Co-authored with Mariateresa Muraca, Chiara Zamboni, Annamaria Piussi. Translated by Caterina Diotto.
The original version, in italian, was published here.
We would like to get to know some of the paths taken by feminism in areas and places in South America. We are interested in how women, whom we have met or read about, bring their relationship with nature into play, what vision they are creating and what political practices they are putting into action in favour of the Earth.
We want to move through relationships, i.e. involving women from different places in a long-distance interlocution to understand these ways, not by passing through generalisations, i.e. a general model of vision and practices of the women-nature relationship, but by questioning and going to the bottom of some reasoning and accounts of experience gathered in an actual exchange. This is based on the assumption that knowledge of a few circumscribed paths of thought, of life, of experiences gives a broader and truer vision of what we care about – the bond between women and nature – than studies that are intended to be exhaustive but lead to generalisations.
From an initial confrontation with some women, their testimonies and their texts, we realised that in many experiences many women have a feminist way of behaving (i.e. they refer to other women as a choice in a privileged way, recognising a female genealogy and an effective exercise of authority within their specific realities) even if they do not use the name feminist for themselves1. Hence, the practices of women in tune with the earth are much more extensive than self-described feminist or ecofeminist, which turns out to be a word from European and North American culture.
At least three points emerge from stories of friends’ testimonies and texts read.
Firstly, these women start from a vision of the cosmos to which they themselves contribute and in which the Earth has a central position.
In addition, from certain areas, the culture of buen vivir is developing, i.e. a set of concepts and proposals born from the reinvention of the cosmovisions of the original peoples, particularly of the Andean region. It is a new paradigm of civilisation, which focuses on the multiple relationships of correspondence, reciprocity and complementarity that link human beings, living beings and nature. Buen vivir was the lever for the writing of the constitutions of both Bolivia and Ecuador. A writing that expressed the vision and desire of indigenous peoples, especially with regard to land rights. On this word there is now an extensive and in-depth debate in various places in Latin America, to which many women contribute with great symbolic inventiveness and practices. One can think in this regard of the creation of the expression “body-territory”, which – by juxtaposing the two words – makes it possible to overcome a conception of body and territory centred on possession in favour of the recognition of the interdependence that makes life possible. According to Veronica Gago,
the body is thus revealed as a composition of affects, resources and possibilities that are not only ‘individual’, but that take on a singular dimension through the body of each one, insofar as each body is never just ‘one’ but always with the others and also with other non-human forces.2
Thirdly, radical currents of thought in Latin America are affected by the symbolic force that was liberation theology and the concept of social justice implicit in it: a struggle for the liberation of the poor. Ecofeminist theologians in particular have reasoned on this. For example, Ivone Gebara, from Brazil, develops some concepts of liberation theology from an ecofeminist perspective, arguing that the well-being of the poorest people goes hand in hand with the well-being of women and the well-being of the earth. However, while taking liberation theology as a starting point, she criticises it not only insofar as it remains a dualist conception of the creator God and human history, but additionally insofar as it is androcentric and does not take into account the cosmos as a whole. It has not changed epistemology3. Rather than justice, which for Gebara is an important but ambiguous value that can fall into forms of idealisation along with that of love, truth, etc.4, she proposes an epistemological change that leads to a transformation of the ethical attitude. It is the transformation of our bond and attitude – the ethos – towards all beings that interests her.
Chiara Zamboni
The interview that Antonietta Potente did with us, in which we asked her questions about her experience in Bolivia, with particular attention to the link between the community she lived with and nature, had the effect of transforming a certain prejudice I had formed. Especially after reading Western feminist texts that discussed the relationship between land and social issues in South America, I had formed the idea that there was a strong link between issues of nature, the position of women and the struggle for social justice. Because of this preconception, I asked questions about justice in the interview.
Antonietta’s answers and the interview as a whole showed me that it is not the word justice that is at stake, neither as a value nor as a guiding principle for action. Her entire discourse shows that it is a different attitude and a different overall vision. In a community like the one she lived in, women, men, girls and boys, animals, distant mountains and the nearby land, she as a guest, young people, the elderly and the antepassados, are bound together in a relationship in which everyone has a presence and a concrete task. Even the youngest children, at one year old, are given the task of looking after an animal and raising it. Antonietta herself, who had been in the community for a year, was entrusted with a lamb to raise. Female authority is recognised, and this can be seen in the behaviour of the women in the community.
Those who do not respect these customs – violence against women, for example – are punished severely. The land is honoured and nurtured as the cornerstone of this vision. Yet life is hard, farming is tiring, and the climate is cold. There is nothing easy about this mountain life, but you can see from Antonietta’s love for her distant “family” that there is a lot of meaning in it.
Thus, in this context, the word justice is completely abstract and out of place. It is not the measure of a meaningful life. And there is no thought of the emancipatory redemption that the link between justice and poverty implies. There have been and still are struggles over specific issues related to land and water – in Cochabamba, for example – but these are struggles that involve multiple communities and represent actions not so much of control and power conflict as of renewal of these meaningful bonds.
