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The Earth Is Sweet. On Cottica Ndyuka (De)compositions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2024

Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha Open the ORCID record for Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha [Opens in a new window]
Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, BR
*
Email: omgc@mn.ufrj.br
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Abstract

How can we remain attentive to the scale of the environmental damage caused in traditional Maroon territories by the effects of the Plantationocene and the material vestiges of colonial and racial violence left by capitalism? Dwelling on conversations held with Maroon Cottica Ndyuka women living in Moengo, a small town established on the Cottica River in Eastern Suriname to support a bauxite industrial plant in the early twentieth century, this text seeks to illuminate what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2021) calls “elemental affinities,” relationships in which humans and more-than-humans interact in composing body and earth through refractive and diffractive effects. The paper observes how the women mixed and modeled clay, turning it into sculpted balls known as pemba or pemba doti, frequently used as a therapeutical and spiritual substance, and as food. In so doing, the text deals with processes such as creating, composing, undoing, decomposing, and perishing once the earth—as soil—takes part in and renders possible the existence of diverse creatures. This is a contribution toward an ethnography of (de)compositions of the earth that sets out from the affinities between earth and bodies, attentive to certain metamorphic possibilities, the multiplicities of relations in which soils act.

Keywords

MaroonearthPlantationoceneSurinamewomenCottica Ndyukasoilgeophagiabauxite miningFrench Guiana
Type
Indigenous Knowledge
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , April 2024 , pp. 242 - 266
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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