this research answers the question “How the interface of ontologies and (re)territorialization are reflected on the management of a social-farm in agroecology transition in Juquitiba?”. This study is divided in four chapters: “Background to the Study,” “Pluriverse,” “Virtual Potentialities” and “Politics of the
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Introduction
Social-Farm”. As aforementioned, the discussion of the collected material is developed thought the three later chapters. The research-questions will be directly answered in the conclusion. First, the chapter “Background to the Study” starts presenting a general overview of the crack-cocaine problem in downtown São Paulo, specifically in the “territory” known as Cracolândia. Then, I turn to the Christian ecumenical missão CENA, which develops several activities related to social justice in the area. Among its many projects, CENA offers the opportunity for those with chemical addiction to join a therapeutic community. Last, I turn to Fazenda Nova Aurora, CENA’s free of charge TC, the place where the main ethnography research was developed. The chapter “Pluriverse” starts with a general overview of the concept of ontologies. Then, the three main ontologies of the scheme (Modern ontology, Permaculture ontology and Spiritual ontology) are developed through the notions of culture and nature, and through the discussion of relevant field observations. I close the chapter with a reflection on the challenges of such interfaced realities. Third, the chapter “Virtual Potentialities” further develops the concept of ontology. For that the assemblage theory is presented, followed by ethnographic examples specifically related with the permaculture experience. Finally, in the subchapter, the “(re)Territorialization of the social-farm” I explore some characteristics and challenges of the rhizomatic reality of farm. Last, the chapter “Politics of the Social-Farm” focuses on what can be learnt from such experience. The subchapter “Permaculture, pluriverse and fluidity” shows how permaculture has some patterns that can be connected to assemblage theory thinking. Furthermore, the subchapter “Cosmopolitics” explores the potentials and equivocations of an assemblage such as the FNA. Its development of daily life as potential experiences of controlled and uncontrolled equivocations.
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Introduction
That happens on fluid and plural realities and results in partial communication. Finally, “Final thoughts and further questions� disentangles some issues related to the management of a pluriverse and fluid FNA, as well as poses new questions that emerged from this present ethnographic experience. The thesis is then concluded with a brief reflection of its academic relevance by understanding this therapeutic management14 case as an embodiment of care; an experience in which modern certainties are challenged through a fluid pluriverse matrix where a new possible politics of life emerge from the assemblage of human and nonhuman entities .
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Social-farm's governance that includes the responsibility for farm activities and general organization as well as the care of the "students" and labor therapy supervision.
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Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
II.
BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
In this section I briefly present the current situation of drug addiction and homeless in downtown Sao Paulo, with a special focus in the Cracolândia area, where the head office of the partner institution missão CENA is located. Most of the mission’s activities, including the screening for the social-farm/therapeutic community, occur there. Furthermore, I describe the social-farm's objectives as well as its structure and activities. I do so through document analysis and ethnography. Last, I raise some challenges of managing this plural venture.
Cracolândia (land of the crack-cocaine) “Take the guy from the streets is easy. Hard is to take the street from the guy.” (Roseana, field notes)
Yellow metro line - Luz station. Once out of the escalators, into the open space, I face an explosion of colors, sounds, odors and sensations. I am in downtown Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil, the biggest and richest city of South America. All kinds of people are around me, coming and going from the most distinct places. My destination is the headquarter of CENA mission, number 280 of General Couto Magalhães street. In the 15 minutes’ walk to CENA it is possible to feel a bit of the Luz neighborhood. Among the buildings, it is easy to recognize the centenary train station, important museums such as Pinacoteca, a technician school, a police station, the house of São Paulo’s Philharmonic Orchestra, several squatted buildings and cortiços (buildings transformed in precarious low budget housing). The headquarter of the homeless social movement - MSTS, government institutions, cheap hotels, formal and informal stores, bars, brothels, NGOs, churches and the fluxo. We are in the famous Cracolândia.
Background to the Study
As I walk through our short but rich route to meet João "Boca", the president of the mission, I feel the contradictions and pulsing energy of the city in all my senses. The complexity of a territory in constant dispute and reconstruction makes this area a place that "thinking about it demands creativity and seriousness" (Rui, 2014:91). Fluxo, the Portuguese word for ebb and flow, is how the area for commerce and use of drugs is denominated by those frequenting Cracolândia; an area that as its name implies is in constant movement in open spaces on the streets. This is a place where the borders between consumers and dealer become blurry (Rui, 2014); where all kinds of social relations between people from different backgrounds, social status and histories are established 15 ; and where missionaries and workers of health and damage reduction are an important presence. In the Cracolândia, it is not uncommon to see a parent appear looking for his or her child, or a "lost" pedestrian cross in a hurry afraid of such a suspicious gathering, the police keeping a certain distance and occasionally interfering. Violence led by a police operation or by a reckoning between nóias and dealers is also quite common. But, overall, Cracolândia is a heterogeneous experience16 where everything turns around those small white stones called crack-cocaine: "an eternal bricolage with the body, with the exchange of objects, with the crack and external relations" (Adorno et al, 2013)17. In the begin of the last century, the place known today as Cracolândia was called the "New Center", a privileged space for business, shopping and leisure of city's elite (Raupp and Adorno,
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It is important to highlight that most of the users rather use crack in private places, renting a room in one of the several cheap hotels from the region when possible, leaving the streets just for those that are in a more vulnerability stage known as nóia (c.f. Rui, 2014). 16 An ethnographic example of the multiplicity behind the "drug user" in the Cracolândia can be found in Gomes e Adorno (2011). 17 Unless otherwise mentioned all translations from Portuguese into English are by me.
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Background to the Study
2011). In the mid-twentieth century, the changes on the city, i.e. the creation of new elites and cultural neighborhoods as well as real estate speculation, re-configured the region. Gradually, who could move away did so and other practices and social classes started to take the open niche left by the abandoned consolidated urban apparatus. Among others, some marginal activities to the "common" behavior started to emerge (Valverde, 2016)18. In 1953, the cracking down by the municipal police on the Bom Retiro prostitution zone resulted in the migration of prostitution practices to the zone called “Boca do Lixo”, which housed one of Brazil’s biggest cinema complex. With such migration, the dynamic of this neighborhood changed and a new type of nightlife started to develop. Marginal practices such as drug use, heavy drinking and prostitution overcame the traditional and normative aristocratic life style of São Paulo's elite, expelling most traditional inhabitants of the new center to other areas of the city and allowing a rapid take over by this new population that quickly became the face of the region (Valverde, 2016). On the 1990's crack-cocaine started to spread in Brazil. From the peripheral areas of the city, the drug was incorporated into the Boca do Lixo transforming what once had been a marginal bohemian zone into one ruled by that drug: the Cracolândia was born. Through the intermingle of space and interactions of people and objects, a new identity rose; a process of becoming (new) territory through clashes between requalification and deterioration of such city's fragment (Raupp and Adorno, 2011; Frúgoli Jr and Spaggiari, 2010).
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The HBO show The Corner, based on the nonfiction book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997) by David Simon and Ed Burns, shows the life of a family living in poverty amid the open-air drug markets of West Baltimore is an interesting visual approach of the social struggles around the open-air drug markets that can help to approximate those that never experienced to be in contact to people in the fluxo.
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Background to the Study
Briefly, it is also important to point the struggles that rose from the appearance of this new marginal area in the heart of the city. With the deterioration of the now old city center, the question of how to recover or transform it (or even how to rename it) became a conflictive one, with different social, economic and political interest groups arguing for different solutions to the problem. Such debate, as I explore further on, became known as the "Nova Luz versus Cracolândia" debate. The municipality of São Paulo, with support from the State of São Paulo, proposed a complete transformation of the Cracolândia region into a cultural pole, rebranding it as “Nova Luz” (Frúgoli Jr and Sklair, 2010). Several initiatives with a business driven and hygienist approach were proposed, such as offering tax incentives to new large ventures, demolition of old buildings and constant police repression in the fluxo. As part of this "revitalization" effort, in 2012 an operation called operação Sufoco repressed the fluxo, and, as an unintended consequence, it spread the drug users to different areas of the city, creating smaller “cracolândias” all over the city. With an expanded presence in the city, and with the denouncing of police's violation of the Human Rights during the operação Sufoco, the Cracolândia became a central topic in the São Paulo 2012 municipal election (Rui, 2013; The Guardian, 2013). In 2016, the problem of the Cracolândia was far from solved and was once again a central topic of the municipal elections. The city still struggles about what kind of approach (criminalization or damage reduction) should be taken. To complicate further the situation, the fact that opposing political parties control the municipality and the state of São Paulo, the city mayor constantly complains about lack of cooperation and communication from the state police in the area. Such operations in the area resulted in the arrest of participants of the homeless movement
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Background to the Study
(MSTS), who were accused of being responsible for part of the drug being sold in the region, linking the social movement, that is part of the political basis of the sitting mayor, to criminal organizations such as the First Command (PCC) (Folha de S.P., 2016). Also, in the 2016 mayoral election, one of the incumbent candidates proposed to install 3 barriers/check points around the area (Estado de S.P., 2016) in order to watch and control the territory. That is, even though the Cracolândia has proven to be a marginalized “itinerant and heterogeneous territory” in the heart of the capital, the luz region still holds an important place in the public discourse about the city, being a mandatory talk point for politicians running for office in São Paulo. In short, the history and social amalgam of the Cracolândia is a very rich and interesting one, that challenges any fix approach done by the policy making (Rui, 2014). Back to my walk, once I arrived at the “Yellow house”, which is how CENA’s headquarter is known, João Boca was crossing the gate carrying some boxes of donations. When he reached my hand to welcome me, a used crack-cocaine aluminum pipe fells on the ground. Pipe that he had probably trade, stolen or convinced some one at the fluxo to give to him. Without knowing what to do, I reach down with some uncertainty and a bit of disgust, got it and gave it to him. He thanked me, gave me a kiss on the chick and invited me to help him to bring the boxes inside. In that moment, I realized that I had arrived for my research. Not a passive or objective experience but a participant ethnography that would certainly affect me and my guts. My “field” had started.
Missão CENA “Then, on a beautiful day, Paulo and I were walking in the street when we decided to go to Mapping, a department store, to talk to homeless people from that region. Once there, we engaged with two homeless, Severino and João. During the chat, we asked what would they like to do, which they answered, “we would like to take a shower”. A shower?
16
Background to the Study
We repeated. “Yeap, a shower”. (In that time, I used to live in the Aurora street - the main street of the fluxo). Then, we got the guys from the street and drove them to my apartment for a shower. Two guys! Two homeless strait away from the street, imagine the stinky smell… From Mapping’ street straight to my bathroom where we let them take a shower… and, not surprisingly, the guys took a terrible bath (This was exactly 20 years ago). Then, after that shower we took him back into the bathroom for another one, and still another after the second. Each one took three baths, Severino and João. Then, we had a very serious talk with them that lead us to shelter them at the Gen. Osório street, where today is our daycare center.” (João Boca, fieldnotes)
Downtown São Paulo, during the 80's. The glamour streets of another time became just a foggy memory blended in the raw reality so poetic represented through the lyrics of Caetano's song Sampa. It is in the surrounding of Ipiranga and São João's avenue that the beautiful architecture of the 1930's and the dream of an abundant future co-exists with the harsh reality of poverty, trash, violence, street children, prostitution and bocas (places where drug is sold). Inside old buildings, entire worlds called cortiços, an urban kind of slum in which buildings are occupied and shared by several families in a precarious configuration. Also, on squares and streets, homeless people and drug users adapt benches and corners as beds to pass the night. In such context, in the small Borracharia 5 Esquinas - a tire repair shop at Aurora street, an initiative started aiming to be a place for the (marginalized) people from the region to gather and experience God's love. For that, the repair shop would become a small Christian community during Friday's night. Quite fast, the community became well known in the region till get to the point that its physical space couldn't fit the “new family” anymore. The gathering moved then to a new locality offered just a few blocks further. The new place was larger and available for the
17
Background to the Study
entire week to the community, what enabled the start of a aid assistance with the homeless population during the working days. The missão CENA - Comunidade Evangélica Nova Aurora was born. Missão CENA is an interdenominational Christian organization. Since its creation, the mission attend mainly the community of Boca do Lixo in downtown São Paulo, also known as Cracolândia. Surviving through donations and missionary work, the mission is currently supported by several churches, communities and persons around the world. It has a advisory council composed by people from multiple backgrounds and a directory that is democratic elected by the mission members every four years as well as the coordinators of all activities. The mission has as its main goal the preaching of the gospel through words and actions, promoting several humanitarian, educational and evangelical activities. Today, CENA's main work is structured in 4 domains: Prevention, Rescue, Restoration and Reintegration. Briefly, in the Prevention domain, the mission works with the local families and children raising the awareness about the complexity behind the daily issues around drugs, poverty and prostitution. Three projects are developed in this domain: The Risk-situation children in which cultural and sport activities are offered on the CENA's headquarters to children and teenagers of the neighborhood; A day care center for children between 3 and 5 years old, with priority to families that are struggling with social problems emerged from alcoholism, drug addiction and prostitution; And the Family project which aims to give material, spiritual and educational support for the children's' families of the day care center. Furthermore, the three other fields of the mission, known as CENA's “3 Rs”, deals more specific with the attendees of the fluxo. The Rescue has as its motto to “rescue those no longer able to live on the margins of a marginalized and oppressed society”. It has 4 sub-programs: Person in
18
Background to the Study
homeless situation, Shelter, Transgenders and Prostitution. The first one aim to receive the street population in the mission headquarters for the provision of basic needs such as clothes, bath, haircut, etc... Also, the missionaries and volunteers of the mission go to the fluxo to make friendship, talk about God's love and inform about the services offered by the mission. The Shelter works during winter when everyday 50 homeless people are welcome in the headquarters of CENA to spend the night. There they receive warm meals, place for shower, new clothes and a warm bed. Every day, a different partner church is responsible for donate and prepare the food and arrange the football court into a big bedroom. Also, the Transgender and Prostitution projects promote friendship bond, provision of information and possibilities for potential new jobs. In the Restoration field, the work is done with the people that are aiming to give a step towards the overcome of certain addictions (mostly crack-cocaine and alcohol) and also to get to know deeper God's love reflected through the care presented in all the projects of the mission. For those that are aiming to change habits or wish to have a friendly environment to share the difficulties and learn with others experiences, weekly a support group is hold in the headquarters. Also, the possibility to go to the therapeutic community Fazenda Nova Aurora - FNA is offered for those who are willing to go away from the city center for a period to improve health and initiate social and spiritual re-structuration. After the period in the farm, next step is the Reintegration phase. This is the last part of the “3 Rs program� and it aims to help slowly rebuilding each participant's social life after the period at the farm. A collective house is offered for living and responsibilities sharing. Also, the participants are helped and oriented to return to school and/or in their personal process of reinsertion on the job market. Psychotherapy assistance is offered when needed.
19
Background to the Study
Further, CENA is also involved in other activities as lectures in churches, schools and other events as well as the offering of an Integral Mission Course for people that are willing to get involved into Social Justice topics under a Christian perspective.
Fazenda Nova Aurora “Just who live and work here knows what is actually the job about. Who experiences the everyday in here. Only the ones that sleep and wake up with the "students" are the ones who truly knows what this is about..." (Sueli, fieldnotes)
After three and half hours of a "pinga-pinga" bus19, a group from a church of downtown São Paulo arrives in the bus station of Juquitiba where Ismael, the minister and manager of the therapeutic community/social-farm Fazenda Nova Aurora (FNA) is waiting with an old Volkswagen Kombi to take them back to the farm. It is a 30 minutes driving mostly on dirt roads towards the rural neighborhood of the Camargos. The contrast with the city environment is prominent. Fresh air, birds and insects singing, some crop fields and a lot of green over the mountainous landscape. From the Tupi indigenous language, Juquitiba ("Y-ku-tiba") means "land of many waters". Not surprisingly, the region is famous by its rivers and green areas. Reached through BR-116 highway, 75 Km of downtown São Paulo, the region is known for being one of the peri-urban state areas with the most Mata Atlântica rain forest covering and by its ecotourism (Juquitiba is the closest rafting destination from the capital)20.
19
Name given to transportations that are not direct, stopping in several points, thus taking long periods to move short distances. 20 For more information see http://www.juquitiba.sp.gov.br/. Accessed in 27/03/2017
20
Background to the Study
Once in the farm, the visitors are warmly welcome by the FNA community. It is a Saturday, visiting day and when, occasionally, special activities are done. For Luís, those days are not always easy. This is because his family or old friends won't come to visit him. They were too harm from all those years in which they had to deal with Luís' nóia compulsory behaviour unleashed by the "bitter delight" (Adorno et al, 2013) as well as his criminal past that lead him to seven years behind bars in a state prison in the recent past. Thus, days like today, in which volunteers come to socialize and be with those that don't receive visits are very special in his process of getting better and feel cared. The farm is a therapeutic community – TC. All TCs are regulated by ANVISA, a governmental institution. Overall, a TC function as following: The main project should have an official person responsible for its management. Health services should be done through the public services (SUS) or private. The admission in a TC should be always made on a free will basis. Also, severe cases of health (mental or motor) are not accepted (such cases should be allocated in other institutions like psychiatric hospitals). Thus, the therapy in a TC is structured for mile cases of dependency through labor and socialization21. The concept of social-farming is quite broad and although when specific working with health and therapeutic services it can also be named Farming for Health or Green Care (Hassink and Van Dijk, 2006), for this reflection, I will use the general term social-farm. That is because I believe such name also brings the idea of community relationship. Also, due to the project experience integrates the social and the farm activities in a way that its practices produce social gain beyond the main agrarian products and environmental services. Therefore, FNA activities
21
The complete ANVISA's resolution of therapeutic communities is the RDC Nº 29 and can be accessed at http://bvsms.saude.gov.br/bvs/saudelegis/anvisa/2011/res0029_30_06_2011.html. Accessed in 27/03/2017
21
Background to the Study
goes beyond the productivity of the farm. Its daily activities also are used to help in social interactions and therapy as well as a way of teaching new skills (professional or not) for the participants22. In FNA, the main causes that bring people in are alcohol and crack-cocaine addictions. All activities of the daily life at the social-farm are done by the "students" (name given for those in treatment) as part of their therapeutic activities. The acceptance of students is free of charge. After participating in a screen process in CENA's headquarters in which the interested should show commitment, willpower and present certain health exams, the then called "student" is authorized to go to the farm where he is welcome to stay between 9 to 12 months. The main objectives of FNA are to be an environment suitable for the development of three aspects of life: spirituality, social-relationship and organization/responsibility. Manage by Ismael, Elenilda and Carlos, FNA also has the help of missionaries, trainees, sporadic visitors and volunteers. Usually, the people that arrives at the farm are not used to have a routine, what some would refer as the “nóia life style”. Life in the streets enables them to do whatever they want whenever they feel like. Also, the sociability can sometimes become quite violent in the streets and often the peculiar way of resolving issues involves treats, physical harassment and lies. It is also true, though, that the opposite, brotherhood and mutual alliances and other interesting forms of socialization aiming "survival" or to enable wellbeing also happen.
22
An example of social-farm model http://www.sanpatrignano.org. Accessed in 27/06/2017.
is
San
Patriagno’s
therapeutic
community
-
22
Background to the Study
Currently the FNA function strictly with male students from all ages (during this ethnography, the age range of the “students” were from 19 to 57 years old). The program is individual for each participant overviewed by the project management and the responsibility and organization are developed through the daily activities of the farm. Everything is done by the students in the FNA, from cleaning, cooking and chopping wood to agroecology activities on garden and agroforestry systems. The farm was given to the mission by a “crazy” German, as João Boca refers to the person that reached out to CENA offering 34 bushels of land that he intended to donate as long as it would become a therapeutic community. Approximately 22 years later, four team managers and several infrastructure implementations, the FNA is an example of persistence and of a “dream” that became true as well as a reference for other TCs in the region. Yet, as the trainee Alexandre remembers, "although what CENA’s does here is amazing and very advanced in relation of others evangelical initiatives, we shouldn’t level from the underneath”. [And I continue] Indeed, there are quite some challenges to be faced and discontinuities to be recognized in FNA’s history. According to Sueli, a middle age women that arrived at the farm as a “student” in 1995 and later became a missionary of the mission, "in the beginning the farm was created to receive girls, something that wouldn’t exist back then. They would live in today’s main house, which was the only one existed besides the missionary wooden cabin. They build it all from nothing. Some years later, the farm started to receive men and a while after children as well. All those trees were planted by them and the empty field next to the lake back then was a gorgeous vegetable garden" (fieldnotes).
