Barbara Stiubiener Abrahao

Grant Type

Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

Institutional Affiliation

Oxford, U. of

Grant number

Gr. 10540

Approve Date

April 6, 2023

Project Title

Stiubiener Abrahao, Barbara (Oxford, U. of) "Is this forest or carbon? An inquiry about value in the Brazilian Amazon"

BARBARA STIUBIENER ABRAHAO, then a graduate student at University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, received funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Is This Forest or Carbon? An Inquiry about Value in The Brazilian Amazon,” supervised by Dr. Javier Lezaun. This research lies at the intersection between economic, environmental anthropology, and the studies of Lowland South America. The grantee engaged in an ethnography of a Quilombo of the Brazilian Amazon. Quilombolas flee colonial plantations in the XVIIIth century to enjoy freedom and autonomy as they escaped to the forest and waterfalls that protected them. The project looks at the transformations of the quilombo community as it engages in the development of a carbon credit project along with a consultancy and an investment bank. This ethnography is described through the stories of the many encounters between financial and scientific rationalities, vernacular knowledge, different forms of accountability, forest creatures, nonhuman animals, witchcraft, and the quilombola’s gardening practices. The scenario that lies behind all these encounters is the attempts to curb and compensate carbon emissions, the increasing effects of El Niño across the Amazon and the arising social awareness about endangered species. The dissertation addresses the methodological challenges of doing ethnography in the Anthropocene by forging connections between the ecological, political, social and historical spheres that were often kept apart.