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Nathália Tavares

Biography

Nathália Tavares de Souza Almeida is a PhD student at the Center for Amazonian Studies (NAEA/UFPA). She holds a bachelor’s degree in Law and Master’s in Public Policies and Law where her main research interest was ABS (Access and benefit sharing) contracts. She’s trying to adopt an inter-disciplinary approach while engaging in her PhD thesis considering the Plantationocene and plantation landscapes as an intensifier for this ontological crisis, as being a killer of diversity. Her research discusses the maintenance of the colonial productive structure in Latin America’s Amazon and how it’s redone and refreshed in new ways of colonization.

 

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nathalia-Almeida-3

Abstract

Work title

The prioritization of monoculture in large tracts of land has negative consequences on the environment and society affecting landscapes and socio- biodiversity resulting from the co-constitutive relationship between nature and peoples. The appropriation of natural resources in the form of a commodity imprisons and enclosures the cultural and symbolic value contained in affected relations impoverishing not only the land, but also the diversity of modes of living in and from land, that is, socio-biodiversity. Herein, the debate will be that due to the centrality of land to the social reproduction of socio-biodiversity and the wellbeing of communities co-creating it, the various capital mechanisms to enclosure land, affecting the way it is shared and accessed, have an impact on how society is structured.

For the reflection, the traditional communities of the Amazon-Cerrado transition, based on the knowledge built by countless generations, have in the territory the spiritual link and belonging that gives meaning and guarantees the reproduction of their ways of life. In contrast, this knowledge faces forms of misappropriation that origin from the privatization of biodiversity and the constant enclosures arising from agribusiness – which try to financialize access, allowing it only for those who can pay and subordinating life itself to the market logic, preventing, finally, the reproduction of the traditional lifeways. Among the ways of enclosing this knowledge, there is the appropriation of genetic and cultural heritage, usurping traditional knowledge, by companies, subjugating its holders, which contributes to accentuate and perpetuate conflicts in the area. Furthermore, it implies the deepening of the dynamics of dispossession of lands, resources and territories and produces new and dangerous forms of dependence and domination.

 

Affiliation: Federal University of Pará, Brazil