23
Background to the Study
During all those years, the management of the farm changed four times. It started with Luzia for the first 8 years. Then was taken over by Valdete and Jota once the children orphanage was closed. After them, Cido became the manager and finally Ismael. As Ismael emphasized when talking about the farms’ history, each manager had his specific way of dealing with the ecologies of the daily life in the FNA. Thus, although the continuity of the work enable the over life of the community, several discontinuities also have fundamental roles on the existence of its reality. Such volatility will be explored further. Also, from a macro perspective, the daily activities of FNA are well designed and distributed to all participants. In other hand, a closer participative observation allowed me to highlight some plural experiences and dissonant realities. Next, I present a brief description of the main actors presented at FNA: CENA’s directory, FNA managers, missionaries, trainees, volunteers, visitors and “students”23. CENA’s directory are currently João Boca, André and Rosane. They have the responsibility of keep the all the activities of the mission coherent to its main vision. They visit the farm sporadically to support and supervise the general activities. Also, important decisions should be brought to them. FNA managers are CENA’s people that live at the social-farm, taking care of its everyday life. Ismael is the leader of the team together with his wife Elenilda and Carlos. They have the autonomy for the daily decisions and they are responsible to guarantee the rules of the house. Missionaries are the people that come from downtown to develop weekly activities with the “students” or that eventually come to FNA to stay for a period substituting one of the FNA’s
23
Although not included in this part of the text as main actors, nonhuman entities such as the plants of the gardens, Dorinha (the farm’s cow) or the football field will be further presented as fundamental actants of FNA.
24
Background to the Study
managers when they are absent. During my observation period, on Thursdays Edileusa and Josimar use to come to mediate a leisure activity with the “students” and, during Ismael and Elenilda holidays, Sueli came to help Carlos in the farm’s management. Trainees are other missionaries that are welcome to stay one year with CENA to learn about integral mission through all CENA's ministries. They stay around 3 months in each department, which include FNA. Once involved in the activities they receive the responsibilities of a regular missionary. During my observation at the farm, I met Alexandre, Francisco (Guga), Marcelo and his family, Ivan and Jessica. Volunteers are the people that offer an activity for a regular period of time. In the case of FNA, they will be referred as permaculture volunteers. The permaculture assistance started in 2012 through a group of young people that were looking for a place to help 24. They knew the mission and once CENA presented the FNA as the ministry that most needed help at the time, the permaculture assistance started. From that time to the one I write this, several people participated in this group as constant or sporadic volunteers, visitors or invited teachers. The core group that started in 2012 was me, Paula and Rodrigo. During this field participant observation, Pedro Garcia was also an invited teacher of Syntropic agriculture (agroecology).
24
“What happened was that me and some other friends would participate on a prayer meeting on the middle of the week. This group decided to engage with action in some project to 'fulfil' the Pray, Fist and Time donation proposition that we made as a group. For that, using Boca's words, we started to 'date' the project CENA in downtown São Paulo. After some coming and goings, we ended discovering that the project had a farm, which was lacking volunteers and technical support. That was very interesting because we [Paula and João] had come back to the São Paulo's 'concrete jungle' and we were looking for opportunities to develop permaculture. It fit like a glove and we decided to start to volunteer at the farm. Although we [Paula, João and Rodrigo] were the 'organization' group of the permaculture volunteer, a lot of people from different backgrounds participated. From our week group, from different churches, from the agroecology movement (no need to be Christian to engage), etc... All together with the 'students' at the farm and somehow under the management of the farm’s project” (Paula, fieldnotes).
25
Background to the Study
Visitors are the families, friends or churches that come on weekends to visit or offer a specific activity. During this three months, we had several parties, lunches and bakery workshops done by this group of people. Finally, the “students” are the people that are living at FNA's therapeutic community. They voluntarily accepted to live at the farm for around 9 months. The resignation of this commitment can be done at any time. It is expected from them to respect the house rules and participate in all activities. To be accepted in in FNA, they had to get through a screening in CENA's headquarters in downtown São Paulo25. Sueli summarized the vision of FNA as following, “I don’t think that they come from the streets only because of the drug. Drugs are consequences of what happened on their lives. It is going to be very good for their health to stop to use drugs, and they really should stop, but, also, they need to love themselves and find themselves as persons”. Thus, the management of the farm should tackle not just the technical aspects of community life and farm practices but also somehow enable affection to reconstruct each person's reality. Further in this text I will present other observations about the farm’s daily life ecology, which will challenge even more FNA’s management, not from a subjective dynamic of reality but from the fluidity of its material things.
25 The screening is done in 3 weeks, with meetings every Wednesday. Each week the candidates is required to do something that will show his desire in participate on the program as well as fulfil technical needs. For instance, documents such as personal identification, criminal antecedents and medic exams are required, which all can be done through the municipality free of charge.
26
Background
Pictures
http://fotografia.folha.uol.com.br/galerias/44431-cracolandia
Figure 1 – Cracolândia
Figure 2 - Juquiá river (a 10 minutes’ walk from FNA)
Figure 3- FNA's entrance
Figure 4 - View from the upper crop field of FNA
Figure 5 - Common area of FNA with kitchen on the right
Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
III.
PLURIVERSE
•
What are some main divergences between modern, permaculture and spiritual ontologies?
•
How does social-farm actors' lifeworlds relate to those ontologies (resulting in pluriverse)?
This approach is based on the possibility of multiple realities that coexist; the social-farm as an interface of multiple ontologies. Furthermore, I propose a framework based on three general ontologies: Modern, Permaculture and Spiritual. Such framework is build up from the issues' plurality of what is humanity and nature. Then, I explore through ethnography those realities and intrinsic derived rationalities on FNA's everyday life. Finally, I explore the pluriverse reality of the social-farm and some "uncontrolled equivocations"26 of its management through the interface of the three ontologies expressed by the emergence of actors' lifewords.
Multiple worlds The world is a continuous change and reality is always unprecedented. An upcoming nourished by humanity’s interactions that are revealed through history and culture. For Freire (1970), the journey of incompleteness towards, what he calls, a fully human, is achieved through history, education and dialogue, mediated by the world. The complexity of reality (or realities?) expands the terrain where such process occurs, and the significance of the world that mediates the process of becoming human turn out to be plural. Once multiple, different humanities are generated in different ontological arenas, challenging the boundaries of understandings by its basic
26 Shortly, is when different ontologies address different things presuming that it is the same (cf. Viveiros de Castro, 2004).
Pluriverse
assumption of being. Thus, the present27 becomes a result not just of socio-natural interactions but of different concrete co-existences; not different perspectives of the world but also distinct real and ongoing worlds. Multiple ontologies that clash in space and time in everyday life. Therefore, to think about possibilities of how to deal with this politics in a pluriversal world in order to, by empowering the oppressed, achieve what Freire (1970) called a less ugly, more beautiful, less dehumanizing, and more humane reality is needed. As dominant ontology, the Western narrative of reality influences all society in multiple forms, since an undetected presence until a strong and imposed way of conceiving reality. Often it is quite evident how, in an encounter, the different parts can’t get to an understanding. Not because a mere difference of opinion, but because their worlds are completely distinct. What Viveiros de Castro (2004) called an “uncontrolled equivocation”. Equivocation, according to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, is not a simple failure to understand, but “a failure to understand that understandings are necessarily not the same, and that they are not related to imaginary ways of ‘seeing the world’ but to the real worlds that are being seen” (2004:11); "In other words, these misunderstandings happen not because there are different perspectives on the world but rather because the interlocutors are unaware that different worlds are being enacted (and assumed) by each of them" (Blaser,2009:11). Therefore, if uncontrolled, equivocation inevitably ends with the existent conflict being neglected through the imposition of a main ontology that marginalize and disregard as “real possibility” other's world. For instance, as seen in Blaser (2009) on the attempt to integrate Yshiros'
27
The idea of present here actually refers to the notion of Kosmic addressed. Thus, it highlights that an observer uses a method of observation to observe something. Therefore, there is not one present, but multiples (cf. Esbjorn-Hargens, 2010).
29
Pluriverse
conception of the Yrmo on a hunting program in the Amazon or in LaCadena (2010) when, as result of emergent indigeneity in the Andes, an earth-being became represented on the constitution. For a clearer example of this ontological challenge among politics, history can be of great help. The great navigations of late XV century, a mercantilist rush that promoted, among other things, the approximation of different cultures, also happened to “discover” the Americas, such an exotic place that the term “new world” was adopted (Carta, 1943). So many differences that even the humanity of the other was questioned by both sides, as shown by Lévi-Strauss (1952:12) in the famous example in which conquers didn't questioned the bodies of the “savages” but looked for signs of their souls at the same time that the “natives” wouldn't question the Spaniards spirits but would search for evidences of a real body: “In this way, curious situations arise in which two parties at issue present tragic reflection of one another's attitude. In the Greater Antilles, a few years after the discovery of America, while the Spaniards were sending out Commissions of investigation to discover whether or not the natives had a soul, the latter spent their time drowning white prisoners in order to ascertain, by long observation, whether or not their bodies would decompose”. In general, the encounter of such different actual worlds, where meanings and understandings were completely divergent, would culminate in conflicts and the diminish of a possible coexistence of ontologies through equivocations that often lead to insensitiveness, imposition and violence. Something that is not just part of history but is still very present and actual, for instance on the recent struggles with traditional people and government over the “development” of the Amazon.
30
Pluriverse
Examples of misunderstanding communication due to those different comprehensions of meanings are vast in history and literature. Happened on the past and are still a challenge for the future. This dominant narrative can happen among cultural construction, ideologically sustained by multiple mechanisms amalgamated on the daily social life, where the one-way story is developed, shaping and configuring the “hows and whys” of life 28. When the issue of why is brought as the core reason for a disagreement, it's likely to be related to plural specific ways of conceiving the existence of a subject. For instance, the issue of how land is understood can be quite diverse. If for a capitalistic perspective, land would be passive of being owned, privatized and commoditized, for others like Elusi of Odogbolu, actual Nigeria, “land belongs to a vast family of whom many are dead, a few are living and countless hosts are still unborn” (Meek, 1912 in Amanor, 2001:25). Or, in the Andes where the signification of land can be integrated in a dynamic space with people, river, mountain, plants, animals called ayllu (Oxu, 2004 in La Cadena, 2010; Gudynas, 2011). Although the idea of co-existent conceptions of reality can sound like something peculiar that just happen on distant places yet to be “developed”, where the western rationality meets others cosmovisions that remember "fantastic tales", in a ludic way, Alves (1996) bring the theme of ontology to the daily life of the modern world through a bowling game by highlighting how some people try to change the route of the ball that is already in course by will when bending their bodies to one of the sides to command a change into that situation. How different would this moment be from the witchcraft presented in the Azande’s world29? He concludes (1996:12), “the beliefs on
28 29
An interesting reflection of the single narrative can be found on Adichie (2009). See Evans-Pritchard and Gillies (1976).
31
Pluriverse
magic, as well as on miracles, are born from the view of an universe in which the desires and emotions can change facts�. Further, an interesting approach that recognizes multiple ontologies and its related epistemologies and methods is the Integral Pluralism (Esbjorn-Hargens, 2010). Its theory suggest that multiplicity can be approached through subject (who), method (how) and object (what). Also, that such realities just become when experienced, what Mol (1999) refers to as enacted. Further, Esbjorn-Hargens argue that, “enactment involves subject-methods-object or Who-How-What co-arising and co-implicated� (2010:157) in overlapping realities, resulting in something that is more than one, yet less than many (2010:154). So, through the enacted multiplicity and controlled equivocation, the pluriverse can be, in some extent, better recognized in an effort of include other worlds. Thus, the daily life in the social-farm can help to indicate some possible enacted ontologies that are presented and overlapped at the site. In addition, once different views of the universe encounter, a necessity of an ontological politic emerge. Beyond the acknowledgement of the pluriverse, the challenge becomes how to proceed once you have its comprehensions as starting point. For instance, the historical dilemma between science and religion give us a good insight of how challenging it can be to gather different worlds in the same arena (Hathcoat and Habashi, 2013). How would it be possible to develop agreements for engagement in politics without a common ground? It is not enough to recognize others ontologies. This would most likely to trend to a completely discredit of opposite parts, an oppressive arrangement once politics take place or even an immobilizer misunderstanding that prevents any further action. Thus, it is necessary to go beyond its acknowledgement towards a recognition of ontologies in politics. Hence, to embrace the complexity of reality as a starting point for a reinvention of politics on a pluriversal way.
32
Pluriverse
From that, I propose that the researched social-farm can be understood as multiple realities that coexist: an interface of multiple ontologies, epistemologies and methods. To enable a reflection on the politics of this pluriverse, I present, based on a three years’ volunteer experience at FNA as well as mine participant observation from a 3 months’ field work, a simplification of the ontological multiplicity encountered through a framework of three general ontologies that would represent a large part of the social-farms' management challenges and (un)controlled equivocations, named Modern, Permaculture and Spiritual. Such classification was chosen based on the issue what are humanity and nature and were developed through the rationality derived from such realities. Moreover, Modern ontology is characterized by a binary distinction between human/nature. Also by its economic rationality, centered on commoditization, progress and continuous growth. Differently, the Permaculture ontology enables a “permacultural lens” that can be translated in something that might grasp a relation to the indigenous relationality (Escobar, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 1998, 2004) where there is no fix existences and distinctions among humans and nonhumans, i.e. "becoming-jaguar" (Viveiros de Castro, 2004:160). Hence, might because the traditional knowledge involved on the development of permaculture, the approach to humanity and nature is more integrated, with a less clear border between culture and nature through the process of patterning through an “anthropo-systemic” affection. Furthermore, the Spiritual ontology addresses human and nature as creation of God, living in a mundane reality that coexist with a spiritual one. Its supernatural rationality is center on the ideas of God's kingdom and eternity.
33
Pluriverse
Figure 6 - Scheme of the three main ontologies presented at the farm
In other words, to engage with the social-farm as pluriverse is to conceive that different worlds co-exist in the same time-space, what would unavoidably result in equivocations. Such challenges become concrete things on the daily life of the community. Thus, to engage on the everyday politics becomes an ontological challenge and the management of the social-farm a cosmopolitical 30 experience. Next, I briefly explore the three ontologies of the proposed framework and further I relate it to the ethnographic research done in the social-farm.
Modern ontology As we were walking through the capoeira, getting to know a field from the farm that was supposed to be leased, Kim would be pointing to wild edible plants, saying loudly “this is money, it is all money!�. (fieldnotes)
30 To accept "what we call nature as multiplicity and allow for the conflicting views about that multiplicity into argumentative forums� (La Cadena, 2010:361); the "power dynamics produced in the encounter between the dominant modern ontology and Indigenous ontologies as they are embodied in concrete practices" (Blaser 2009:18).
34
Pluriverse
The debate around modernity and postmodernity is extremely rich and points to different comprehensions of how the terms should be understood and related to history. For this reflection, the notion of modernity is centered on 3 concepts that sustain the dominant narrative of capitalism, pillars of its ontology: dichotomy between human and nature, economic rationality and reliance on the scientific-technological improvement31. Previous of the enlightenment age, the works of Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle synthesize the foundation of what would became the basic political understanding for the development of the liberal ideals: politics would deal with human issues and science with nonhumanities (Latour, 2012). In other words, Human and Nature would have distinct fields and its overlapping should be avoided; a scission that endures in most institutions and social structures and therefore, what I will be considering the first pillar that sustain the thoughts and actions derived from modern ontology. This dichotomy molded and continues to influences several ventures, such as scientific approaches, policy creation or education, that are developed direct or indirect in scenarios shared by humans and nonhumans. The book Misreading the African landscape: society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic of Fairhead and Leach (1996) is, for instance, an interesting example of how the distinction between nature and humans led to years of equivocate research targeting local people as the main cause of deforestation while, instead, it was the opposite. The people were the responsible for implementing the fragmented forests islands on the savanna. Such example shows how the development of knowledge was kept enclosed for several years on this peculiar paradigm where humans, whom are not part of the natural world, were supposedly responsible for its
31
For a broader debate of the ontological aspects of modernity see chapter 4 of Escobar (2008).
35
Pluriverse
depletion. Like water and oil that naturally stays apart, people have a place in the world and nature other, being impossible to mixture. Just after a resignification of the peculiar reality through ethnography which enable the overcome of the binary paradigm, it was shown that in fact humans were the ones responsible for the expansion of the forest. Although the misread situation was overcome, generally, the modern thought persisted. According to our contemporary western world rationality, humanity and culture are conventionally presented in opposition to nature32. The second pillar of the modern ontology consist of its economic rationality. Although with roots on the Liberalism, capitalism kept been reinvented to adjust itself to new paradigms such as the environmental one, getting to its latter state: the green neoliberalism33. If for one side, those changes aimed to strait the market ideology to marginal issues such as ecology and social justice, it certainly didn’t divert it from central core principles such as the need of continuous economic growth and commoditization. As homo economicus, the fate of existence is centered on producing and consuming. A non-stopping race on what to be (economic) health is synonymous of growth and profit (Read, 2009) and the ultimate goal of existence is monetary accumulation. Other rationalities/ways of thinking that have, for instance a more social relational instead of a profitable one and therefore, enables a different notion of value that transcends the notion of exchange value, supply, demand and commoditization are perceived as naive or nonsensical. For instance, when a local dealer that refuses to sell all his products on the beginning of the week because he wouldn't have more to sell
32
It is also true that the definitions of humanity and nature have been challenge through technology, turning the clear modern borders into some kind of fluid edge, as seen for instance with machines that are brought into human bodies and social dynamics and more recently, the molecular manipulation of DNAs, the Genetic Modified Organisms. A very interesting discussion about those topics can be found in Haraway (2006) and Braun (2007). 33 For a better understanding of the capitals re-invention to green neoliberalism see Goldman (2006).
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in the following days is approached as stupidity by a reporter. Or, when forest is take down to plant soya or is flooded to produce energy as synonym of "development" and the people who stands against “the progress” are silenced through violence (physical and bureaucratic) and their eventual arguments linked to primitive, childish or crazy rationalities. Several examples such as the amazon struggles related to mining, hydropower dams and deforestation can be related to it34. On a macro approach, Capitalism structure is per se a continuous cyclical pattern of crises and re-inventions to enable the essence of continuing growth through new markets, expanding the idea of accumulation and commoditization. This dialectic relation between the development of a crises as well as the ability to profit from them through the creation of a new market is what sustain the economic rationality. From liberalism to neoliberalism to the new “green” neoliberalism, a series of reconfigurations in order to continuing to exist (Hart, 2010, Goldman, 2006). The third pillar would be the scientific-technological improvement. Intermingled with some distorted notion of Darwinian evolution and the idea of species supremacy, where humans are not just different from all the other things, but better due to our “unique rationality”, it is through techno-knowledge that humanity will rule and improve the world. Not surprisingly, the gap between humans and nature become greater in every new technological era, recently culminating on the second green revolution where technology is being able to create new forms of life through genetic modification and maybe starting to challenge in a new way the limits of living beings (Gudynas, 2011).
34
For instance, an example of ontological clash in Peru among government and local leaderships can be watched on the following links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F3RUDgTC7A (0:30-1:27), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vf4WfS5t08 (accessed in 6/3/2017). Another example can be found at El País international (2017).
