BODY-TERRITORY IN DISPUTE: EXISTENCES, RESISTANCES AND MEMORIES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE AMERICAS
For many indigenous peoples of the Americas, the body is the first territory, as well as the place where life occurs, constituting itself as a condition of existence: the body is where indigenous cosmovisions and contemporary political struggles are lived, disputed and transmitted.
Multiple indigenous traditions uphold a constitutive relationality in which what is done to the territory is done to the body, and vice versa, in contrast to the modern separation between nature and culture, individual and community. Understanding this articulation is also a way of listening to what indigenous peoples have historically expressed about dispossession, violence, memory and life.
However, this relationality is not free of tensions. The body-territory is not only the site of a dispute against the State or extractive capital: it is also a space traversed by conflicts internal to the communities themselves (of gender, generation, migration) that call into question any harmonious or essentialist reading of that relationship. This symposium invites an interrogation of the very category of “body-territory,” a notion widely circulating in activism and academia: does it account for indigenous diversity, or does it translate—and thereby reduce—it to a language that is not its own?
On the other hand, the body-territory is not only a site of harm. In the face of dispossession, violence and community fragmentation, numerous indigenous peoples have developed and continue to develop, through the body-territory itself, processes of care, healing and regeneration that are not mere response mechanisms but forms of knowledge in their own right: rituals, territorial medicines, collective work, languages that precede the experiences of dispossession.
This tension is further sharpened when the body-territory lacks a physical land to refer to: permanently displaced communities, generations born in urban contexts, peoples for whom return is no longer possible. In these cases the category is put to the test, as it forces us to think of territory in motion: can the body continue to be territory when the territory itself has been lost?
Taking up the notion of body-territory and the critical questions underlying it, this symposium seeks to open interdisciplinary dialogue from the conviction that indigenous memories are not relics of the past but active forces that organize the present and orient horizons of the future. We invite papers exploring the ways in which body and territory mutually constitute one another among the indigenous peoples of the American continent, covering axes such as: indigenous ontologies and cosmovisions; internal tensions of gender, generation and migration; the body-territory in contexts of displacement and urbanization; memories of dispossession and practices of healing and regeneration as epistemic responses; movements of defense against extractivism and state violence; and legal frameworks in tension with indigenous conceptions of territory.
