Feeding “the commons”: rethinking food rights through indigenous ontologies

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to open possible new domains for thinking the relationship between commons and food rights by trying to respond to the challenges of alternative ways of experiencing humans-nature interdependence. The idea of a self-standing individual separated from nature – which underpins both the economicist view of “common goods” as resources, and the Western definition of human rights as something owed to people – not only prevents us from seeing what is at play in countless local struggles worldwide, but it also limits the possibilities of a plural redefinition of food rights. In order to let alternative rationalities emerge, it is necessary to set aside the onto-epistemological framework that sees society as separated from nature, body from mind, subject from object, and the individual from the collectivity. By approaching food commons through the lens of indigenous senses of co-belonging among people, land, and food expressed in relational ontologies, my intention is to bypass both the resource-based, and the sociocentric view of the commons, and see them as life made in common. Finally, I look at the possibilities offered by indigenous relationality to expand notions of food sovereignty and decolonize food rights.

KEYWORDS:

• The commons
• indigenous ontologies
• food rights
• food sovereignty

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the people of the indigenous ResguardoTikuna-Uitoto, Kilómetro 6-11 and the indigenous organization CAPIUL, especially Lidia Rodríguez, Yolanda Andoque, Sandro Jair Agga,  Aurelia Jifichíu, Raúl Yucuna, William Yucuna, and Omar Cubeo. Thanks to Janet D. Keller, Ivan Vargas Roncancio and three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and editorial comments. This work was supported by the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana-VRI under Grant number 7291. Title of the project: Food Sovereignty and Community’s Valuation of Common Goods.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For instance, palm plots such as caraná, burití or peach palm. Palm plots have been historically managed by indigenous people of the Amazon. Caraná palm’s leaves (Lepidocaryum tenue) are used for thatching. Burití (Maurixia flexuosa), and peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) are sources of food.

2. Interesting in this regard are linguistic findings that show a correlation between linguistic diversity and ecological diversity, in which loss in one domain corresponds to loss in the other (Nettle and Romaine 2000).

3. The project “Food Sovereignty and Community’s Valuations of Common Goods,” was carried out from May 2017 to March 2018 in four regions of Colombia (Nariño, Guajira, Chocó and Amazonas). Luis Alberto Suárez Guava, Claudia Cáceres, Paula Bak and the author (IP) coordinated the activities of local researchers’ teams in each region. Financial support was provided by the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PPTA # 7291).

4. I grew up in Italy, continued my studies in the USA, and moved to South America in 1995. I lived about 10 years in the Peruvian and Colombian Amazonia, before moving to Bogotá.

5. Lidia Rodríguez and Yolanda Andoque developed a method based on self-ethnography that consisted in inquiring on the topics of interest with the people they met on their daily interactions, and at night sharing what they had learned, and recording these conversations.

6. The People of the Center (Gente de Centro) is a linguistically diverse, but culturally relatively uniform cluster of ethnic groups including Uitoto Muina-Murui, Bora, Muinane, Miraña, Nonuya, Ocaina, Andoke. It comprises approximately 7,500 individuals living in the Caquetá, Putumayo and Amazon regions of Colombia, and in the northern Amazon region of Peru.

7. Bienes comunes, common goods; the term “commons” has no direct translation in Spanish.

8. To critique the substantivist conceptualization of the categories of Nature and Culture, Viveiros de Castro (1998, 470) states that: “Such an ethnographically-based reshuffling of our conceptual schemes leads me to suggest the expression, “multinaturalism”, to designate one of the contrastive features of Amerindian thought in relation to Western “multiculturalist” cosmologies. Where the latter are founded on the mutual implication of the unity of nature and the plurality of cultures – the first guaranteed by the objective universality of body and substance, the second generated by the subjective particularity of spirit and meaning – the Amerindian conception would suppose a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 470).

9. Flat manioc bread baked over a clay pan. Different preparations are made from sweet or bitter manioc, using fresh or matured tubers, starch, or a combination of the above, to obtain a bread whose thickness varies from 0.5 to about 5 cm. Other ingredients, such as the roasted seeds of mocambo (Theobroma bicolor), can be added to the preparation.

10. Conjurar, rezar or curar is a speech at that transfers an intention over a substance in order to produce an effect.

11. See also Gagliano (2018).

12. Natural mineral licks.

13. It is important to note that reciprocity is not the only form of interaction that is established between human and non-human beings, and that other patterns, including predation and protection, also exist. Predation is made necessary because the owners of resources are often stingy and do not want to release their assets (Micarelli 2015a). An instantiation of what Santos-Granero (2009a) calls the “political economy of life,” predation is not aimed at accumulation, but at feeding the circuits of vital energy.

14. In the classic definition, common resources are characterized by non-exclusivity, that is, they can be exploited by a person or a community since no one individually has an exclusive right; and by divisibility or rivalry, that is, the use of part of the resources by an individual or group subtracts from the amount available to others.

15. In Colombia’s peasant uprisings, for instance, peasant movements have been defending the special connection with, and care of, the land as part of their political strategy. They follow the path traced by indigenous and afrodescendant movements, but while for ethnic minorities the right to autonomy is recognized in the legal framework, particularly the ILO Convention 169 ratified by most Latin American legislations, peasant movements have to create new institutional arrangements that challenge the idea of sovereignty as emanating from the State. Instances of this are the Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina: ZRCs) in Colombia. First and foremost a tool for the defense of peasant territories against the expansion of latifundium in the lack of a proper agrarian reform, ZRCs are undertaking the defense of peasant communities’ territoriality as historically shaped forms of social, cultural, economic, and political organization. In so doing, they link a sense of identity to particular agroecological practices. For peasant movements this is a way to guarantee the protection of food-sheds, seed diversity, watersheds, and ultimately food sovereignty.

16. The right to food was recognized in 1948 by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 25) and reaffirmed in 1966 by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 11). The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes in 1999 that: “The right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, have physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement. The right to adequate food shall therefore not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with a minimum package of calories, proteins and other specific nutrients.” “Cultural or consumer acceptability implies the need also to take into account, as far as possible, perceived non-nutrient-based values attached to food and food consumption and informed consumer concerns regarding the nature of accessible food supplies (Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 12 on the right to adequate food, 1999).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana [7291].

Notes on contributors

Giovanna Micarelli

Giovanna Micarelli is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá, and collaborator researcher at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. Since 1995 she has conducted research in Amazonia with the Conibo Shipibo of the Ucayali region (Peru), the Tikuna of the Amacayacu river, and the indigenous peoples belonging to the supra-ethnic cluster People of the Center (Colombia). Her research interests include indigenous critical engagements with development and modernity, the place of social-environmental understandings in the construction and defense of territory, cultural politics in intercultural contexts, and indigenous onto-epistemologies, methodologies and modes of knowing. The most recent extensions of her research focus on food sovereignty, territorial sovereignty and the commons, understood through local onto-epistemologies.