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Presented here as the core of modern ontology, these three pillars shouldn't be understood as statics or isolated but, otherwise, they are dynamic with an interconnected flow that enable the continuous autophagic cycle of crisis and rebirth of capitalism system through the creation of new markets. Something that in a way was happening at the social-farm. While walking through the farm area, in the middle of a capoeira, Kim had found a possibility to "create" a new commodity. Although the situation was a bit caricatured, the rationality behind that awkward moment was clear and strong: the wild fern (gleichenia sp.) that was growing after the area had been “cleaned” by the fire had introduced us for a possibility of entering a new market, what left everyone very excited: to generate money from something that didn't have any exchange value until now. The fire that triggered the overpopulated fern area by burning all vegetation of two entire mountains started in two different places but under the same modern ontology that dissociates culture and the “wild nature”. From the east side of the mountains, the fire started from the attempt of a “student” to kill a bee hive in the ground and, from the west side, from a neighbor that took advantage of the dry weather to burn the wild so he could plant some cash crop. In both occasions, they couldn’t control the fire, which consumed all the vegetation and some small animals that couldn’t escape to the wet areas by the river. In both cases, the relation of men and “wild” was antagonistic. Nature as the other that should be overcome so humanity and its interests could thrive. Therefore, nature should be dominated and overcame to serve humanity's needs and interests. Some days later, as the result of the fire, the area became overpopulated by the specific fern that Kim showed us and taught us about its eatable and commercial potentials. The wild plant that was considered a problem due to its fast grow ecological characteristic that was triggered after
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the fire, “making the place dirt again”, had become a potential commodity to be sold to the Korean community in São Paulo. Every kilo of it could be sold by 50 reais. And there were acres and acres of it. Our new “little treasure”. Kim is a retired Korean man that spend his life around the world developing areas through infrastructure implementation, or in his words, bringing progress. Now retired, he asked CENA’s directory if he could bring investments to develop part of the farm that was not been used by the therapeutic community. He would pay some rent for it and therefore everybody would win35. As we kept walking through the field, everyone would be collecting the plants while laughing in an enthusiastic mood. We finally had found a purpose to all that land that was until now just sitting there without "any use". We filled two bags of the fern on our way back to the house. After all, the fire hadn’t been a problem but the begging of the solution.
Permaculture ontology “The boy came from the farm to help me with the garden of the day care center. And I told him, André, there is some fertilizer back there and also some dirt. Get them and put it here so you can take care of this thing. “Wait a bit, this is a Jabuticabeira [fruit tree]. Now, it is not like that anymore. Now, our thing is Permaculture. We won't use fertilizer that are not organic. Ok? This thing of keep throwing junky here is over, the earth doesn’t deserve it.” (João Boca, fieldnotes)
35
An economic income would help a lot to implement some needs of FNA such as to reforest 60 acres of preservation area that had been degraded along the years and that now could become a heavy environmental fine.
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As an answer to some of the main concepts of modernity and specially for the new paradigm of the green revolution during the 70's, social-movements started to develop alternative ideas that would become the agroecology movement. Although, such initiative had a clear position that didn't aligned with the conservative capitalistic politics, it's ideas didn't always perfectly fit with others progressives’ perspectives. By focusing on its particular ethics and principles which orient its practices, I next argue that through its reflected values it is possible to think about a particular ontology related to such way of be and do. Therefore, agroecology doesn't propose just another politic; another way of doing things on society. Beyond an epistemological distinction, such differences would be developed from the roots of another way of conceiving reality. Before continuing, it is important to clarify what is agroecology. Currently understood as a triple concept, agroecology is at the same time a social movement, a scientific field and a technique (Wezel, 2009). People can organize themselves according to the ideals of agroecology, can research about a more sustainable agronomy or can use it as a method while implementing an orchard. This reflection will be concern about agroecology as a social movement, and more specific about a branch of it that is called Permaculture. Permaculture One (1978) is the result of the academic work of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren at the Innovative Environmental Design School in Hobart, Australia on late 70's. Initially, the term Permaculture was strictly related to agriculture. As result of a constant reflection of their work, later it was broadened by the authors to be understood as the gathering of the words permanent and culture. This early change showed already a necessity of approaching the issues of sustainable existence from a broad perspective-culture, instead of just concentrating on specific
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green techniques 36 . This conceptual expansion represented a statement that to engage with permaculture would concern more than learn how to do “greener” but also why to think-walk that path. In other words, the concept points that more than techniques, it represents an alternative ontological statement, therefore another way of being and understanding. As a response to the direction that humanity has taken with regard to their relationship with the environment and communities, the permaculture approach was developed aiming to gather diverse knowledges, both ancestral wisdom and technological developments. Such content was then accumulated, reorganized and systematized in a method of design (Mollison, 1988) and a mind-map-flower framework (Holmgren, 2002) in order to help on a transition to a more sustainable livelihood. Yet, with slightly different emphasis, both approaches have the same essence: permaculture's ethic principles. The ethical principles of permaculture were generated from a gathering of researched community ethics that were present in several ancient religious and cooperative groups. They can be resumed in three maxima: care of earth, care of people and fair share37. Presented as principles instead of rules, the concepts of care can be explored in multiple layers. Voluble instead of fix, thus, fluidity became part of its philosophy's core, thus a glance of what is presented here as foundation of its ontology. The cover of Mollinson designers' manual brings an image of the egg of life and the aboriginal Earth-shaper snake/Rainbow serpent bypassing the tree of life. Everything surrounded by universe and earth's elements, flows and patterns. The icon is dedicated to “the complexity of life on earth” (1988:xi). Further in the text, it is evoked that for enable a future that includes
36 37
A brief history of permaculture can be found in Veteto and Lockyer (2008). For Mollinson the third principle is slightly different: Setting limits to the population and consumption.
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opportunity for explore the potentials of humanity, it is necessary to reclaim aboriginal belief systems and the respect for all life. Thus, such picture somehow is presenting that modern knowledge may be insufficient to deal with the complexity of the present. Also, although Holmgren state that “The more we understand the world through the lens of system thinking and ecology, the more we see the wisdom in spiritual perspectives and traditions” (2002:3), I argue that it is not through such modern approaches that permaculture incite to other possibilities, but actually through its enactment/embodiment (of principles and practices) that emerge in inter-subjective affections among all related entities (humans and nonhumans) involved on a design. Thus, the ecological pattern of energy fluxes 38, together with ancient narratives of life dynamics, are the main influences to permaculture's narrative of lifeworld that contests in critical and pragmatic way the economic rationality. For instance, Mollinson refers to the need of ‘philosophers-gardeners' and ‘farmer-poets'. A call for explore the world through another way with more fluid borders. Such, in a priori, simple combination of terms can be explored indeed on a much deeper basis, challenging the modern paradigm from another ontology. Permaculture dare to propose an approach of affection that combines humanity and nature. Not a completely fusion nor the modern dualism. Something else that point towards an anthroposystemic pattern that includes on its narrative a planetary cooperation or, in Mollinson words (commenting about the aboriginal perspective of life): “to assist in and celebrate the existence of life forms others than humans, for all come from the same egg” (1988:2).
38
See Odum (1974) for more information on ecology and energy fluxes.
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Furthermore, in the social praxis of permaculture is common to use the jargon “permacultural lens”. This term is expressing the idea of a permaculture affection that is guided by principles and establishing new inter-subjective relations among all design entities. Something that can be related to the principle of relationality, which, according to Escobar (2012, xxvii), is an “interesting convergence among certain philosophical, biological and indigenous people´s narratives in asserting that life entails the creation of form out of the dynamics of matter and energy. In this view, the world is a pluriverse, ceaselessly in movement, an ever-changing web of interrelations involving humans and non-humans”. Born from but also contesting modern rationality by embracing aboriginal wisdom, permaculture emerges as a hybrid narrative that gives another significance of the world through an anthropo-systemic affection. A peculiar understanding of the reality that reaches the ontological ground of those that embraces its way of see, know and understand the world. A rhizomatic reality that interplays new/old; modern/aboriginal on the actualization of another ontology 39. That is, through permaculture embodiment, another "expression of being in the world through the life course" (Fisher, Arce and Díaz Copado, forthcoming). While listening to João Boca’s narrative about how he was surprised by André’s answer regarding the earth as not deserver of such treatment, that now he [André] was a permaculturist and, therefore, cared about what would happen to the earth, I realized that, somehow, his response was emerging from another understanding in which those other entities were being defended as they were virtually bonded to him through an anthropo-systemic affection.
39
A discussion of the topic is presented in the next chapter.
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During our conversation, Boca was also talking about how he acknowledges that back in 2012, it was really difficult for them to understand, accept or even consider the permaculture ideas for the farm. It was too simple, with no high-tech machinery or high investments. Also, they had already received feedbacks from conventional agronomists about FNA potentialities and how high would be the investment for starting to produce food. Then, one day, the permaculture volunteers appeared and started to do everything different, to explain things different, to look to the same thinks but see other stuff, and then, after all those years, permaculture principles were kind of becoming impregnated on them. Even he was a bit “crazy”. In his last holiday trip, he would be talking to everyone about how they should compost and be looking for potential places where such practices could be implemented. And I quote him, “André told me, 'now I am a permaculturist. Let’s do different. Let’s feed the plant through a clean way'… Can you see? It is sticking in the people’s minds, now, they come from there [FNA] with such ideas, right? Even Guga is super exited with it, but the “students”, you can see on them. A guy that walked with a crack-cocaine pipe in his hand all the time now says to you something like that [and he send me a kiss through the air], wonderful, it is wonderful. A “student” that for me… for me André didn’t have hope any more. Unfixable, for me he was already dead but there he is, alive and wanting to live”. Somehow, André’s relations with “nature” became different. Not just on an ecological understanding basis but also in how he would be affected by the way nature would be dealt. In some way, some sort of continuity among him and that tree had been established, challenging the modern dichotomy, which he unconsciously stated when saying that now things should be different
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because he was a permaculturist. The earth didn’t deserve such treatment. Somehow, in his spontaneous way, André was claiming the rights of that Jabuticabeira.
Spiritual ontology “I had already worked in downtown with the prostitutes. I was a missionary there in downtown but my heart always beat stronger for the farm. God put this on it even before I started dreaming about doing mission. God had put this love for the farm in my heart. God had already told me that I would be a missionary here.” (Sueli, fieldnotes)
The spiritual ontology here refers to what sustain the broad notion of reality from mission CENA's Christian perspective that results in some of the main guiding concepts presented on the management and project development. To begin, it is important to highlight that, through such ontology, the way reality is perceived is not through a materiality approach. In contrary, materiality is result from the spirit. Guided by the Holy Bible40, the word of God revealed to humanity, this idealistic approach can be illustrated in the following passage of the book of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" and “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:1,3). Therefore, the idea enables materiality, resulting two overlapping realities: material/mundane (from this world) and spiritual. Thus, although humanity and nature are developed in this mundane reality, they are generated from a spiritual realm; both humans and nature are creation of God. Although the same
40
The NIV version of the book Holy Bible is used in all quotations.
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genesis, humanity and nature are not the same, having some essential difference that can be found, for instance, in the following passage: “God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (Genesis 1:26). Hence, although both, humanity and nature are created by God, there are a distinction in regard of their roles in the world, where humanity is to rule (be responsible for?) nature. In addition to the ideas of spiritual and material realities, Christian rationality believes that the spiritual world can change the material world in ways that don't necessary follow the natural and scientific laws, as we can find in the book of Matthew 1:20: “But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”. Also, the life cycle dynamic is understood in a peculiar way in which is consider the life after death for those that are with God through the ideas of salvation and eternity as seen in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. Therefore, what happens during life is just a pre-momentum of eternity and thus should be lived in a way according to two main principles taught by God: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27). To live according to such orientations is translated as to be developing God's kingdom on earth. Overall, such beliefs sum up to something that will be called on this reflection as supernatural rationality. The Christian believe is central in the everyday activities of the farm. Every meal is preceded by a prayer. Wednesdays nights are church night as well as Sunday mornings in which
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every body gathers at the chapel to sing, pray and listen to a sermon. Although it is not necessary to share the same beliefs, or as Ivan shared with me, “we do not shove Jesus down the throat”, the presence of everyone is required at all activities. Also, twice week there are group meetings of one and a half hours and daily short devotionals are expected to be done and hand in to the management. The idea of God’s will is very present in the life plans of all missionaries. Elenilda presented it as following, “Yes, this is my home. In the beginning, I had the conviction that I was here under the will of God. When I realized, I already had it inside of me. Though we have passed through very difficult times, I already had this conviction that I only should leave this place if God put it on my heart. Like in 2013, when we were almost leaving the project, but still praying about it. We went on a vacation and while on it we prayed about what was God’s will at that moment. If that was the time to leave for another missionary field. Then several things started to happened, the direction of the events changed drastically and we were challenged to assume the direction of FNA. From that moment on, I started to feel this place as home, in peace and with certainty. With more strength and wiliness to do my job even better.” Somehow, this supernatural rationality defines that the decisions and understanding of reality are supported by this spiritual world. What is becomes result of earlier “ideal facts” at the same time that such idea is also influencing the materiality of the “present”. The mighty God that has no beginning or end, challenging the modern idea of time or natural laws.
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At the same time that it was clearly present such rationality, at FNA God’s interventions were mainly related through feelings and actions that were referred as metanoia41, a new way on being in which the Holy spirit would actively affect ourselves, helping to change our feelings to search for a life towards to sanctification. When asking João Boca about this topic, specific about more “factual experiences” he replied with his jester way of being, “Miracle? The miracle is the guys staying there… and not killing themselves. And they almost killed themselves there recently uhm? One got the machete…” [referring to the kitchen fight that happened in the previous week]. And then started to tell me the history of CENA, from which I highlight the following: "(…) Well, we could have a place that at least in the winter could work 24 hours per day. (…) and then we started to dream with such space. (...) We wrote a project and send an offer to buy the Ginástico Paulista Club. Our proposal was the lowest (there were other four higher offers), but we kept dreaming about the place. Then, one day, a guy from Maui, Hawaii arrives to meet us intermediated by our friend Ziel who inform us, 'this guy said that God has spoken to him and that he wants to know your project'. We had "thrown the shit into the ventilator” about the need of buying another building, and well, if God had spoken to him… We visit the old building (it was in a very bad condition) that we had made the offer. (…) and he told us right there, God will give this space to you. God will give to us? How so...? Yep, God told me that this space is yours.
41
From greek /ˌmɛtəˈnɔɪə/, [mass noun] Change in one's way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion: ‘what he demanded of people was metanoia, repentance, a complete change of heart’ (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/metanoia)
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Sunday, we had church service and he asked us to preach. Ok, we let him... [João gets a bible in his hand and raise above his head imitating the guy] 'I am certain that this project is from God and He will give the Club building for you. The Club is yours, the Club is yours!' (…) We were both standing at the entrance of the church because it was right in the fluxus street and crazy people would get in all the time. And I said to Paulo, hey man take this guy away from there. And he would answer to me, 'Not me! You invited him to come, you should go there and stop it'. And the guy kept preaching and preaching. When he finished, he came to us and said God will give to you the club. How much is the club? Well, our offer is of 75 thousand dollars (at that time the dollar was 1 to 4 reais). Then he got his check booklet and wrote one for us. Without talking or agreeing about it (and remember, ours was the 5th proposal!). And, how much to renovate it? Which I answered 75 thousand (we had the project with all the costs already). Then, he wrote another check. 150.000 dollars! (man, I shit all over my pants, imagine at that time such amount of money!) Ok, then we took him for a pizza and the next day I went to talk at the club that we already had the money. The president of the club replied that we were only the 5th proposal in the list but that he had a good notice for us. We were the only non-profit organization of the list and the club could only be sold to such kind of organization. And that’s how we bought this club where we are talking today.” A supernatural existence. A reality in which God talks to people and interfere in how things are done; where the ideas precede the materiality of things and influence its existence and development.
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“More than one, less than two” “For instance, I don’t like irrigation. I do it with the watering pot. That way, I pass through each little plant, looking how each one is doing. And they do show me (exactly that thing, if you “talk” to the plants you can see them growing). By the way, before, I would understand all this as something silly but today I actually understand that we really talk with the plants and that they do answer. When I told my wife that I was working at the vegetable garden she said I was lying (at home we don’t have even little violet’s vase). I was the biggest 'urbanite'. Today, when we see each other, she asks about my plants. But she doesn’t understand the garden in the same way I nowadays do. She thinks I am a bit crazy.” (seu Antônio, fieldnotes)
Pluriverse. The overlapping worlds of FNA under the same materiality, at the same moment. Multiple rationalities presented, sometimes coexisting, sometimes clashing and always challenging the project in its perceiving purpose of care. La Cadena (2010) and Blaser (2009) have shown examples of how the multiverses exist in a constant dispute of self-affirmation and conflict. Viveiros de Castros’ uncontrolled equivocation (2004) as well as control strategies such as Mol’s coordination 42 and distribution43 (2002) have shown to be important concepts that reflect how people deals with such scenario on the everyday life.
42 According to Blaser (2009:17-8), "coordination works by adding performances as if they were multiple perspectives on a single object (the idea here is that the larger the number of perspectives added, the more accurate the representation will be) and by discarding dissonant ones (the idea here is that some perspectives are simply inaccurate)". 43 According to Blaser (2009:17), distribution "works by keeping different performances apart so that inconsistencies between them do not turn into clashes where some sort of adjudication of “truth” has to occur to preserve the unity of a given object".
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Using those concepts, in the next paragraphs I will develop the idea that such challenges are also presented on FNA’s daily activities, challenging the proposed model in which modern, permaculture and spiritual ontologies interface. One night, Ismael and I were at his home after dinner talking about how we could give continuity to the permaculture design through an agroforest. Next week, Pedro, a permaculture volunteer would come to FNA to give us a theoretical and practical introduction course in Syntropic agriculture. And we wanted to study the subject before the classes so we could “explore” his knowledge utmost. At some point, while we were watching a documentary about it, Ismael told me, “It is just too much for my head. How am I going to understand all that?”. Although at the moment I thought that was just a technical problem about all the small details of the procedures, later, during the introductory part of the course, I was convinced that the challenge that was haunting Ismael was much more than about methods. It had some ontological aspect on it. Pedro started the classes presenting his previous experience and then made an overview of the beginning of the agroecology. He taught us that amerindians were doing some sort of what we call today agroecology in all territory, always producing food accordingly to the biome possibility, interacting with it on an intrinsically way, synchronized with the planet’s processes. And I quote him, “But, if you look to the letters from the firsts Europeans that “discover” the Americas, you would find on it reports something like 'the land is wonderful. That food could be found everywhere but the native people were lazy and didn’t liked to work'. And, it was from such perspective that 'modern agronomy' was developed in
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the Americas44. And because forests weren’t common in West Europe. And beyond that, nature wasn’t part of humanity. Indeed, the wild was a place without culture, that represented a threat to life. Thus, in Americas, trees were cut, replaced by monocrops for a “proper” way to produce food and other commodities” (fieldnotes). In that tropical environment, the “local nature” wasn’t part of the conquerors' life, an agronomy that would be integrated to it, where food would be produced inside the forest, or that the forests would produce the food you need, was incongruous, not real: "wildness of the jungle” was one thing and agriculture another. While watching that movie, Ismael and I were being challenged by those principles and techniques as well as from some previous ontological aspects. Thus, simple things would become grater challenges through this 'imperceptible' ontological issue that would emerge in our duty of care of the earth. As an example of those struggles, next I approach the issues of dealing with the mato. Mato is all the vegetation that is not recognized for a “specific” purpose. Something like a wild grass and bushes. Such plants are considered a problem by the conventional agriculture and normally are taken out of the system through a mechanical, chemical (poisonous) ways or by fire. Conventionally, the crop should have order, should be recognizable from far away due to its composition, no mato or too much diversity as well as “clean” bear soil. In other hand, the agroforest is a food forest, thus should look and behavior like a forest. The plantation should have mulched mato all over the place as well as several species growing together in an “explosion” of life. Indeed, you need to train your eyes to see all the food growing together with other plants. And
44
For example, see the history of the chinampas agriculture systems in Mexico.