And indeed: when there is a need for water, people fight for water, but only as much as is necessary.
Mariateresa Muraca
The Latin American debate on buen vivir rightly begins with the recognition of its roots in indigenous culture. At the same time, to avoid generalisations, many contributions seek to highlight the specific characteristics of the different indigenous peoples inhabiting the continent. In many cases, however, the result is a proliferation of points of view – evident also in the multiplication of words that identify it in various linguistic and cultural contexts (for example, sumak kawsay in Quechua, suma qamaña in Aymara, kvme felen in Mapuche, tekó porã in Guarani, bem viver in Portuguese) – which can lead to a loss of the transformative power of buen vivir. Antonietta Potente’s reflection traces a path that differs from both the essentialisation and fragmentation of buen vivir, precisely because it is rooted in concrete relationships and attentive to the modification of oneself, the other and the world that arises from them. This position is in tune with that taken by other women, such as Julieta Paredes (Hilando fino desde el feminismo comunitario), who, from the perspective of community feminism, presents buen vivir as an orientation, a path that is taking shape based on the recognition and empowerment of alternatives that already exist.
Caterina Diotto
Of the experience in Bolivia with an Aymara community that Antonietta told us about, two things struck me. The first is that a particular form of relationship seems to emerge: we could call it a being from the body. The fabric of reciprocal relations that constitutes the community, and the social position within it, is constituted starting from the body of each and every one, from his or her needs, from his or her participation in the harmonious balance between things, from his or her being and moving in common spaces. The community is an extended community: animals, plants, people, the earth, the sky, the stars, the antepassados. All these components participate in the community from their corporeity, their being as embodied souls and pleasure. The concept of buen vivir also has to do with this. Ivone Gebara in her texts, while taking up the general spirit of liberation theology as a concern for the last, criticises it for not breaking free from the anthropocentric and patriarchal paradigm, invoking the search for a different, ecofeminist epistemology. The juxtaposition between Gebara’s thought and the kind of interweaving of relations described by Antonietta seems to me to give rise to new possible reflections in this direction.
I also find interesting the sense of time that seems to emerge from his words. Not a time compartmentalised between past present and future, but a time of the now composed of many co-present layers. A dense time in which both the now, the past and the genealogy derived from it – the antepassados are invited to everyday actions as well as those of struggle – and the future inextricably occur and intertwine. A time in which, I believe, the relationship between what has been done, what is now and what is to be done for the future is not linear but fertile with unexpected references.
Anna Maria Piussi
In Antonietta’s account of her daily life in an Aymara community in Bolivia, she explains the reasons behind her choice, including the need for “another soul, to read life from another perspective”. Her words remind me of the profound need for the pursuit of female freedom, at the heart of difference feminism, and at the same time the need to seek new forms of relationship with nature, which we are interested in. I was struck by her statement that the people she lived with and who hosted her do not support their ways of life, their reciprocal bond with the earth and the cosmos, the relationship between the visible and the invisible, etc. with ideologies or systematised thinking. These are people who live in a “pre-theoretical, original state”, and even the young people who have studied in the city have this relationship with the earth and with life in a spontaneous way, having learned it from their antepassados, from their mothers. It is a relationship that you do not learn from books, you do not learn from theories, says Antonietta, and she herself learned it by living it in the daily life of her indigenous host family.
When compared to community life forms such as these, where every member, living and non-living, has their place and contributes to the harmony of the whole, and where a deep appreciation of life (even in its difficult and painful aspects) is central, the limitations of many Western (and predominantly male) environmentalist positions emerge, which aim to intellectually induce awareness of a necessary renewed relationship with nature and the planet, stripped of their subjectivity and taken as objects of scientific analysis or protection programmes. Antonietta’s story seems to show that only direct experience of these ways of life, having nourished the physical soul (its expression) for a long time with care for life according to indigenous wisdom, can bring about the ecological conversion we need in order to thrive and generate a new civilisation. Embarking with strength and feminine freedom on a path of transformation of our ways of life (in the North of the world) in resonance with practices and cultures such as those narrated by Antonietta, or taking inspiration from them, seems to me to contribute to generating the ecofeminist epistemology and ethos necessary for our times.
- See Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water, Fortress Press, 1999, Minneapolis p. 4. ↩︎
- Veronica Gago, La potencia feminista: o el deseo de cambiarlo todo,Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid 2021,p. 97. ↩︎
- I. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, op. cit., pp. 45-47 e Id., Intuitiones ecofeministas. Ensayo para repensar el conocimiento y la religión, Editorial Trotta, Madrid 2000, pp. 66-69. ↩︎
- I. Gebara, Longing of Running Water, op.cit., p. 44. ↩︎
Originally published as:
Caterina Diotto, Mariateresa Muraca, Annamaria Piussi, Chiara Zamboni, Ecofemminismo nell’America del Sud, Per Amore del Mondo n.18 – 2021/2022 Il mondo stringe ISSN 2384-8944
Caterina Diotto 