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although knowing the technical reasons for all that “mass”, at FNA, the feeling that something was not wright would still be among us. As Carlos confessed one day when looking to our implemented agroecology system, “we look to this ‘messy-unclean’ garden and don’t recognize anything”. Under such statement was the modern conception that human and nature should be apart. A garden is part of our culture, it should state that we are in the control. Shouldn’t look like wilderness, like if the farmer has gone away and the nature had taken back the place from him. To deal with the mato became a silent intern battle to each and every one at the farm. And several times equivocations would take place when planning the interventions on the field. Eventually, Ismael would receive the support of specialists in conventional agronomy, donated by the municipality or by a church. Those specialists would talk about how to develop the farm and crop fields through technology, industrial fertilizers, poisons (which they would call “agridefenders”), monocultures and bare soil. At the same time the permaculture volunteers would come monthly to help develop the farm. And the talk would be about letting the mato grow, not using those technical supporters and keeping everything on the ground. If under one technique the approach would be to control nature, in the other the approach would be to cooperate with it. “Cooperation not as an option but as how things are in the planet”, Pedro would tell me when trying to explain this main concept that drives how agroecology understands the world. And he continues through what he considered a silly example, “I can’t through trash, a plastic, throughout the window. This is not part of my culture, the real is integrated not a choice, it is the only possibility by which I can understand what is real. Thus, to through some trash out the window would be self-aggression. The outside is here and I am also there and there is also me”. [and I continue] In other words, an anthropo-systemic affection.
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Although multiple rationalities could be notice at the farm, such as the ones derived from the suggested model (modern, permaculture and spiritual), the possibility of multiple realities wasn’t something well received and often would be framed as nonsense, or as Antonio’s wife told him, “a bit crazy”. Indeed, in the beginning of my stay at the farm, “students” would come to share their gardening experiences through a discrete way, almost a confession because those things that they were thinking or feeling weren’t quite “normal”. In such discrete way, while I was helping Antônio to watering the garden he told me, “let me tell you something that you 'gonna' find a bit strange. I arrive 'at here' around 17:30h and I sit there in those steps. I close my eyes and stay listening to the birds. I understand everything. Where each one is, with who he is talking and who is answering… I even become emotion in saying this… I learned a lot here in the farm. To wait, to be patient, to talk more quietly, to understand that everything has its own timing”. If for one hand, it wasn’t easy to freely expose some aspects of another rationality without being afraid of become known as “eight”, an allusion to the number of the psychiatric diagnostic in the local medical report, to transit from one rationality to another in order to guarantee communication as well as keeping parts of the rationality exclusive used on certain occasion would happened quite often. What Mol (2002), refers as coordination and distribution. As missionary, minister and director of the therapeutic community, Ismael has to distribute his “realities” quite well in order to guarantee the continuity of all those worlds. For the government and municipality, he has to deal with all the bureaucracy and receive the inspectors in a formal way. There is no space for God and supernatural events in his vocabulary. Just filling paperwork and presenting the 'facts' that FNA is properly conducted, accordingly to the laws and
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orientations. In other hand, during the worship events in the chapel, the supernatural become the essence of all activities and prayers and intercessions are the rule. Also, during his class, Pedro incorporated in his vocabulary the ideas of “God’s creation”: “look to the forest, that is how God grow plants. He plants forest" [pointing through the window to the forest in the other margin of the river]. Later I asked him why he was using such vocabulary. He answered me that he felt comfortable to use such approach. That if the class was for scientists or agronomists such idea wouldn't be presented like that. Also, that he believed in something like a God but that he didn’t have a lot of opportunities to present agroforestry in such way. Some level of coordination was also present at the farm. Moments in which a person drives from one ontology to another aiming to better interact with the others, thus controlling some level of equivocation. One morning, before the breakfast prayer, Ismael started to talk to the group triggered by our previous agroecology studies. He commented about a video that he had watched. The video showed Ernest45 at his farm house where he had a snake to keep the mice away. Not exactly as a pet but because she had chosen that place to live. There she could find food and he “allowed” her to be there because she would control the mice population. Then, he made an allusion about the garden of Eden. That men would live in the garden and cooperate with nature. And nature would give him everything he needed in abundance. Thus, that was how God had made things. With the fall of sin, men disconnected from nature and had to start to work. Finally, he said that he didn’t knew if they would be able to implement all what we were planning but that they would at least give it a try.
45
Ernest Gotsch is consider the "father" http://agendagotsch.com/pt/ernst (accessed in 27/03/2017).
of
agroecology
in
Brazil.
For
more
see
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In another moment, after several weeks of classes and agroecology practices, during a permaculture presentation, one of the “students” rose the issue that the challenge for us would be to develop certain skills of sensibility while working with the plants in order to achieve some kind of dialogue with them. That we had already learned that plants communicate to each other and that it was somehow possible to access such communication, understand it and interact with the system. That as gardeners we should understand them to interfere on their ecological dynamic ethically in such way that we would generate abundance. After two months experiencing intense agroecology practices and permaculture studies, we were talking about how to talk with the plants and no one from the group seemed to feel uncomfortable about it. Those things weren’t an “indigenous crazy hippie” topic anymore. It was as if we would already accept somehow that others realities could exist and indeed were happening right there. But if the “students” were open to new realities, maybe due to their role of reinventing themselves and “reborn” for the society after the nine months at FNA as different persons that wouldn’t be slaves of the addictions that made them and the people around them suffer so much, the managers of the farm didn’t seem to have the same flexibility toward changes. If in one moment Ismael would dream with Kim about the agribusiness potentialities for the farm, in another moment he would be giving advices for other TC of the region about how to build an agroecology garden in such way that nature dynamics would be incorporated into TC’s culture. For instance, one day Ismael actually convinced a farmer on a shop to receive us for a coffee in the next day so we could teach him a bit about agroecology and the things we were changing at the farm.
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At the same time, in another moment, when I told Rodrigo, a permaculture volunteer, that the agroforestry that we had been implemented some years ago had been “cleaned up” by Ismael orders, he got very upset and told me that it was all Ismael's fault, that we couldn’t trust him, that he would say to us what we wanted to listen but would do whatever he wanted… That he [Rodrigo] even gave up helping them because it was too hard for him. He would explain something to Ismael and he would agree. Next month when he would come back, everything was done completely different, even opposite. That it took almost 3 years for them to stop burning the mato… Listening to all that I couldn’t stop wondering how much those mismatches were just unwillingness or indeed behind all that there were some ontological struggles and Ismael was indeed been challenged about that reality he was in (or realities?). He couldn’t easily keep his modern understandings of what kind and how a specific agricultural approach should be done without been confronted by this other anthropo-systemic affection. At the same time, could he deny all his reality, his understandings to become someone else, with another rationality? Struggling among the interfaces of ontologies, in a concrete way, Ismael was continuing experiencing novelties, hybridized in between realities. As LaCadena (2010:347) presented, he had become “more than one, less than two”. Something that would interfere direct on the management of such place. Discussion The multiple realities of the farm, represented here through the proposed model raises awareness for three distinct ontologies that are present and overlapping at the farm: Modern, Permaculture and Spiritual. If in the daily life of the farm, those worlds did not seem to collapse, through a closer look, the different realities and equivocations became more evident. At the same time that Kim was dealing with the plants as commodity opportunities and planning how to
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develop the place to "bring progress", Antonio was acknowledging that he had a relation with his garden that made him be jealous of the plants and fight with those that weren't treating them as they "deserve". Also, Ismael would refer to the plants as "God's creation", something "sacred". "Sacred", but that sometimes would still be burned to "clean" the field and other times it would be treated as something very precious that should be collected to be put on the agroforest systems. More than complex, the social-farm was the interplay of multiple realities, a pluriverse. Once pluriverse, the interface of realities challenges everyone to deal with this experience of being "more than one, and less than many" (Stratern 1991:35 in Mol, 2002:82). And, in the daily life at the farm, it is possible to grasp several situations of misunderstandings originated by ontological differences that for instance led to Antonio's wife tell him that he was getting "a bit crazy". Also, uncontrolled equivocation such as the "same" plant becoming the reason of a fight because without they realize, that plant was a mato with no importance that should be burned for one "student" and in some way, as part of "family" for the other "student". Behind that plant there were different ontologies that couldn't be accessed by "the other" and, because such possibility of different realities overlapping at that garden was just not considered as a possibility, it clashes would emerge in partial communication and conflict. In other situations, efforts to enable partial communications were done. For instance, through the coordination of speech, such as when Pedro talked about the forest in a way to access the "students"’ reality of spiritual genesis without actually submitting his own world to it. An action in order to achieve his own objective/necessity, of explaining agroforest driven by his own Permaculture reality. Or, also, when Ismael was able to distribute his actions and vocabulary among the different worlds aiming partial connections and understanding. Inside de chapel, he was
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one and with the municipal inspector he was another. In a way, more than one but yet not entirely two. Trying to enact other ontologies through different ways of think, act and understand the world.
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Pictures
Figure 7- Cover’ s drawing of the book Permaculture: a design manual
Figure 9- "Students" working on the garden
Figure 11- Potential products to be commercialized with Korean community
Figure 8- Interior of the chapel
Figure 10- A walk on farm' s preserved rain forest
Figure 12- Wild fern prepared for lunch
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Figure 13 - Theoretic agroecology class
Figure 14- Practical agroecology class
Figure 15 - Adding mato to the agroforest beds
Figure 16- The "dirty" agroforest soil
Figure 17- Conventional "clean" plantation
Figure 18 - "Messy" agroecological plantation
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Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
IV.
VIRTUAL POTENTIALITIES
•
How can this social-farm be understood through the assemblage theory?
•
How this fluid reality is influenced by the multiple ontologies presented in the farm through process of territorialization/deterritorialization (enabling virtual potentialities)?
Using the assemblage theory46, in this section I reflect on how the configuration of socialfarm's entities, its relations, emerges into an assemblage that generates future potentials; a fluid reality with virtual potentiality. For that, I argue that the dynamics between territorialization and deterritorialization of the multiple entities have intrinsic influence on the formation of the actual reality. Also, the issue of care is understood as a transversal central aspect of the actors-entities coding of the assemblage. Furthermore, the inter-subjectivity behind the relational dynamic among humans and nonhumans of the assemblage, its affections as part of the emergent reality is explored.
Fluid realities of material things “Football? It can be a problem when I am not around. Cause the boys can become a problem, but when I am here, there is no crying. The guy wants to win through who makes more noise… This thing about you just touch and is already foul… I think the only place I am not converted is in the field. God have mercy on my soul. That when Jesus comes back, do not do it when I am playing.”
46
Based on Deleuze and Guattari (1988) work. Briefly, reality is composed by virtual and actual ontologies that are not fix and are rearranged according to entities affections. DeLanda (2006) refers to it as a theory of "flat ontology" which core aspects are irreducibility with emergent properties and possible of decomposition; an attempt "to fit together all the ways in which the world is now characterized by flows, connections and becomings whose functioning logic is more about folds than structures, more complex than linear, more recursive than dialectical, more emergent than totalizing" (Dewsbury, 2011:148).
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(Ismael, fieldnotes)
When thinking in the Fazenda Nova Aurora, a mosaic of narratives comes to my mind. Multiple interactions between humans and nonhumans being developed daily. For instance, the social-farm is a venture about care, but not just it. It is also about living in community, having responsibility, having to make decisions. Also, is about agroecology, farming, feeding animals, making compost and collecting seeds. Yet, it is about thinking in cycles, succession and symbiosis. Furthermore, it is about developing spirituality, is about stopping for meditate, pray and build Christian values. And also, it has moments to play soccer, learn different practical activities, swim in the lake, receive visits. To be in the FNA is to be in a place that gathers the urban, the rural and the wild. It is persons, plants, animals, fungi, minerals, air, water, light, temperature, sounds, values, agreements, rules, feelings‌ Yet, this reality of the social-farm is not just about being multiple or complex, it is also about fluidity. That is, its complexity is constantly rearranged in many forms depending on the (mutual) affection of all its components: it is an assemblage. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1988:3-4), “In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblageâ€?. Such fluidity reflects in the possibilities erupted from the result of how its actor-entities inter-relates, enabling potentials of totality or disrupting in dispersed parts. What one considers to be the social-farm, its characteristics developed by certain structures and relations in a specific time
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and space, can suddenly be disrupted by another kind of reality developed by other interaction or behavior giving a new meaning (reality) to its materiality. Reality in the social-farm can be arranged in such way that at the same time that it can become the social-farm expected by the project developers, it also can become its antagonism, chaos, another arrangement that results in something else that can't be recognized as what the project was supposed to be, yet still keeping its materiality. Its entities are preserved but with others arrangements, guaranteeing its continuity in time-space; The real of the assemblage, transitioning between the actual social-farm and its virtual potentialities. “One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:4). Hence, the apparently cohesive social-farm has a fluid reality in which virtual potentiality of becoming strata or body without organs co-exist in the daily conformation of actors-entities. The assemblage theory is part of the new materiality approach. Developed by Deleuze and Guattari in the book A thousand plateaus, its ideas derived from a materialistic philosophy developed from David Hume and Spinoza writings and, therefore, are “committed to a vision of the autonomous nature of reality (independent of the human mind)” (Escobar and Osterweil, 2009:128). Also, is important to highlight that the assemblage theory is developed over three reality "fragments" (ontologies) named the virtual, the actual and the real. Such dynamic relation of ontologies enables fluidity and potentiality in the assemblage. 64
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“Not only are there as many statements as there are effectuations, but all of the statements are present in the effectuation of one among them, so that the line of variation is virtual, in other words, real without being actual, and consequently continuous regardless of the leaps the statement makes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:94). And, “"Potential" and "virtual" are not at all in opposition to "real"; on the contrary, the reality of the creative, or the placing-in-continuous variation of variables, is in opposition only to the actual determination of their constant relations” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:99). DeLanda (2006), also developed further the ideas on the proposals of Deleuze and Guattari aiming to make the assemblage theory (which is presented in a disperse way in the A thousand plateaus) more cohesive. He refers to it as a theory of “flat ontology" since it just contains "differently scaled individual singularities" (DeLanda 2006:28). Also, he defines assemblage as a hole that has properties of its own, which are non-reducible to its parts. Further, that its parts maintain their autonomy, being possible to be detached from the assemblage. Hence, its core aspects would be irreducible, with emergent properties and possible of decomposition. From irreducibility is understood that the result of an assemblage is more than the sum of its parts. As an example, the “man-horse-bow assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:404) shows how the resulted reality is more than just the man, the horse and the bow. Its configuration enables something else that extend the possibilities beyond the maximum potentialities of each specific possibility. As Deleuze and Guattari presents, “in the becoming-horse assemblage the man subdues his own "instinctive" forces while the animal transmits to him its "acquired" forces” 65
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(1988:260). What Bennett (2009:24) refers as an open-ended collective; a "non-totalizable sum", making an analogy with the Christian theology of the Trinity that is one. Another example of assemblage in a different scale would be the molecule of water (H2O). As the result of the interaction of the molecules of Hydrogen and Oxygen, its connection would enable a new molecule that has a completely new reality and characteristics. It is not possible to reduce the assemblage to its parts. Such action would lose the assemblage specific potentialities over to something else related to the characteristics of the isolated molecules, in direction to a body without organs. Therefore, as assemblage, the water or the man-horse-bow are irreducible to their parts. Hence, its reality has emergent properties. Emergent properties, according to DeLanda (2006), is a property of a hole that arises from the constant interactions between its parts. Therefore, imminent, resulted from material interactions rather than transcendent (independent from those parts). Back to the “man-horse-bow� assemblage, an emergent property would be its potential deadly-speedy-weapon, emerged from the connection of actors-entities and that wouldn't exist otherwise. In our other example, water (H2O) as an assemblage of H2 and O2 molecules, the properties of water are unique. Although derived from the well-known potential explosive (combustion) molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, its reconfiguration (connection between molecules) results in a totally new emergent property with characteristics of non-combustion. Yet, assemblages are decomposable. As fluid, the assemblage is the result of its actorsentities inter-relations, which can be dissolved, potentialized or recreated according to its coformation. Instead of fused into a totality, its segmentarization, enables the actualization of its virtual potentialities. If for one side, the assemblage can become strata, it also can dissolve into a body without organs.
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The conformation of its actors-entities becomes an assemblage, a hole non-reducible to its parts, where the parts maintain their autonomy and could be detached from the assemblage. It is the possibility of an organ transfusion of a patient, a substitution of the rider-warrior or to one day be able to develop a synthetic molecule of O2 or N2 in order to enable the formation of water. In his lectures for the European Graduate School Video Lectures, DeLanda (2011) refers to the assemblage theory as a “parameterized concept”. Commonly used on mathematics, this possibility gives fluidity to the concept that aims to reflect about a reality that is also in constant formation 47 . Briefly, the assemblage is formed by two factors: territorization/deterritorization (articulations) and coding/decoding (genetic/linguistic resources). Also, both factors are influenced by diagrams (structure of its possibility in space) through virtuality. Therefore, the degrees that territories and codes are arranged results in the assemblage. If both are in their maximum intensity, assemblage becomes strata. In contrary, if both are in their minimum intensity, assemblage becomes a body without organs. As presented earlier in this text, in A thousand plateaus, the territory in which the assemblage is developed is formed through “lines of articulation or segmentarity” and “lines of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:3). Thus, to think in how such lines are formed/structured in the social-farm can help conceptualize it as an assemblage, fluid, with virtual potentialities through process of territorialization and deterritorialization. Hence, "rearticulating the way we see, understand and thus live the world" (Dewsbury, 2011:148).
47
Imagine that as part of the assemblage there are something like "old volume controls" that can be turned to change the intensity of, for instance, its territory, where a minimum intensity would "develop" a body without organs and a maximum intensity strata.
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Potential aspects that can be approached through the ethnography are the dynamics of urban/rural/wild
coexistence,
individual/collective
socio-dynamics,
nature/culture/spirit
connections, immediate/future wishes/dreams, and peaceful/aggressive state of being. Their affection on the landscape and vice-versa are what result in territory. Also, I propose that the coding/decoding on the social-farm should be understood through the issue of care. In his book, A new philosophy of society, DeLanda (2006), presents the DNA as a classic example of coding. A series of information that allows the creation of identity into reality. Although it has a clear strict pattern of function, the DNA has also some degree of flexibility through which its different proteins combinations and mutations enables some diversity under the wide characteristics of the specie. In the same way, I believe that the issue of care is one of the main code that influences the reality of the social-farm, enabling its identity. Also, the rules, bureaucratic regiments and laws of the state and NGO participate in the coding process. Presented in all three ontologies (Modern, Permaculture and Spiritual), care can be understood as the ingredient that seam those different realities, the one thing that connects people and nature, humans and nonhumans, in one event-space. Although acting across the ecotone of realities, the notion of care also has a lot of flexibility, receiving a different meaning according to which ontology is preponderant in a specific situation. Therefore, the notion of care in the socialfarm is one general code of the assemblage and its specificities of the meaning of care are changed through the degrees of its (ontological) parameters. Thus, the adoption of the presented criteria for the social-farm in relation to the process of territorialization/deterritorialization and coding/decoding can help to conceptualize such venture as assemblage, therefore fluid and with virtual potentialities. Also, such comprehension challenges any fix management approach (Umans and Arce, 2014) and develops the potential to conceive another emergent praxis that may be more suitable for the challenges of such “reality of realities�, 68
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re-thinking/considering “new questions on life, nature and the social in a rapidly changing world” (Allen, 2011 in Blanco, Arce and Fisher, 2015:181). If there is something that everyone that visits the social-farm can agree is that the football field at FNA is the most well cared place of the farm. It might be the only place that mowing doesn’t need to be asked and the maintenance is happily done. On Wednesdays, the TC even receives visitors from the neighborhood to join the afternoon matches as well as on the weekends. As Humberto, a friend that coordinate another TC says, “for starting a TC you should at least have a place for the football and enough number of “students” for a match”. But a closer look to the football field under the assemblage theory can reveal much more about that well cared grass area. A diversity of voluble realities under one materiality that can suddenly emerge or melt depending on which affects happen among all involved entities such as the grass, the field marks, goals, managers, “students”, visitors… It was a Wednesday afternoon, leisure time on FNA schedule and, for the first time, I also had my schedule free to join them for a football match. I knew that Alexandre, one of the trainees, wouldn’t be joying because as he had already told me, “I don’t play it because it is a sport with too much contact and lots of discussions, too much emotion. Suddenly the heart can open to the wrong motivations, the proud, the unbalanced temper… so I think that football is very complicated, I don’t even go to watch the matches”. Then, when looking to the path that leads to the field, I saw a missing handrail and remembered what Ivan had told me about what happened last weekend when I was away. “A man was at the TC to 'save' his marriage. He had already passed the second third of the nine months’ period. He had high level responsibilities on the CT and was already making plans for a new begging. One day he received a call from his wife informing him that their relationship was over. The guy was very 69
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upset and the reason for his stay at the farm was shaken. During a football match, some days later, some harsh contact provoked a small confusion with a lot of verbal aggressions. The game had to be finished and everyone started to go up the hill for showering. Suddenly, the guy got out of his mind, wrenched the handrail and started to hit the others. The confusion took a while to settle and resulted in the expulsion of all four “students” that got involved on the fight” (fieldnotes). The reality of the football field had changed. In that afternoon, the recent events had transformed it. The well mowed lawn stopped being a synonym of leisure and happiness to become something associated to failure and sadness. The affection between “students” and field had been reconstructed and a new reality had emerged. Fluid, it suddenly changed. However, because I wasn’t there three days earlier, the affection between me and the field weren’t the same as to the others. I didn’t remember that the fight had happened there and was still feeling expectation of joy when looking to the field. Two realities under one football field. The interest thing was also that as soon as I saw the missing handrail and remembered the incident on the field, my relation to it changed, and a feeling of sadness and lack of hope dropped on me. The affection between myself and the football field was re-structured as I could almost feel the fluidity in which reality was becoming something else without transforming its materiality. A few weeks later, the football matches started again. We had new “students” arriving and the incident became just a small memory. The green grass didn’t affect most of us the way it did before and the field became once again a place of joy and leisure. In other hand, one of the “students” stopped playing football after the incident because as he told me, “to lose the chance of completing the treatment just because of a stupid game… better to not give it a chance”. Indeed, the football field had more than one reality.
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Also, beyond the football game, this entity-actor relation of field and people also emerged on others realities. For instance, Sueli told me that one of her best memories of FNA was a weeding of one of the “students” that happened on the field. “A beautiful and very impacting moment” according to her. What happened there was something that marked her, influencing the reality emerged from the affection between her and that grass field. Multiple and fluid. That was what grasp from all those events that involved the field. But that was just a small fragment of a complex and potentially fluid reality of that social-farm, what certainly would challenge any management attempt.
‘Philosophers-gardeners’ and ‘farmer-poets’ After three years away, that was my first walk in the farm to become familiarized once again with all the things that were happening over there. When we got to the area of the old agroforest system, I made a comment to the directors about how to see the place like that, degraded and ploughed under a conventional way, made me said. Then, João Boca, the president of the mission, made a comment about my feelings implying that such thing was a “sissy” thing, “to cry about some little plants”. The same João that, once we arrived, had kissed and hugged all the “students”. Such moment made me thought about how, for him, humans and non-humans were clearly distinct, with no space for continuities between the “us” and “them”. (fieldnotes)
Patterning is the language of permaculture that connects people and land. More than mimicking the nature, patterning is a creative dialogue. A two-way action where the multiple parts affect and are affected. Is to give and receive, talk and listen. Under its ontology, to garden is a
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relational and sensorial experience that aim to develop microsystem that works in the same tune of the planet, a holistic approach that includes all entities as part of a greater assemblage. Furthermore, Permaculture's way of see and understand, its anthropo-systemic affection, can be playful illustrated through "permacultural lens". Once using the lens, the reality is perceived in another way, highlighting the patterns, energy fluxes and interactions. Also, the challenge becomes to combine the "needs of the place" and the "needs of people". Is the balance and integration of both "needs" that enable a good design. In other hand, if one of the "needs" overcome the other, the unbalance results in disharmony, pollution and extra work. In a way, the illustration of Holmgren (2002) first principle of design, "Observe and interact" can be related to the "permacultural lens". Such approach represents a re-formulation of how to perceive the environment. More than that, it affect the reality of things from another ontology that blur the distinction of subjects and objects "needs" in a relational way. To certain point, resembling to the Amerindian relationality which, according to Escobar (2012:xxvii) asserts that "life entails the creation of forms out of the dynamics of matter and energy. (‌) and ever-changing web of interrelations involving humans and non-humans". Although it may be possible to use the "permacultural lens" as a tool, it requires much more to experience it as reality. A rational change is needed; Another possibility of being, experiencing and understanding what is through other ontology: a Permaculture one. Also, identity is reshaped through such process. An Identity that involves people and place as material continuities, thus emerging from a re-territorialization through lines of articulation and of flight. Next I present an example of development that just took in account the "need" of people followed by a relational experience that re-territorialized the site bounding land and people on a
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permaculture design. Thus, distinct territories are formed from the specific affections between the entities in each case according to each ontological background. The implementation of marginal roads in the low lands rivers Pinheiros and TietĂŞ in the city of SĂŁo Paulo are good examples of how a place was developed without the use of "permacultural lens"48. The need (or greedy?) of people was attended with no concern to the "needs of place" resulting in a terrible design, floods, poor diversity and productivity. The rivers, that had naturally curves and a slow flux were made straight and fast. The "new lands" of the edges were transformed in highways and sites for real estate speculation. The "need of the river", its multiple and long curves that would slow down its velocity and would become flooded after a big rain weren't took into account. In its margins, where previously the water would be trapped after a flood and would slowly infiltrate into the soil (leaving it fertile through this process) became impermeable roads and buildings. Instead of a permaculture design, the result was something with a lot of pollution, disconnections and extra work. Through the use of "permacultural lens" it is possible to visualize how thinks could be (or are) on accommodating needs of place and people. Often, such approach is commonly seen as crazy or obsolete from others ontologies and currently is put a side by "modern and developed" initiatives such as the example before. At the same time, there are several others, commonly marginal, initiatives that can be related to a more anthropo-systemic affection, bonding people and place. Next, to illustrate such approach, I briefly present a case known as "The man who farmed water" (Lancaster, 2007).
48
The documentary Entre Rios and the NGO Rios e Ruas presents briefly and in an interesting way the history of the city development and its relation with the rivers.
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In Zimbabwe, on a small rural town called Zvishavane, Mr. Zephaniah Phiri Maseko and his family developed their site through a design to harvest water based on patterning the surround nature where, in some specific spots, the moisture from the water would last longer after a rain. Mimicking it through some simple water and fertility harvesting earthworks the place became abundant. Mister Phiri and family had to flee to the countryside after being persecuted due to his political engagement against the white-minority-led Rhodesian government. Inspired by the Garden of Eden, in which he argued humanity had all they needed in a garden that was probably watering supported by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, water access which he was missing on his land, he got the inspiration to develop his farm. By "observing and interacting", he could perceive traces of moisture and water in some specific spots even after several days after rain. He decided to mimic that "natural intelligence" in order to expand those fertile islands. His motto became, "before plant trees it is necessary to plant water". Developing something complete different of his neighbors and "development programs" for the region, his persistence in another rationality gave fruits. After slowing down, spreading and sinking the water of his site, in the draw season, his wells would always have water while all the neighbors became dry (even though his wells are the shallowest of the region). This, he says, is due to the fact that he "planted more water then he takes". After 30 years of being in the land, he evaluates that to "plant water it is a slow process, but that's life". And he concludes, "As you begin to rhyme with nature, soon other lives will start to rhyme with yours". Today, his site is a model for the region and world, receiving visitors from all continents. As Lancaster (2007:43) states, "Phiri shows how water scarcity can be turned to water abundance – by planting the rain both in the soil and in the minds of the people".
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In such example, the "needs of the people" were combined with the "needs of the place". Abundance developed from such experience. People and place started to "rhyme" together. Such possibility derives from virtual possibilities of the actual assemblage through the sensibility of "permacultural lens". An engagement that re-signify the existence/experience through the establishment of an emergent "rhymic" entity. Such rhyme between people and land enable the emergence of a new entity previous referred as farmer-poet or philosopher-gardener. Through the "permaculture lens", the re-configuration of a territory in which multiple needs from people and place are acknowledge and included in the process of becoming. Thus, in certain way, such movement is related to perception and action. Sustained by a Permaculture ontology, the anthropo-systemic rationality enables fluidity of the material reality of things: People and landscape. People that actively act, shaping the landscape at the same time that them are also being affected by it. A relational existence from what emerges new territory; a reterritorialization. Also, by affecting both people and land, such process influence identity development. To enable with the reality through the "permacultural lens" is to re-create reality and identity through new experiences of relations. In Mollinson (1991) words, "Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate". Thus, such experience results in affect and being affected in a fluid process of re-identity-creation. Is to experience fluidity through "creating alliances that bring together relations of movement, rest, speed and slowness within an assemblage" (Blanco, Arce and Fisher, 2015:187). Another interesting case in which humans and non-humans affected each other resulting in novelty in FNA was the Lucas' "office". Back in 2012, after permaculture had been presented in FNA by a group of volunteers (me included), practical works oriented by "permacultural lens" started to be done with the "students" 75
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of the social-farm. Among others projects, the vegetable garden was chosen as a starting point due to its fast results and transversal potential of interaction within several daily activities49. A garden produces fresh organic food for the meals served in the social-farm. Also, the garden's need of nutrients that can be "produced" through composting the kitchen scraps, animal manure and mulch. Furthermore, its flowers can be picked and seeds collected to be then cultivated on a nursery. Also, non-conventional plants challenge the kitchen's responsible to learn and create new menus. Thus, everybody in the FNA experience the garden in a way, from working on it or in something that is related to it as well as tasting the local grown fresh vegetables during the meals. To start to use new "lens" can be quite challenge. New different shapes and colors challenges old objects images. Some certainties melt while others emerge and a hybrid world coming to being. In the FNA permaculture garden case, a mixture of conventional, agroecology and personal approaches in what a garden supposed to be and how to developed clashed and influenced each other on the process of planting annual food for FNA consumption. After a weekend of planning and developing the garden in a permaculture way through a collective initiative, agroecology volunteers would then come monthly to be with the students and follow up the works in the gardens. Overall, some students were hold responsible for the everyday working in the garden with the occasional supervision of Ismael, the (overloaded) FNA's manager. Also, occasionally a big working day with several volunteers and all students would take place in the garden and agroforestry.
49
I briefly explore the transversal potentiality of a vegetable garden in a ARCAH's therapeutic community pilot in http://permaculturenews.org/2015/03/27/arcah-s-therapeutic-permacultural-yard/ (accessed in 27/03/2017).
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Gradually those responsible for the garden incorporated some permaculture strategies. The ground became covered with mulch, beds had diversity and compost was made in the site. A change in the how they perceived and related to the place was slowly happening. After a few months, the guys responsible for the garden, leaded by Lucas, constructed a new nursery for the garden. It was carefully planned and developed with love. They were quite proud of the new development and, as soon as we got there for the monthly visit, Lucas guided us to the spot to show us his new "office". In some way, he had increased his eco-literacy (Orr, 1992) in encounter of the traditional African maxim "soil erosion is soul erosion". The place was still the vegetable garden. But it was also something else. A new reality had emerged. The new relations between people and plants had developed affecting both in a unique way, transforming a garden into an "office". A new human-garden entity had emerged. Lucas invited us into his "office" and started to tell us how, now he would spends most of his time there. After the morning prayers, he would go to the garden to read his bible and have an intimate moment with God. He said that the nature, God's creation, would help him to get in touch with the supernatural, likewise in the garden of Eden. Also, he would take care of the sprouting baby plants as if they were family. A relation of intimacy and care. The garden had become a sanctuary where he could "transmit and receive" love through the daily fresh pick organic vegetables that would be relished during lunch. Later, Ismael also told us with proud that in those last weeks they would always have vegetables in abundance on FNA's table. When the FNA host the sustainability part of CENA's integral mission course, Lucas helped the teachers and was the responsible for the garden tour, his "office", where he explained how they would produce the vegetables with diversity and mulch to keep the plants happy and also how some kind of intimate relation with God's creation would help him to develop his spirituality.
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Same place, same activity, same people. But yet different. The interface of ontologies emerges in a new actual reality. If the materiality of the plants was a continuity of before, it also became something else, unique. A result of a new web of relations and affection sustained by multiple rationalities. Connections of entities and smaller assemblages resulting on the broader FNA's assemblage. Through process of re-territorialization in that time/place and emerged from the interplay of ontologies, the place developed a new identity: became the sacred garden-office. Through the following months, the fluidity of the assemblage could again be perceived. Same space, same activity, same people. But yet different. Lucas experienced several personal issues that affect how he related to the garden. Among the things that happened, I point the following: His time of going back to the city was arriving. A girl fell in love to him. He started to have some struggles towards the others students through a lack of humbleness on his attitudes, defiance of the rules and hierarchy in the social-farm that ended on first changing his work station from the garden and, finally, few weeks earlier of the complete FNA cycle, CENA's management decided to invite him for the next phase at the community home in downtown in SĂŁo Paulo. The garden was still there but it wasn't the same any more. The re-arrangement of workplaces in the FNA changed all the earlier responsible for the garden and the new ones didn't develop the same skills or affection for the garden. The sacred office-garden melted giving place to a regular garden that eventually became a ownerless garden, giving place to the weeds and rising in similarity with the surrounding wildness. A garden with another identity. Such process is one of the biggest challenges of the management of the FNA. The flighty dynamic of entities and relations inside the FNA assemblage are continuously re-territorializing the reality, clashing to the fix approaches that tries to assert the social and the farm arenas. As a fluid process of virtual potentialities, "the assemblage is less about what it is then, and more about what it can do, what it can affect and bring about" (Dewsbury, 2011:150 about Deleuze 78
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and Guattari, 1988, 4). Thus, to manage the farm through such possibilities is to deal not just with the actual but also with the virtual reality that compose the Real realm of the social-farm, fluid and dynamic.
(re)Territorialization of the social-farm “A nice surprise that was. We arrived at the farm one Saturday and found a tap in the middle of the agroforestry system with a rose and a sprinkler. The first thing that came to our mind was about how the management of the farm was lazy, so many people to work on such a small area and they already found a way to water it without being there to experience the ecological process and become a bit more integrated to the system. Our mistake. In fact, the area had become the responsibility of only one man and he engaged with it in such way that, by his own initiative and personal money earned from a government grant for those that live under the line of poverty, he bought the hose and sprinkler. Money that he chose to spend there to give a better care to those plants. Permaculture had ‘conquered’ him.” (Rodrigo, fieldnotes)
To conceptualize the FNA as an assemblage allows the expansion of its reality through its potentialities of becoming. A fluid reality in which changes are intrinsically to it through process of territorialization and deteritorialization, hence challenging any rigid attempt of dealing or understanding its rhizomatic existence. Living at FNA’s allowed me to realize that its lines of articulation and lines of flight draw its reality through the social-farms ecology of daily life. Through its urban/rural/wild coexistence dynamics, individual/collective social agreements and nature/culture/spirit interconnections that would mutually affect each other on its transits from actual and virtual realities.
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A process that requires from any management attempt a rhizomatic state of being risen from a flat ontological starting point that would allow a perception of the material fluidity in the farms every day. Everywhere in the area, multiple entities were interacting, reconfiguring its articulation and flight lines at the same time that “students”, managers, volunteers, trainees and visitors should make sense of all to enable an understandable agreement about it as a "hole". On the heart of the farm stands an imposing lake. A beautiful site that divides the farm in two, in which on one side a fragment of rain forest rest on a ‘bucolic-wild’ nature reserve and on the other settle most buildings and farm activities of the TC. A nice water reservoir that pumps water for the crops irrigation, that was used to baptism new believers that accepted Christ and that one day used to be the number one leisure option of the farm. During summer, after an intense day of work on the land or a disputed football match, everybody would go for a refreshing and relaxing swimming time. Some that were more athletic would cross it swimming for exercise while others that didn’t have enough familiarity with the water would play at the margins keeping a safe distance from the deep waters. One afternoon the activities of the farm were suspended. It was during a football world cup and Brazil was going to play. As most people started to gathering at the TV saloon for a good time of cheering, the farm became reterritorialized. One of the “students” went quietly for a swim on the lake and disappeared. When people notice his absence, after searching for him without success, it was thought that he had just left the farm without having the strength to tell the managers about his desistance. A day later, his body appeared floating on the lake. The lines of flight immediately affected farms assembly, reterritorializating it, hence, bringing a new reality to FNA. Everyone was devastated and the lake changed from the most special place to a nightmare that could even become the reason of FNA’s end. The social-farm that was a place of “bringing life” and enable new beginnings, became a place of drawing dreams and death. 80
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Same lake, same beauty but other affections. The death potential that lay virtually for all those years had suddenly erupt on a painful actuality. Today a fence surrounds all the lake with signs that forbids anyone to enter, reminding new participants of its potential danger that once became reality. However, as time went by, new entities arrived to compose the assemblage. From “students” and managers to fences, fishes, a new damn and a baptism spot known as batismódromo. New lines of articulation were drawn and the actual reality of the social-farm became redefined. Such fluidity challenges the common understanding, increasing the overlapping of realities that dances among actuality and virtuality depending on which entities and affections are been played inside the assemblage. Requiring a rhizomatic approach to the realm of the Real, gathering its actual and virtual volubility. Another example that I experienced at FNA’s fluid reality was the twist on what the machetes and other farm tool represented after the kitchen incident. Paulo was an older man of around 55 years old from which the past 17 was lived on the streets under the use of heavy drugs. Convinced by João Boca to come to the farm for a new beginning, he had already passed half of his ‘treatment” and, after starting with the permaculture experiences, was dreaming about staying at the farm as a missionary after doing all the regular trainings of the mission and help on the agroecology transition that was being taken place there. That day, he was the responsible for preparing all the meals at the kitchen to all community50. The menu and ingredients for preparing the meal are controlled by another person that works with the dispensation. This person has the control of the key of the place where all food and
50
The kitchen work was done by a cooker and his helper. A group of “students” would rotate daily to prepare the meals in order to share the responsibility and create a sense of collective comprehension among everyone. If the food wasn’t so good one day, I shouldn’t complain because next time it could be me to burn the rice or overcook the meat because the fire wood wasn’t dry enough or any other eventuality.
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kitchen utensils (including the knifes) are stored. The managers give this job to only two specific “students” that have already some time at the farm and can be trustworthy. That day, Graciliano was the “dispensationer”. Graciliano was a young man around 25 years old. Also coming from the streets, since his youth he had spent several years on prisons for underage men. Alexandre, one of the trainees, was at the site when the confusion took place and narrated to me the following, “I heard a discussion on kitchen and approached to ask them to please calm down. They were discussing about some orange pills that Paulo wanted to put on the food for an extra flavor and Graciliano just wanted to burn them. Suddenly Graciliano through the pills at the fire and the tone of the discussion raised. I intervened asking them to break it and calm down. Paulo kept melting sugar on a pan and Graciliano walked away. Then, without any notice, Graciliano got a vegetable wood box from the ground and through it over Paulo, followed by a rush approach toward him. Everything happened just too fast and when I realized Paulo was with his both hands down receiving the punches at his face. We broke down the fight and Graciliano walked away furious. It was actually a miracle that Paulo didn’t spill the hot pan with melted sugar over Graciliano but instead, put it on the stove. He didn’t respond the aggression with another aggression so he wouldn’t be punished with an expulsion. Some seconds later, Graciliano reappeared with an axe that was used to chop the wood for the fire screaming that he was going to kill him. Thanks God at that moment, Marcelo, another trainee, appeared and grabbed Graciliano to stop anything worst to happen. Graciliano was expelled and Paulo and Marcelo went to the hospital for check-ups that showed that they didn’t have any serious injuries” (fieldnotes). 82
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Next day things weren’t the same. Every time that something of this magnitude occurs in the social-farm all the “students” get excited and nervous on a mix of feelings that destabilize all the social-material relations. That time wasn’t different and several gossips, intolerances, threats and discussions erupted at the place. Such situation resulted in the trainees having to do a general search on all the accommodations for hidden tools that could be used as weapon. The machete, symbol of the agroecology movement, used to planting seeds, prune trees, open spaces and create biomass had become a threat. An object with a harmful potential that generated unsafety and should be strictly controlled. Hoes, sickles and machetes were locked on the tool house and also some “lost” tools were founded in hidden places around the fields and working areas. The activities were developed with an “extra weight”. No one was comfortable and the general feeling of being at home shared by most was substituted by a feeling of unsafety, mistrust and not belonging. Paulo confidence to me that although he was happy about his ability of self-control to not react to the aggression, that, now, he was struggling with all kinds of thoughts, including an uncontrolled sense of counting down the remaining days to finish his period at the farm. That after the event, the first thing that came to his mind was how, in around one and a half hour he could be at a boca buying crack-cocaine to leave all that behind and anaesthetize that reality through a pipe. Since that moment of the fight, the countdown had started. Same person, same place, different reality. Deterritorialized through new affects among its entities. Certainly, a challenge to any attempt of management and a probable failure for one that wouldn’t be acknowledging this rhizomatic reality. And even though one accept that FNA’s reality is indeed fluid, in which its lines of articulation and flight stretches and shrinks according to entities affections. Though, its eventual flat ontological management attempt is also challenge by the multiple layers of overlapping realities 83
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in which FNA’s macro-assemblage is composed by several others micro-assemblages that territorializes and deterritorializes social-farms reality at the same time.
Discussion To understand the social-farm as an assemblage is to state that its reality is in constant formation through the affection among its entities. Also, that there are other assemblages constituting the larger one. But, overall, it is to state that reality is fluid; an interplay of virtual and actual ontologies of the real. If, on a first visit, Lucas showed me his "office", a micro sacredgarden assemblage resulted from his affection with plants, earth, animals, memories, feelings and spirits developed, after some months, reality was reconfigured by new lines drawn between those and new entities emerging in another reality, but under the same materiality. Thus, an assemblage approach challenges modern rationality through adding affection, memories and feelings, at least, to the same level of importance of reason as fundamental elements that will mediate the emergence of reality in becoming assemblage. For instance, a "normal" garden becoming an "office". Also, once assemblage, its reality is open to be (re)territorialized. That is, without changing its materiality, the entities of the assemblage can affect and be affected differently, thus reconfiguring its reality. Hence, enabling fluid realities of material things. In Lucas' case, a broken heart changed the affections between the entities of that micro assemblage, switching the "office" back to a garden and eventually turning it to mato. Also, another example is how the machete ceased to be the "soul of the agroecology practices" to become a dangerous weapon. A process in which the food/life actual reality of the machete became virtual in exchange of the actualization of, until before the fight, the virtual weapon/death part of that same reality.
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Pictures
Figure 19- The "office"
Figure 20 - Agroforest being implemented
Figure 21 - Painting the football field
Figure 22 – Fenced lake with a “forbiden swim� sign
Figure 23 - Machete being used to plant seeds
Figure 24 - "Students" posing with the machete at the implemented agroforest
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Permaculture, social justice and care: ontologies, fluidity and politics in a social-farm in agroecological transition
V. •
POLITICS OF THE SOCIAL-FARM
What are some challenges of social-farm management as a potential pluriversal political ecological experience?
•
How do these multiple realities influences the virtual possibilities of social-farms politics?
By gathering both previous approaches of ontologies and assemblage, I will raise some challenges of farm's management as a potential pluriversal political ecological experience. In other words, the problem of how does the acknowledgement of different ontologies in a fluid socialfarm contribute for its management and its virtual potentialities will be addressed as well as further potential topics to be deeply researched on FNA’s ecology of every day.
Permaculture, pluriverse and fluidity “Permaculture? A crazy thing. I always said that I am from the city and I have no idea about the things from the farm, but if there is someone that can teach me, I will learn it. I am a "beetle-head" but I can learn it. For me it is not easy and you need to show me in real life because in the beginning I am suspicious. When you told me that in that piece of land (the worst of the farm, just rocks and hard soil) we would produce food I thought this boy is mad... But if he wants to try... I am here for already three and a half years and I have never seen something happen over there, but if he wants, let him do it. Whatever... And you started and I kind of suspicious, then you planted green manure and said in 3 years we will plant an orchard in here. Ok... If you are saying I guess... Then came the idea of a garden, because in my conventional concept, when I was a child, and that is a long time ago, I used to see my father plant lettuce. But it was just lettuce, if it was from here until the US, it would be just lettuce. Then another bed of kale and etc. One bed for
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of each thing. Then, you came with the proposal of planting everything together, at the same spot and moreover to put mato everywhere. And I thought, they will destroy everything.” (Ismael, fieldnotes)
Emerged from its peculiar ontology, as previously presented, to think in a permaculture way, anthropo-systemically, is to responsibly engage with reality affecting others entities as well as being affected by them through connections and relations; is to become assemblage. An interesting argumentation of Bennett (2009:23) while arguing why an approach such as the assemblage one became necessary is about the new reality’s configuration: “‘Globalization’ had occurred and the earth itself had become a space of events. The parts of this giant whole were both intimately interconnected and highly conflictual. This fact - of the coexistence of mutual dependency with friction and violence between parts - called for new conceptualizations of the part-whole relation.” Thus, Bennet found on the assemblage theory the episteme tools needed to develop his vibrant matter proposal. A different theoretical approach that would bring new concepts to enable an engagement with the process of becoming and from which, possibilities for a new reality that urged to be understood emerged. Indeed, the assemblage brings new possibilities for the relations between parts and holes, human and nonhumans. Also, from a different starting pointing and with no pretension of being a socio-philosophical theory, but also dealing with notions of continuous changes and interactions between parts and holes, permaculture was developed as an approach to enable the design of sustainable and productive human settlements. Several similarities can be drawn between both ideas. Also, the understanding of the permaculture design as a process of assemblage can raise 87
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some interesting perspectives of the design as a fluid process of becoming with virtual possibilities aiming to “adapt to energy descendent� (Holmgren, 2002:xxx) path. With the similar effects of globalization but from some much more ancient knowledges, the issues of parts, holes and its dynamic were also a trigger in the conceptualization of the permaculture affection. From narratives of life creation, ecological mesh and proposals such as the Gaia theory, the dynamic of reality was also perceived and used as starting point for a new design method based on principles, using the language of patterning and targeting connection for best maximizing energy use. And that, as I already argued, through its embodiment, another ontology can emerge. The language of a permaculture design method is patterning (Mollinson, 1988). Thus, in an analogy to the assemblage theory, if the ethical principles are the centrals configurations of coding, patterning would be the drawing of lines of flight in a process of (de)territorialization. Patterning is to recognize a natural intelligence/energy efficiency on how "natural" reality is constituted and mimic it through all kinds of strategies towards a synergic co-existence between people and place. Therefore, through the implementation of a design, territories would emerge through the mutual affect between landscapes, people, memories, feelings and all other entities. Thus, to approach a site through the "permacultural lens" would be to virtually affect the environment, pointing the potentialities for connections among all actor-entities in order to delay syntropy. In a permaculture jargon, when designing, one should develop the principle of auto regulation (Mollinson, 1988) where all needs of the site should be supplied from several fonts and all actorentities should have multiple functions. Once the design is implemented, a process of
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reterritorialization starts in which the virtual potentialities of the site-assemblage changes to actuality. For instance, a butterfly, result of the caterpillar's transformation, the icon of Holmgren's 12th design principle: Creatively use and respond to change (2002) somehow represents such fluidity of the materiality.
Figure 25 - Holmgren's 12th design principle: Creatively use and respond to change . at https://permacultureprinciples.com/principles/_12/ (accessed in 28/03/2017)
Such image, embody the concept of the permaculture design as a virtual potentiality for the actuality. Instead of another thing-novelty, the butterfly is a material continuity of the caterpillar. Before present as potentiality in the caterpillar, duo to certain (re)configurations of the assemblage, after the metamorphose, its potential-butterfly became "constituted" into the realm of the Actual. In other words, the caterpillar-butterfly assemblage changed its conformation due to its interactions from an actual-caterpillar/virtual-butterfly to a virtual-caterpillar/actual-butterfly. Such change shows some degree of fluidity in the assemblage's existence. The same animal-materiality on a new process of becoming. According to the principle, then, to design is to creatively perceive possible changes to the site (including the people-entities) and be prepared/sensible for the process inherent to its becoming. Thus, to work with virtual potentiality and fluidity. Hence, to design is to engage with the virtual potentialities presented in a site, imaging/drawing/experiencing possibilities of affection in order to achieve a resilient system: 89
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strata. In opposition, our conventional poison-technical-industrial agriculture or our modern way of life directs existence to a high-energy cost, low diversity, high pollution and low resilient but high short term economical profitable system that resembles to a body without organs, dismembered from a planet-rhizome comprehension. Such approach, though, is less consistent in others rationalities that rest in other ontologies, what brings again the challenge of how to deal/develop a pluriversal political ecological experience. A challenge that can be recognized in the collective permaculture design experience at the social-farm. As Ismael shared with the group one morning, “Just now, after all those years I am starting to grasp the meaning of what the permaculture volunteers are saying. Until now, it was like if they were using the Thanderas’ ward that could give to them a vision beyond reaching [referring to the cartoon series Thundercats, popular in Brazil during the 80’s]. That, where I used to just see mato or crops they could already see agroforests with timbers and food, as they could see the possible future right in front of their eyes”; [And I continue] The virtual part of the realm of the Real becoming actual through the “permacultural lens”. Such challenge that permaculture would bring to the everyday life through the adoption of ecological dynamics of niches, cycles and patterning would challenge the community of the farm to deal with a reality that wasn't fix. A reality made of interacting entities and several potential ways of being and affection that permaculturists should interfere in such way that would bring abundance to people and earth. One of the classic quotes from the dry toilets of Beira Serra agro-village in Botucatu -SP is "turning poo into flowers". Indeed, such biologic necessity is an interesting entry point to engage with permaculture, challenging some of our basic modern routine from an ontological approach.
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The way we conventionally relate to our sewage in Brazil is an interesting entering point to the relations of people and landscape on potential process of reterritorialization. Through "permacultural lens", sewage actualize as a bound between people and landscape. An actant (Latour, 2012) that affect bought people and place, changing habits and enabling abundance. My personal experience as science and permaculture teacher in middle public schools in Brazil allowed me to explore the sewage topic with the young students (Lotufo jr, 2013). Very interesting is that, having done the same approach in the permaculture social-farms that I have been giving support for the past five years, the collective reflections about the issue have been quite similar and enthusiastic51. Basically, the topic is approached through a history telling of the water cycle and water management in the city of SĂŁo Paulo. The conclusion is always a surprised exclamation like, "Hey, so that means that we drink water with sewage!". Our modern model of urbanization and lack of ethic responsibility in the way we relate to resources, lead to practices that obscure the things that are happening through alienation of the daily process and energy fluxes. As seen earlier, the ethic perspective of permaculture is center in the issue of care. From that, one of the challenges of permaculturists is to take responsibility for the process and products of his site. This can be translated in the mollinsonian principle of autoregulation. That is, the elements in a design should have multiple functions and be “sustainedâ€? from several fonts (Mollinson, 1988). All this to trap the energy inside the system the longest possible to then finally direct to sink (entropy) the remnant energy with responsibility.
51
For more information see www.borapermaculturar.wordpress.com (accessed in 28/03/2017).
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In the case of sewage, a conventional system will use clean (potable) water to carry fezes and whatever more we flush to a central station that will end in a river, sea or groundwater52 often polluting those environments53. Thus, a lot of energy (and money) is spend to clean water, then to make it dirty and then clean it again in a centralized system that detached people (users) from the actual processes; once flushed the shit is not more a problem of its creator, becoming the problem of a completely impersonal somebody else or government. By using the “permacultural lens”, those terribly designed systems become acknowledged in such way that the new affection of those entities end up challenging one to become responsible for its own “shit”. From that, several possibilities are rose to re-design such developments in a permaculture-responsible way. Several techniques are possible to delay entropy keeping longer the energy on the system and being responsible to let it leave the site without creating problems or pollution further in the broad system (environment). Thus, such approach changes the relation of people and environment. The “outside or out there” is molten into the subject resulting on a people-place assemblage. Sewage becomes an actant, affecting both person and backyard. Hence, through the “permacultural lens”, a (re)territorialisation occurs resulting in a new people-place identity; blurry edges that entangle endings and beginnings through the expansion of responsibility and care. Furthermore, the question raised by (de la Bellacasa, 2011:92) "what are we encouraging caring for?" can nicely suit on what we were experiencing during those permaculture classes. After
52
In Brazil the rural areas don’t have sewage systems and often a “sept tank” which drain the untreated water to the groundwater reservoir, polluting it, are used. 53
According to the NGO Trata Brasil, only 10 cities in the country treat more than 80% of their sewage and more than 40% of the sewage in not treated. For more see http://www.tratabrasil.org.br/saneamento-no-brasil (accessed in 28/03/2017).
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the collective single clap (borrowed from an indigenous tradition of determining the storytelling moments on collective gatherings) we would open the possibility for another world to be somehow experienced. As a "student" said during a class, "we were learning to thing like nature". And, yet, another one that shared how happy he was of being able to express his relation with his crop in another way, including feelings with a vocabulary that gave some kind of identity to his plants. Not that they had personalities but that he certainly had his favorites that received some extra attention. Also, a space to share frustration about the clashes that we were experiencing through the conventional approaches and labor orientations that were often given by the managers that most of the time were busy in other activities and wouldn't attend the classes. Also, as presented in this reflection, the embodiment of permaculture blur the configuration between humanity and nature through an anthropo-systemic affection. In a way, through such experience, another reality emerges in which non-humans have agency. This doesn't mean that it will claim such drastic modern discontinuity as seen in other ontologies through a first glance but it could be perceived on a more careful analysis such as the one presented in this ethnography. Thus, permaculture should be considered part of the “biocentric turn away from the anthropocentrism of modernity� referred by Escobar (2012:xxvi). Born in the junction of modern and ancient worlds and principle based, permaculture uses multiple practices and techniques in order to adapt the site design to its local context. Thus, each technique is chosen according to the context of the local but driven by its ethical principles. By that, many times other peculiar strategies (derived from other ontologies) can be incorporated such as anthroposophical biodynamics, Syntropic agriculture, shamanism, homeopathic and others. Also, many times, these processes involve a broad number of participants from different
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backgrounds. And finnaly, its embodiment potentialize a rhizomatic experience. Thus, in both cases, designing and developing a site on a permaculture way will be a pluriversal political ecological challenge. For instance, as part of the permaculture design that was being implemented at FNA, a non-conventional sewage system is foreseen. Today the sewage of the farm is sunk into the ground. Although the project was done and its theory already presented to all community, the starting of the proper ecological sewage system was being constrained by the local legislation and partners. The modern values of its dominant ontology wouldn’t accept the idea of recycling the feces on the property due to conventions of thought and ignorance of such possibilities. Even less probable to allow as possibility inter-subjective affections between humans and non-humans. Behind those small examples of daily life that I presented here, it was possible to unfold ontological clashes that were till some extent being partial acknowledge and becoming partially addressed through politics between different ontologies. Under the "permacultural lens", to maximize the energetic potentiality of the place and also its integration to the bioregion, the treatment of the sewage of the site would be preferable treated locally inside its perimeter. It is part of the ethical commitment of care to be responsible for all your actions, including maximize energy production and avoid pollution. In other hand, according to some legislation, it is irregular to not be connected to the public sewage system, even though just a small percentage of it is treated nationally. Behind a practical issue of what to do with the sewage was an ontological clash of the anthropo-systemic affection and the modern (dual: human x nature) rationality. From this specific example, one might be tempted to attribute it to a simple epistemological matter of how to do something in the world. But once all these small examples are put together, it becomes evident that, although permaculture was born under a modern approach, its entanglement
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with other ancient wisdoms and, moreover, through its embodiment over the daily life at the socialfarm, permaculture becomes an ontology in which the inter-subjective affection of its entities (material and nonmaterial, human and nonhuman) emerge on fluid reality. Thus, the social-farm as well as other initiatives that uses permaculture inputs and/or share its anthropo-systemic affection such as ecovillages, transition town and other agroecology movements as well as indigenous movements represent a political realm that involves plural ontologies. To explore ethnographically permaculture initiatives as well as those others initiatives of an alternative development based on the buen vivir (Escobar, 2012), can help to highlight alternative possibilities and its political struggles intertwined to the pluriverse. Furthermore, through assemblage theory and permaculture, it is possible to engage with the real, that is not just plural but also fluid. Enabling to concede the possibilities of virtual potentialities as important as the corporeal actualities. Indissociably parts of reality, affecting and challenging the daily politics, such as in the researched case of the social-farm Fazenda Nova Aurora's management.
Cosmopolitics Before the lunch prayers Ismael started to talk with the community about a toilet paper’s theft and baths in non-authorized hours. “Here 'aint' the street, neither the prison. It is not everyman for himself!” He said. And continued, “Here we are a therapeutic community. We are here changing our values and principles. And the challenge is not the big things, it’s the daily small thigs that always challenge us”. (Ismael, fieldnotes)
As presented earlier, once different realities of universes encounter, a necessity of an ontological politic emerge; a "pluriverse requires a cosmopolitics" (Blaser, 2016:546). Thus, to
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embrace the multiplicity and fluidity of the Real requests a reinvention of politics on a pluriversalfluid way. With the globalization of neoliberalism as a coloniality continuity, modern ontology apparently consecrated itself as hegemonic in the planet, turning its core principles in common sense. At the same time, advances on social inclusion of indigenous groups at the political sphere have also been more frequent and its ontological clashes more publicly partially known (cf. Escobar, 2010). Thus, it is through the practices of daily socialization that such discontinuities of the basic understandings of how things come to be erupt. As Mol (1999:75) stated, “reality does not precede the mundane practices in which we interact with it, but is rather shaped within these practices”. For such cases, a multiculturalist approach that have its concerns on the how in the world (different ways of interpreting a subject placed in the reality) does not addresses the problem. In other words, in such cases, the epistemological approach presupposes a false common ground. Thus, a multinaturalism approach that “focuses on what kinds of worlds are there and how they come into being (an ontological concern)” (Blaser, 2009:11) is needed. Therefore, to bring up the different realities in which politics take place and reinterpret its clash as the out coming of the social interaction of co-existent worlds is a concern of political ontology. Following, some examples will help to clarify some of the resulting struggles of this collision of realities. In her article, Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes, La Cadena (2010) presents that as the result of the participation of indigenous social movements (which intrinsically brings its particular ontology), a new pluriversal constitution of Ecuador was adopted in 2008. Among its content, chapter 7 recognizes rights to Pachamama (mother Earth). As result of emergent indigeneity, an earth-being became represented on the most important document of the nation. As
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explicitly divergent from modern rationality, its content was severe criticized by, at the time, the current president Rafael Correa as an infantile approach that endanger the state's political process (Ospina 2008 in LaCadena 2010). Statement that embodied the modern rationality as dominant and exclusive, from a fixed reality that did not foresee other possibility into being. Another political struggle related to different ontologies is the attempt to integrate Yshiros' conception of the Yrmo on a hunting program (Blaser, 2009). In this case, the “ontological understandings� of the Yshiros were accepted as long as it followed the modern rationality of the conservationist program. In other words, the different form that Yshiros conceived the environment was understood just as another way of interpreting the same reality, an epistemological divergence. Yet, the problem emerged from a deeper and previous distinction of that basic reality: the locals didn't have the modern (ontological) assumption of a world in which culture and nature are divided. As a result, even though the number of animals hunted didn't exceed the agreement, other issues concern private property and the meanings of restriction of exclusive rights were enough to frame the situation as environmental depredation and devastation. In both cases, although "facts" and politics were being developed among different worlds, they didn't guarantee that power was well balanced among the parts (words). Although others ontologies were present on the creation of policy, they were addressed from the optic of the modern society, through its rules, laws and understandings, being subordinated through violence to a sort of "second category". Therefore, the issue of how to do this kind of ontological politic in an arena that is not fixed in one of the worlds, that is fluid enough to embrace this ontological encounter is the core issue. In Blaser (2009:18) words, “the challenge is how do we account for ontological
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encounters when any account presupposes an ontological grounding”. Something that maybe request the need of exploring a meta-ontology to find such a commonplace54. However, in order to explore those clashes, a look into experiences of plural ontologies, such as these specific ones of the social-farm can help provide some insights on cosmopolitical challenges through FNA’s management struggles. Not just through the plurality but also through realities’ fluidity. A rhizomatic state of becoming under the dance of Virtual and Actual realms of the Real. At the same moment, at the FNA, one is completing his first week there. Still feeling sick and troubled due to the abstinence period. Everything is new as he discovers a world(s) where miracles are accepted and some treat the garden as “part of the family”. Another one has already gain weight and the color of his face improved. On his fourth month at the farm, he looks healthy again and he starts to wonder about his first trip back home for a short period that will help him to engage with future plans. Other one yet is on his last weeks, experiencing a mix of anxiety and fear towards his next step. Everyone affecting and being affected by all others, humans and nonhumans entities, composing FNA’s assemblage. Also, the daily adequacies of farm’s life increase the challenge of realities’ interface. For instance, in a period of less than two weeks, a lot changed on farms’ gardening sector. Rene choose to leave the farm after a discussion, Alison was allocated to the kitchen after the fight and Antonio and Betão had completed their times and were leaving for their next step. Julio, that had less than a month at the TC suddenly became the only one at the job.
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A general review of the “ontological turn” and meta-ontologies can be found in Pedersen (2012).
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Each one living one reality at that garden. Having one experience, been affected and affecting other entities in a peculiar way that made the garden become what it was. Also, having some kind of a collective reality that was increasingly becoming anthropo-systemic. All that under the farms' management, that sometimes would listen to what the others had to say, other times just determined what should be done. For instance, Alison had received his first visit that month and he spend most of the time at the implemented agroforest system that he had been appointed as responsible for caring. The visits were his parents and they stayed there talking and dreaming about how he could enter a technical course after finishing his “treatment” to continue this agronomic knowledge that he seemed to like so much. After his internment at FNA, his family decided to move to another place. Quieter and with space where a garden could be done and he could experience a new beginning. In other hand, Rene had already some experience in working with gardening. Although he was quite interested in the theoretical classes and new ways of working with the plants through what he called “natural gardening”, he decided to leave his treatment in the middle. Maybe what he was experiencing at the garden was not enough to help him overcome the misunderstandings of the everyday. Also, Antonio confessed to me at his last day at the garden that he loved those “little plants” and shared with me the following: “In a way, I am relief that I am leaving before we start to change this place. I am quite jealous of all my ‘babies’ and I think that I would suffer too much if I would see all this changing to a jungle” [referring to the fact that the old garden was in an area of environmental protection and would have to be transformed into a forest again].
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As for Julio, he was quite happy. He was feeling better after the firsts weeks and he found in the garden something that he was very good, to clear weeds of the garden beds [Julio has several scars on his body and a problem with his leg that restrain his movements]. Each person of the gardening team had one story and experienced different connections with all entities, affecting and being affected, hence emerging as assemblage. Thus, such collective experience enables the changing of the garden from a place to a rhizomatic territory that should somehow be managed by the three FNA’s directors. Yet, other actors such as a government environmental fiscal that was demanding that half of the garden would become a protected forest area again, Kim and his business aspirations to profit from commercializing with the Korean community and CENA's downtown directors with the expectations of the farm becoming a self-sufficient permaculture environment would also play roles in the social-farm's politics and for instance the emerged garden-assemblage. As Carlos said on a after lunch managers' meeting, "we are sleeping well. The house's energy is fine. João, you have no idea... There are times that it is so tense in here that any spark promotes several problems. And believe me, there are several sparks happening all the time." And I kept thinking for a while after the meeting, the interface of realities sure does promote some heavy sparks... A clash of multiple worlds that had to be manage somehow by the farm managers. Although sometimes such challenge would be partially managed through process of coordination and distribution (Mol, 2002), several others moments would explode in uncontrolled equivocations. Mainly, when differences could be notice, strategies such as distribution would be used and spiritual and modern worlds would be carefully separated. When talking to the municipal fiscal, the modern world would come out of the drawer and the spiritual one would be locked inside
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another. After it, on the following management lunch meeting the draws would be "opened" again and the spiritual would come out for prayers about provisions or gratefulness. But, although pluriverse, often reality would be accessed through a culturalistic perspective; under one truly reality from which different understanding could emerge. Thus, a single reality would perceive all interpretations/experiences. From that, the garden would be dealt without acknowledging its plural realities. Hence, the interface of the multiple gardens would be unnoticed emerging in clashes and confusion. Different actors would be talking about different gardens presuming it was the same. Commodity, vegetation, a sacred or healing place, a "part of the family". All clashing under uncontrolled equivocation. Therefore, the experience at FNA becomes cosmopolitical when the daily management of the social-farm "allows" the multiple worlds to be. Thus, recognizing them as possibilities that have the same importance, are in the same level of relevance. A flat ontological approach that know less and allow more. That open room in the table for the different on a humble experience of care through "slowing down the reason" (DeLacadena, 2010:361). Also, as fluid, realities can erupt or melt unexpected. Hence, this need of a pluriversal management also can suddenly be perceived. If one day reality is such that a specific approach can handle it, the following day, it can rise with actualization of realities' virtualities, thus emerging in novelties in which a new challenge would be presented over the same materiality. For instance, three years ago, the permaculture volunteers advised the managers of the farm just work with plants until a stable and productive foodforest was established for then engage with animal production such as cows. A demand of Ismael because, as he said back then, "a farm needs a cow to be a farm, otherwise is not a proper farm".
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Although Rodrigo explained that, "we didn't give the proper care to the garden once and it died 'quietly', a cow wouldn't do the same. In fact, it would die quite noisy and such thing could affect much more the 'care of the people' in FNA". Albeit such point was made as well as others such as the more intensive work and responsibility for such step, the decision was made and a cow was bought. Three years later, Aurora (the cow), had a small calf named Dorinha but still no proper barn or field. Every day she would be tied up somewhere in the farm that had enough grass for her to eat and at night she would be brought to a small fenced open area to sleep. Very roughly cared, one day someone forgot to collect her for the night, she dripped and felt on a groove and died asphyxiated by the rope in her neck. Next morning the accident was discovered. The cow was cut into pieces and storage into the freezer for future meat consumption. I was told that because of the way she died and the time it took to prepare the meat, it was possible to taste a specific unpleasant flavor on the meat. Also, that it was so much meat that for the next 3 months Aurora was presented on the menu every other day. In the beginning, more than half of the "students" didn't want to eat the meat. It wasn't "any" meat, that was Aurora. Once time went by, more and more people accepted to eat her meat but the guy that had forgotten to collect her that night never succeed in eat the meat, having nausea every time he tried. One day, after around one month of permaculture classes, Abdula, a recent arrived "student", started to talk with me while we were working on the field. He was quite upset about how the chickens (specially the chicks) and Dorinha (the "orphan" little cow) were cared. It was quite interesting to see Abdula so worried about those animals. He was known at FNA for his ability of not been able to integrate socially and whenever he could, skip work. But now, he was saying that we should work more to care properly of the chicks and specially of Dorinha. That we
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should construct a shelter for her and buy some extra food. That he could be the responsible for that. He started to compare how Carlos (the manager) would care excessively about his horse, Menina. That he would buy food and talk about her during the announcements and prayers and complained about how people wasn't taking care of his horse... And that he never heard him talking about Dorinha, and that such thing wasn't fair. Some days later, I was building a shelter with him [Abdula] for Dorinha, Carlos was sharing Meninas' food with her and the chicks had a safe passage for a special area of the chicken coop. Abdula manage to influence several changes on the farm by talking all the time about those issues, complaining and demanding the "rights" of the animals. As Piauí, one of the responsible for the animals said, it "was quite a surprise what Abdula achieved. Specially being him, a guy that didn't like to work or cared about others at the farm". That he [Piauí], had to fix the chicken coop otherwise he wouldn't rest. Although Abdula was the only one that cared about the chicks being treated "humanly", he managed to convince everyone about the issue and, suddenly, everywhere he [Piauí] would go, someone would say something about the animals' welfare. The management of the farm was affected by this other reality in which non-humans have rights and, after more than 3 years ignoring such rights, one "student", maybe driven by this other anthropo-systemic affection, achieved to make so much noise that his "childish but loud" claims were notices and accepted55. Also, although the management of the farm is presented through a hierarchical decision format, the community bases relation is most valued. As Ismael told me, “we started to literally
55
It is very interesting to notice how other ways of thinking are often related to madness or childish by the dominant rationality somehow grounded in a certain ontology.
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walk with them, we would work on the land with them, showing that we were like them. If it was needed to give soup in someone mouth that had just arrived and didn’t have the condition to do it, we would” but, “the decisions are always of the leadership. We don’t give the decision power to them because, right now, they are not in the condition to decide. If we give to them such power, they will want to decide always and sometimes they will come with a ‘ready package’. They will do the tribunal up there [referring to the “students” accommodations] and come with an already closed verdict”. Thus, the daily management of the farm is much fuzzier then the supposed strict rules and top-down hierarchy. Thus, clouding the borders of Virtual and Actual realms of the Real. If for one hand, the decisions of the farm were on a top-down format, completely centered on the managers, as Carlos stated to me when talking about his activities, “the volunteers should be straighter to the point with them [managers]. They shouldn’t leave for everybody of the farm to decide but just say how It should be done and that’s it!”. And very strict to maintain the order like, for instance when I had to stay as witness for a final warning talk between Ismael and Luís, a “student” that had stolen a toilet paper from another peer in which Ismael was giving a last opportunity before making the decision of expelling him from FNA. On another hand, while we were walking on the higher crops, Ismael was telling me how a “student” named Jucelino, that was a serious worker and that had initiative, started a cassava and beans plantation there in his leisure time. Ismael didn’t have a clue about what was going there and when he realized all the good work that Jucelino had put there and how nice it was, he decided that those crops should become an “official” activity of the farm. In the same way, all the corn crops near the lake that were being harvested started by Paulo’s initiative which even included buying the corn seeds using his own money through the help of a trainee.
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Although the final decision was clearly on the managers’ hands, the discourse and practice of it was much more fluid, switching its actual and virtual realities, thus opening space for unimaginable potentials and actuals initiatives over the management of social-farms’ assemblage. Such fluidity of FNA assemblages’ reality would be always challenging its management. Once we started to study about permaculture and exploring its anthropo-systemic affection on our daily activities through new forms of doing and understanding the everyday activities, several interesting points started to be risen by the “students”. For instance, on our permaculture lectures a debate started when Jonathan, one of the responsible for chopping wood for the stove, said that they were cutting too many trees at the forest and that such action was destroying it. That if the forest was also God’s creation we should do it different so we could practice the care also in those actions. That we should find an ecological way to produce fire such as the one we watched on an introductory agroforestry video. Carlos, the manager responsible for coordinating the firewood activity, answered saying that they were guilty about that because they would chop the wood too thin, thus burning too fast in the stove and also that they would cut too much the forest around the firewood because they were afraid of snakes. Also, in another day, during a class about the ecological importance of living soil, the “students” rose the issue of the ant killer that Ismael gave to them to use on the crops. They wanted to know if that was natural or not because that was an organic farm and they shouldn’t use poisons. The agroecology ideas were already presented at the farm but at the same time several practices weren’t exactly following those principles. Most of the time “students” were complaining about the managers and the managers complaining about the “students”. Also, permaculture volunteers would complain and be the reason of complains. And I should say that everybody was right and wrong at the same time. If
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there were organizational, strategic and bureaucratic issues that could be easily improved, several other misunderstandings had a much deeper reason, clashes of different realities. For instance, when interviewing Rodrigo, a permaculture volunteer, about the struggles that they had with the managers, he listed me several problems and misunderstandings that the volunteer group encountered. After every problem listed, he would point Ismael as the responsible for it. It was about his lack of wiliness, time, interest, etc. I then asked if he thought it would be different if another person would be in his place like Humberto, a friend of us that was taking care of another TC. He answered me undoubtedly that we would have had if not the same at least very similar problems. I laughed and commented, “But till now it was all Ismael’s’ fault...”. The encounter of different worlds can erupt by transforming apparent simple problems such the issue of the mato, in uncontrolled equivocation. Such partial communication would need time and experiences to be better understood and somehow overcome with again a limited solution. Not surprisingly Rodrigo was not convinced that such a simple matter (from his view, in his reality) should take so much time to be overcome. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to say if Ismael actually understands the same I do when we are talking about agroecology. But certainly, after all this years, he is able to at least to engage on a “permacultural” dialogue with me. As he said one day, “when someone cut down a tree without being needed, my heart hurts”. To engage on the cosmopolitics of the everyday requires effort towards a flat ontology. An “allowance” of other worlds that works towards exposing differences not previously assumed, thus "controlling equivocations" through partial communications. At the same time, in a way to avoid a coloniality of modern rationality, politics are held under process of coordination and distribution. All under a fluid scenario in which the realm of Real, its Actual and Virtual becoming challenges every fix approach.
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Hence, becoming turns to be the central point of management and the dealing with the partial communications emerged from the interfaced realities its main challenge. Beyond senders and receivers, talking and listening, the cosmopolitics that take place at the social-farm has to deal with the embodiment of the experiencing ontologies. More than words, to communicate becomes an assemblage of talk-listen and its actual experiences at that specific realities. In other words, the management defiance becomes the "therapeutic" daily politics as social engagements "embodied within lived experience" of care (Fisher, Arce, and Díaz Copado, for coming). During this fieldwork, there were times where I could clearly notice that problems were “just” about organization. Other times I wasn’t so sure. And yet, others I could wonder about ontological issues. Although all actors were “western” people, "children of modernity", FNA scenario was quite rich. And, although not apparent on a first glance, the social-farm was a pluriverse of multiple ontologies. Something that the "trinity ontological model" helped me to better illustrate through the argumentations, clashes and maneuvers of FNA's daily politics. Some times in partial awareness strategies and others in completely misunderstandings. Thus, FNA’s ecology of the everyday became a rich pluriverse scenario, reinforcing the thesis that fluid realities are very present at any apparently homogeneous unique reality. Also, that through a closer participatory observation it was possible to grasp ontological embodiments in which glances of the everyday politics under multiple realities could be pointed as cosmopolitical experiences or its anathema, an imposed coloniality of the mind.
Final thoughts and further questions “Nowadays, the way I look is not the same. My understandings are completely different from the ones I have when I arrived here. The mato, for instance, people would gather it and put fire. And I used to think that that was right. Where have you seen to
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cut it to just leave there? But then, when they explained to me … I started to look to all that in a different way. Then we started to watch some videos of another crazy person that was doing agroforestry, planting food with trees, with fruits… This person is mad, but if he is doing over there and is working, I need to learn it, because if it is working there with him, it will also work here. And the idea of the guy is very simple, mimic nature. And, here, nature is what we most have. We have a lot of “untouched” nature. Then we started to look to the forests and started to learn. Though, today, our thing is not “clean” the mato, but is to put more of it” (Ismael, fieldnotes)
The politic of agroecology movements, specially permaculture, goes beyond power struggles and epistemic possibilities inside the reality. Its particular anthropo-systemic affection drives the possibilities of the forms of action from the "essentialities" of a particular world, thus, clashing with the modern ontology and challenging the edges of its economic rationality from its basic pillars of existence. To engage with reality through permaculture is to live/understand anthropo-systemically. Eventually having political ontological experiences embedded on the daily exercises of life. If not so explicit as different worlds such some indigenous ontologies, a closer look to permaculture can reveal its distinct world narrative that often clashes to modernity through equivocations in the continuous search-build of Freire's (1970) more beautiful and human life. Hence, the possibility of a multinaturalism approach blurs the boundaries of livelihoods. The modern reality becomes just one particularly possibility of one world that differs from several others such as the agroecology one. In a way, to conceive other realities is to stress the becoming of other possibilities of what it could be towards an interplay of common worlds. To challenge the modern ontology's binary rationality (which conceives culture or nature, humans or non-humans) through the pluriverse is, among others, to engage with principles such as the one of relationality.
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From what, basic ideas tend to be turned into a fluid concept where objects and subjects get intermingle in a complex way. As told by LaCadena (2010:361), just through “slowing down the reason� it may become possible to engage beyond politics, meaning to engage in the daily social life in a certain way in which the room for other worlds and rationalities is equally guarantee. If, on one hand, to address other ontologies is already a challenge, on another hand, to deal (politically) through pluriverse, truly engaging with different ontologies by means of a controlled equivocation that would recognize distinct worlds and it would explore its differences through a cosmological governance. Thus, rather from a mental exercise about the topic, as anthropologists, we should bring into the theoretical discussion concrete experiences of multiple worlds. Its overlapping experiences and struggles of daily politics, its clashes with other ontologies as well as examples and possibilities of dealing, reclaiming, building or living the pluriverse can become insights of other possibilities of how things could be (and are being) in the anthropocene present era. Hence, FNA's agroecology transition experience promotes a challenge to "how things have always been done" by interfacing multiple worlds. The theoretical and practical permaculture classes were creating a "world-making effect" (de la Bellacasa, 2011:86). Thus, bringing another reality to the apparent distributed spiritual/modern multiverse and challenging the usual attempts of management in the social-farm. Also, its experience was "permeabilizing the minds" of managers and "students" in order to enable the coexistence of such worlds under a flat ontological approach. Thus, challenging the modern narratives and its "rigid reasoning" that would easily present the "other" as craziness through traditional bio-power (Foucault, 1990) towards something more likely to Radiotti's posthuman-polity (2013:169) in which "intense de-familiarization of our
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habits of thought through encounters that shatter the flat repetition of the protocols of institutional reason" are expected. If the pluriverse already blurs the fixed colonial/culturalistic approach by challenging the clear distinctions of "human and things" and "us and them" (Latour, 2012), the assemblage approach probe such issues even more through the notion of inter-subjectivity (Allen, 2011 in Blanco, Arce and Fisher, 2015). Not inside or out there, the reality emerges from how the entities affects each other. Not a fixed interaction but a fluid one, thus, open to any possible "architectures" of entities affections as well as rationalities, feelings, memories, etc. that will culminate on the establishment of the upcoming reality. Thus, such scenario becomes an invitation for a reflection about some management issues. FNA's ethnography shows that beyond its complexity56, once fluid and pluriverse, the social-farm's reality becomes a challenge for any attempt of fixed management approaches under one rationality. Thus, as presented in Umans and Arce (2014), a top-down outsider rigid intervention is likely to become a flunk. Indeed, a fixed approach towards management is sustained by the assumption of a single solid reality. A conception here contested through the narratives of FNA's ethnography. Although the social-farms' management was centered on an apparent top-down fixed preestablished order. Such reality would often become virtual while a fluid practice would be developed adapting arrangements and performances to the flighty actuality of FNA's daily life. A shift from order to ordering, thus enabling flexibility; The interfaced realities emerging in novelty.
56
The following fragment of my fieldnote may represent part of such complexity were a state bureaucratic approval or a piece of toilet paper can equally start a serious problem on the social-farm: "I still couldn't make the presentation walk through the farm with Carlos. We are trying to do it since 7:30 in the morning but several things keep continually appearing for him to solve. Telephone rings, explanation of activities, someone with tooth pain, tight shoes that need to be changed, a brother of a "student" that died and needs solace and a trip to be planed... After more than 3 hours since we decided to start the tour we are finally going towards the first labor therapy spot to check it out".
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Becoming that has to be dealt through a management that attempts ordering the new reality erupted from the interactions and affection of the entities that composes the moment. Not management as order for the present but as ordering the to become. The "going with the flow" motto (Umans and Arce, 2014) represents a warn about how management should be re-understood less rigid-external to more fluid-autonomous. A similar proposal can be found behind the permaculture proposal, which is based on principles not laws. Hence, instead of imposing rules, a permaculture approach is focus on woven the place's entities to increase the availability of local energy and delay the systems entropy. If rules would work in a fixed reality, principles enable the necessary fluidity to bring resilience to the designed site. Also, although, at FNA the Christian religious institutionalized ideas can influence the management on a top-down fixed approach where the truth and knowledge are within the managers, at the same time, an interesting counter direction approach was also experienced. That is, the ontology that sustain the Christian super-rationality blurred the linear structure of church’s historical governance through the concept of service (see Luke 22:27), in which the embodied God comes to serve, thus integrated in society's "bottom"; experiencing and dealing with the emerged everyday issues. Thus, a less rigid and more liquid experience. Thus, some managers' experiences such as the "doing things together with the 'students'" proposal and the agroecology transition are events that convert to disrupt the rigid centered and expected top-down management interventions into less static ones. That is, flatter relational and autonomous webs can be subtle acknowledged as flourishing characteristics of such continuous new-experiences in the dealing of the everyday on a more fluid management. Not that FNA's management have already completely incorporated its reality as fluid pluriverse, but that through
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some moments of the daily activities, is possible to glance the emergence of fluid practices, adapting its management to the interplay of worlds and their (re)territorializations. Also, born as a proposition of society, the concept of therapeutic community somehow resists to the institutionalized bio-politic that rules about normality and abnormality. If not affecting the power over life in such dramatically situations as the common criminal slaughter and death squads that work to "clean" the city, the embodiment of care promoted by the experiences at the social-farm was a live statement of counteract against the “Foucaultian" bio-political statuesque. For instance, all farm managers would always check who would be on duty at the local hospital emergency. Depending on the doctor, it would not even be worth going. Once that doctor realized who was the patient, he would just give him a "benzetacil", a very strong and painful medicinal shot, and send him home. In fact, while I was there we even had a case that in following day (after the benzetacil shot) we took the student to another hospital in a larger municipality where we found out that his problem was so serious that he had to go immediately to surgery. But, for that doctor in Juquitiba – our city, marginal drug addicts shouldn't be spending the resources that could help save others more "relevant" lives. Therefore, this phenomenon at the therapeutic social-farm that I am referring here as the embodiment of care confront such social arrangement through its concrete existence, actions and affects. That is, novelty emerged from the interfaced ontologies producing a new ontology; new life. Another "expression to ways of being and corporeally engaging in the world" (Fisher. Arce, DĂaz Copado, forthcoming). Also, an ontological embodiment that affect both agency and "citizenship" over the practical politics of everyday. For instance, one day, we received a NGO that works with native
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stingless bees called SOS Salvem as abelhas sem ferrĂŁo at the farm. Basically, they came to do some educational activity with the "students" and position some bee nests to capture splitting hives that would later be taken to another more degraded locality as part of a land restauration program. We split in small groups and went to different forested locations to arrange the bee "traps". In one of the groups we had Paula, a permaculture volunteer, together with a guy from the NGO and two "students". Following, I transcribe her narrative of a specific moment in the middle of the jungle. "We were there, in a place where the mato was very tall. Opening our way through it with a machete and looking for spots to fix the traps. We were walking and talking. All very natural and harmonic. Suddenly, I don't really know why, how or who actually started the subject but the conversation became focused on drug issues, the life on the streets and criminality. Then, without any warning, the guy from the NGO said, 'yeap, I am a retired police officer. I have killed a lot of street trumps that started to work dealing drugs...'. My heart started to beat faster. One of the 'students' stopped what he was doing, looked to the guy and said with street and roguery slangs, 'well, I must say that I worked in a boca back in the days and I also shot quite a few polices...'. My heart stopped and the air became heavier while the two kept staring each other. It was the longest five seconds ever... Then, they just looked back to the bee trap and someone said, 'well but that was a long time ago, now let's take care of the bees'. And all that tension of such awkward moment just dissolved back in the lighter happier environment of before. And I kept thinking, this is incredible, just in a place like this to something like this to happen and yet be overflowed by love" (fieldnotes).
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Such encounter, if it was to be happen in a different time, on a different place, it would most likely result in tragedy. But in that moment, at that place, the rhizomatic experience of becoming assemblage of land, people, bees, wild, feelings, memories, beliefs, etc. emerged in tolerance and hope. A spontaneous achievement from care's embodiment through those interfaced ontologies. Moreover, this relational experience of assemblage affects distinctly agency and citizenship. If in the bee case, both agency and citizenship worked towards the same result where the embodiment of care resulted on understanding over a peaceful and well resulted activity, other times such as when Antonio's relation with his plants at the garden triggered conflicts with the people of the kitchen because they "wouldn't treat the vegetables with the respect they should, doing like in a madam house where the minimal defect on a leaf would be enough reason to throw it away". In this latter case, although the embodiment of care would allow Antonio's agency to build up active alliances with non-human entities, his 'citizenship' wouldn't be developed in the same sense, resulting in a huffier way of dealing with the cookers through fights and discussions. Something not to be expected from the 'good citizen' that farm managers are trying to help generate. Hence, agency and citizenship would emerge from the embodiment of care but would also have autonomy from the therapeutic management to develop in different ways. Furthermore, this ethnographic research instigates me to raise other questions that couldn't be referred on this thesis. Among those I highlight the following issues that are provoking me: What is management then? How the notion of care coexists with the so much present gender and homophobic issues that encountered on my participant observation? What a deeper look to how/what make the "students" decide to come to the farm and how they actually experience this
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process of "becoming new"? (not from the management's challenge perspective but from the "students"’ personal journey) and to think more extensively about the embodiment of care and eventual turning points (re-arrangements) for the decision of coming to or leaving the farm as well as how can such example be positioned over Ingold (2011) and Tsing (2015) distinct positions about how to "link process of becoming to expressions of being in the world through the life course" (Fisher. Arce, DĂaz Copado, forthcoming) and the potential relations between permaculture and posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013a).
Discussion On this reflection, I argue that to experience permaculture can promote another possibility of existence that blurs the basic concepts of what is nature and culture trough an actualization of "ancient-modern"/"modern-ancient" knowledge/wisdom in a hybrid narrative. Thus, permaculture could promote rhizomatic experiences at the social-farm such as how Antonio treated the plants as part of his family or how Lucas' garden became his "office" or yet how Dorinha became part of the collective concern. Hence, although Permaculture was developed inside the modern scientific paradigm, its embodiment enable me to point out the emergence of another ontology. Furthermore, to experience permaculture on the social-farm helped to open this possibility of fluidity and pluriverse through the daily activities and challenges emerged from the project ground. By concrete experiences such as having opportunities in horizontal spaces to share and reflect about farm's agroecology transition, our community became empowered to share and reflect about the affections that changed certain realities. Also, to actively/politically deal with those novelties in multiple situations such as defending the right of a fruit tree, organizing a movement
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to build a house to Dorinha or listening, sharing and experiencing the possibilities emerged from that "world-making effect" (de la Bellacasa, 2011:86) of learning and living those permaculture principles. Also, through experiencing fluidity, where actual and virtual are both part of real, potentialities become part of "what is". Or, using Ismael example when referring to his challenge in conducting the farm, the "crazy" things become just another possibility. Indeed, years of certainties were being challenge by another ontology in which the affection between Dorinha and Abdula unfold in such (re)territorialization of the social-farms that even Carlos, the other manager, felt that he should buy with his own money special food for the neglected cow. That just now, after all those years managing the farm, he (Ismael) was starting to grasp the "vision beyond reaching" that the permaculture volunteers had. That is, in some way the permaculture experience had open the door to other realities where inter-subjective57 affections could produce novelty. Thus, in a way, engaging with Braidotti's (2013a:186) proposal in which, "the posthuman predicament enforces the necessity to think again and to think harder about the status of the human, the importance of recasting subjectivity accordingly, and the need to invent forms of ethical relations, norms and values worthy of the complexity of our times". In other words, such experience was affecting Ismael in such way that he could be starting to reconsider fix management attempts towards a more rhizomatic approach towards social-farm's reality.
57
"Refers to alliances that are formed at an interface whereby entities ('real' or not) construct and dismantle themselves as they cross each other's boundaries to constitute new individualities, be this linguistic or corporeal, capable of generating a degree of power or potential" (after Deleuze and Guattari, 1988 in Blanco, Arce and Fisher, 2015:180).
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Pictures
Figure 26 - Batismódromo
Figure 27 - Consortium of corn, bean, sunflower and eucaliptus
Figure 28 - "Students" checking the permaculture activity plan
Figure 29 - Dorinha, the farm´s cow
Figure 30 - View of the back field
Figure 31 – Sheet with the daily tasks of the “students”
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VI.
•
CONCLUSION
What are some main divergences between modern, permaculture and spiritual ontologies? Whereas from modern ontology emerges an economic rationality in which everything is
commoditized and culture and nature are distinct from one another (as shown by the burned mato that gave place to fern, a potentially new profitable product); from permacultural ontology emerges an anthropo-systemic affection that blurs the limits between culture and nature, what can be seen when André claimed the rights of the fruit tree or when Antonio became jealous of the plants in the garden and fought with others so they would treat the plants as they "deserved". Furthermore, in a spiritual ontology, nature and culture are taken as a result from idea (Spirit), and thus they are disconnected from one another through sin and coexist with another supernatural reality; for instance, when Ismael opened the day with a prayer about the garden of Eden (God's creation) and said how before the fall of humanity that was harmony among all creation. Thus, for each ontology, reality and what nature and culture are, is distinct, constituting a pluriverse.
•
How does social-farm actors' lifeworlds relate to those ontologies (resulting in pluriverse)? The everyday life at the social-farm has several challenges which emerge from miss or/and
partial communications. An example of incomprehension was the frequent use of terms related to "craziness" when one was talking about permaculture affections. Also, those lifeworld interactions can be related to “uncontrolled equivocations” due to different actors accessing a material object from different ontologies without realizing it (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). One example is how the plants of the garden were taken by different people as mato or "a family relative" in a mutual unawareness of one another’s’ understanding. Each "student" expected that the reality of the plant
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that he was talking about was the same reality referred by the other. Thus, for them, reality and materiality were the same. Finally, there were also efforts to enable partial communication through coordination of speech to "access" other realities. An example was how Pedro chose to use the terms God’s creation and God's way of gardening during his agroecology class. Or how Ismael distributed the different worlds according to the occasion: in the chapel he was spiritual, but when talking to the municipals’ inspectors he was modern (Mol, 2002). Hence, the lifeworlds at the social-farm are an evidence that there is a distinction between reality and materiality and that under the farms' materiality there is actually multiple realities: a pluriverse.
•
How can this social-farm be understood through the assemblage theory? By understanding this social-farm as an assemblage, its reality becomes a "non-totalize
sum" in constant formation where multiple entities are affecting each other (Bennett, 2009:24; DeLanda, 2011). And, from that, the resulted architecture emerges as novelty/reality. That is, depending on how humans and nonhumans affect one another at the social-farm's territory, a specific (fluid/temporary) reality emerges. For example, how the garden that had been taken care by Lucas became his "office". Thus, reality became fluid, allowing novelty to emerge from the actualization of one of the potential results of inter-subjective affection of social-farm entities.
•
How this fluid reality is influenced by the multiple ontologies presented in the farm through processes of territorialization/deterritorialization (enabling virtual potentialities)? The social-farm's different ontologies could interfere in the affection of its assemblage
entities, drawing new lines of articulation and of flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). Thus, challenging all actors through new embodied realities of the materiality of the social-farm. Such
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phenomenon occurs through processes of actualization of the virtual and virtualization of the actual. Examples are: how the machete changed from an agroecology tool to a weapon; or how the same football field triggered happiness or sadness, affecting differently the leisure time from one week to the other; or, yet, how a garden could become an "office". Thus, making the farm an everchanging reality that challenges any static management attempt.
•
What are the challenges of managing a social-farm as a potential pluriversal political ecological experience? The agroecology transition experience, led by permaculture, helped transform the social-
farm’s reality into a more fluid-pluriverse. Thus, creating partial awareness of other worlds and challenging management to be flexible in order to adapt and give the same level of relevance to those emerging realities. This could be seen when we were talking in the classes about "crazy things” as actual possibilities, like to defend the right of a jabuticabeira or to include Dorinha as an actual member of the social-farm to be cared for like just another "student". It required the virtual to be included in the reality in order to be managed. That is, potential possibilities, such as those here mentioned, became actualized.
•
How does these multiple realities influence the virtual possibilities of social-farms’ politics? Once social-farm's reality is acknowledged as fluid, where actual and virtual are both part
of the real, any fix/traditional management attempt proves to be insufficient, thus requiring a rhizomatic approach/governance towards life-realities: an alive management that emerges from being in the world, as not vertically, but as diffuse and fluid. In a continuous reinvention of management and openness to the upcoming reality (possibilities) where multiple micro-
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assemblages emerge from and dissolve in daily-shared responsibilities. A propose that is potentially present in Ismael's "openness" to the affections experienced in the social-farm through permaculture and care. I argue that Ismael’s "vision beyond reach" represents an example of facing other’s “craziness” as actual possibilities. That is, Ismael embracing in his daily management of the social-farm possibilities such as a garden/sacred/office or accepting Dorinha and fruit trees as part of the family.
General Research Question (GRQ) •
How the interface of ontologies and (re)territorialization affect the management of a socialfarm in agroecology transition? Led by a sense of social justice and permaculture, the therapeutic community/social-farm
Fazenda Nova Aurora is recognizable as a “would rather not” statement to modern rationality. A place where other worlds exist and where the real is dealt through other terms, affection, memories, feelings, rules, and norms that are not constrained under "scientific" reason. A territory emerged from interfaced realities and through the embodiment of care where reality can be recognized beyond its material things. That is, the social-farm’s assemblage emerges on another possible lifepolitic shaped by the inter-subjective affections of humans and nonhumans. Last, although this research is about a specific case, these conclusions have the potential to collaborate to a dramatic change in the comprehension of permaculture, management, and the therapeutic practices on social-farms.
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Pictures
Figure 32 – Talking at the food forest
Figure 33 - Researcher and his family during a visit day at the farm
Figure 34 - Group picture that closed the Syntropic agriculture course
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ANNEX
Figure 35- Fieldnotes example (a)
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Figure 36- Fieldnotes example (b)
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Entrevista: Flaire Eu fui fazer um intercâmbio em Vancouver e conheci um a Cravolândia que tinha la em Vancouver. Ai quando voltei fiquei curioso e comecei a pesquisar um projeto aqui e encontrei alguns, pesquisei e me atraíram mais os que tinham envolvimento com igreja e na minha igreja tinha um repaz que tinha feito CMI com a Cena, ai eu fui fazer o curso. Por 6 meses e durante o curso eles incentivavam a desenvolver um projeto e via de regra as pessoas fazem em suas igrejas locais e coincidiu com a época que você tava querendo fazer o projeto na missão cena la na fazenda com permacultura. Ai eu enato vamo e ai começou assim. Fiz o curso primeiro e depois nos fomos para Juquitiba juntos eu você e a Paula.
O que marcou , a primeira coisa era um terreno muito grande e eles viviam num espaço muito pequeno e vivem até hoje por sinal e eu lembro que num espaço tão grande daqueles um projeto que acolhe homens que são saudáveis e eles não produziam nada. Essa coisa me marcou muito quer dizer, a gente chegou e eles não tinham uma horta. Um terreno enorme você tá numa comunidade terapêutica onde você não produz nada, quer dizer você tem um tempo muito ocioso e você tem muita gente disponível, muita mão de obra, muito braço, então isso me marcou, o que eles estão fazendo aqui durante o dia e porque não tao fazendo nada nesse terreno tão grande. E eu lembro que foi mais ou menos o que você e a Paula sentiram e a gente começou a discutir e ai fomos a primeira vez la para fazer a horta a gente fez os cartões. Eu lembro até hoje uma discussão nossa, até esse momento eu não conhecia a permacultura e você começou a explicar um pouco e putz uma coisa era o canteiro e a leira não pode ser de monocultura e eu lembro isso e foi engraçado e não joao, começar de cara já policultura talvez não seja o mais fácil para eles porque a gente tinha desenhado uma lera com 5 espécies diferentes. Ai vamos fazer assim metade um canteiro e em 6 meses põe mais uma cultura… a gente começou a tentar discutir como trazer a permacultura de maneira mais orgânica assim, para que ela fosse mais bem aceita. Eu acho que isso também foi um dos diferenciais daquele tempo que a gente passou la. Que a gente queria implementar mais sem desconsiderar o contexto assim. Vai ser difícil para eles aceitar uma coisa tão diferente que e o que você falou do SAF hoje ne. Puts o saf tem la o seu saf mas para quem tá acostumado com o convencional, é muito difícil aceitar… e a gente já pensava nisso naquela época eu lembro na verdade e parecia um ciclo ne a gente ia la a primeira vez e vamos fazer isso e aquilo. A gente tinha acordado de ir mensalmente. Então a gente fazia uma intervenção e deixava a licao de casa e voltava no outro mês cheio de expectativa e era uma catástrofe, ninguém tinha feito nada do que a gente havia pedido e o modelo convencional tentando se reerguer. Ai a gente ficava triste e ai no outro mês eles surpreendiam… as coisas mais marcantes para mim que eram mais simples era sempre a palha. Puts então, na verdade ela resolvia dois problemas ela apoiava a técnica de ter o solo coberto e a gente eliminava a sensação do cara que cortava o mato, porque era um castigo. O cara que aprontava na semana ficava cortando o mato. E ele não sabia porque tava cortando o mato, não sabia o que fazer com o mato e ai eles queimavam. Ai a gente não, agora você cobre os canteiros, a gente tinha feito o ASF e cobre aqui e a gente achando que eles iam aceitar bem e não, a gente chegava e vira e mexe o canteiro tava descoberto… po que eu acho e o seguinte, no caso especifico da cena a sensação que eu tinha naquela época e que o Ismael fazia o papel do grande líder,. Ele dizia o faz isso faz assim faz assado e os alunos obedeciam as diretrizes dele e como ele participava pouco da nossa dinâmica, intervenção, ele não sabia dos pequenos detalhes e acabava negligenciando isso. Então o que eu imagino que acontecia e que o cara tá cortando mato e nem sempre o cara lembrava … o cara do mato não sabia que o mano era da horta porque a gente só tinha conversado com o cara da horta e o Ismael tão pouco. Então eles eu acho que e um pouco de falta de conhecimento deles mas não porque a gente não tava la para proporcionar o conhecimento e que o Ismael não tinha o interesse. Eu lembro de várias vezes quando a gente chegava lá ele tinha que resolver umas coisas na cidade, pegar umas famílias.. ele tinha umas tarefas então não tinha como ele saber da importância daquilo ali. Eu acho que era falta de interesse. E atrelado a um pouco de falta de recurso, sei la porque a impressão que eu tenho e que o Ismael era o único cara que dirigia a kombi e a gente ia aos sábados, coincidia com alguma visita que ele tinha que visitar no centro e… mas para mim e falta de interesse porque a gente ia uma vez por mês, a gente agendava sempre antes de ir, ele sabia e poderia ter se organizado para estar com a gente sabe, mas a falta de interesse fez com que ele não entendesse o devido valor do trabalho. Mas eu também acho que gente não deixou claro no começo que era um esquema tipo uma consultoria. A gente vai vir aqui vamos ensinar um pouco vocês vamos deixar umas lições de casa e se tiver uma dúvida na semana e tal … a gente tinha essa expectativa mas não acho que eles entenderam corretamente. Q no começo era um lance não eles vão vir ai para fazer as coisas. Então era meio não faz ae! E acho que tem mais um fator também e mito difícil você ter um voluntario igual a gente que se compromete então para um cara como o Ismael que tava la meio sozinho, dar valor para todas as iniciativas que surgiam era difícil também… e como a gente vai falar não o da valor pra nossa, se interessa pela nossa. Numa situação igual ao Ismael ele fica cansado de tanta iniciativa de tanta igreja que vem… e uma situação meio complexa… ele incorporou a permacultura? Não acho que não. Eu acho que nesse tempo o que ele percebeu e que a gente era um trio dedicado esses caras são ponta firme e sabem o que estão falando.. puts a horta o saf nós escolhemos um lugar terrível e de repente tinha feijão pra caramba… agora e isso o feijão guandu e uma evidencia. Nasceu feijão pra caramba que dava para semear mais e dava para comer… e eles não fizeram nenhum dos dois. Porque, falta de interesse total nem pro cara descer na area para ver o que tá acontecendo. O que os caras plantaram, o que tá nascendo aqui… então eu não acho que ele se interessou pela permacultura ou agroecologia… nada. Porque nesse momento que nasceram os guandus, a gente já era considerado um grupo de respeito por ele mas eu não acho que a permacultura tenho conquistado ele até hoje assim...pq eu fui dar la aula esses dias e meu é você chegar o milharal...
Fragment of one of the translated interviews
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