Ecofeminist ways of knowing

Entering the mangrove

For most of my life, being in nature felt so natural I didn’t notice it. Besides the ocean, the mangroves between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo were particularly meaningful in my early childhood. Every summer, my family would cross the border between the two most populated states in Brazil and camp at my father’s favourite surf beach, sharing memories, knowledge and meanings I deeply treasure today. I remember climbing in between the twisted vines, carefully entering the mysterious and fascinating world of the mangroves. As a young girl, I wasn't aware of the ecological gifts this biosystem offers to human and more-than-human communities, but I knew that in Umbanda, the Afro-Brazilian knowledge system practised by my ancestors, the mangrove was a special place of elemental connection that provided food and shelter for species from the land, water and spiritual worlds. Situated on the coastlines, the mangrove is the fertile crossroads of sea, river, and earth. The entanglement between nature and culture, the boundary place of life and purification.

My connection with the mythic entities who inhabit the swampy landscape of the mangroves is the inspiration for this research.

I begin my essay with a personal ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2003) story for three main reasons: (1) to acknowledge and invite the blessings of my human and more-than-human ancestors; (2) to identify the cultural lineage and specificity of my standpoint as a middle-class Brazilian woman initiated in the cosmology of Umbanda; (3) and to recognise, with a sense of relief and gratitude, the intellectual permission offered by the key thinkers this research primarily draws from. The theoretical concepts introduced by Donna Haraway and Raymond Williams have illuminated my understanding of Cultural Studies as an embodied, democratic, politically engaged practice of knowledge production.

To honour the intellectual pluralism that the field of Cultural Studies invites, besides the work of these Western thinkers, I will reference the rich epistemological contributions of Australian Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson, woman of the Quandamooka people in Queensland, and of botanist and decorated professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, citizen of the Potawatomi Nation in North America. By weaving concepts from both Western and Indigenous frameworks, this essay is an effort to explore the relationship between culture, power and knowledge, and argue that cultivating a plurality of ways of knowing could move us towards higher justice.

I studiously decided not to cite scholarly articles from my own cultural lineage because I have not been initiated to approach the cosmology of Umbanda as a methodological tool to be operationalised. I have been guided, instead, to approach it as a practice of visioning and listening rather than of systematic inquiry; I will however, share metaphors

and mythic knowledge pertaining to this tradition and hope to create an intercultural dialogue with the ecofeminist theories I engage in this research.

“What can count as knowledge?”

In his essay Culture is Ordinary (1958), Williams challenged the Marxist notion that culture and intellectual knowledge are the products and legacies of the dominant classes. As a working-class scholar who witnessed the transformations of post-war Britain, Williams argued that culture is a living process of “common meanings, the product of a whole people (...) made and remade, in ways we cannot know in advance” (1958, p. 8). Contrary to the belief that ordinary people, those seen as the “masses”, are low and trivial, Williams pointed to common ways-of-life and values systems as the democratic bodies of knowledge that not only inform, but sustain cultural and socio-economic structures. In reframing culture as an ordinary, ongoing process of knowledge production, he referenced ‘place’ and ‘land’ as the undeniable base on which not only culture, but the evolution of shared meanings is spontaneously being written. In my interpretation, Williams is alluding to a self-organising – arguably wild – process of meaning creation that precedes methods or ethics and reveals the inseparability between nature, knowledge and culture.

In recent years, more scholars from the fields of social sciences and environmental humanities have been challenging hierarchical dualisms and the assumed universality upon which Western scientific tradition is rooted (Kosciejew, 2020). In the 1980’s Donna

Haraway introduced the concept of ‘situated knowledge’ as a synthesis of this debate, arguing that, contrary to the supposedly impartial distance between knowing subject and matter, all knowledge is produced from a specific standpoint that reflects the context, perspectives and ideologies governing the mind and body (Haraways, 1988, p.583). This view may seem redundant in the here and now, but it exposes that, rooted in Cartesian dualism, Western science has been defined and celebrated as a fully objective, disembodied, and universal framework of “truths” (Wall Kimmerer, 2013). But whose truths?

By exposing what she called the “God trick”, i.e. Western science’s disembodied claim to represent the world by ‘seeing everything from nowhere’, Haraway highlights that, under the condition of colonial patriarchy, what has counted as knowledge is tied to the unmarked category of being male and white, informed by militarism, colonialism and capitalism. The concept of situated knowledge invites instead “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition for being heard” (1988, p. 589). The transdisciplinary interrogation of “what can count as knowledge” and, by extension, the challenging of assumed dualisms, such as nature/culture, primitive/civilised, male/female, organism/machine, reveal the emergence of a new possible paradigm of knowledge production that encourages the cultivation of a relationship between a plurality of knowledge systems (Wall Kemmerer, 2013), against one dominant universalist framework.

Other ways of knowing

If a subject’s social and cultural positionality plays a determinative role in knowledge production, I am interested in what combination of frameworks and methodological tools could be adopted to combat the patriarchal white-supremacist power/knowledge paradigm. How can scholars of the fields of sciences and humanities honour the pluralism of intellectual sources as a (re)generative web that can accommodate contradictory beliefs, discourses, stanpoints and privileges? Is the collapse of binaries and dissolution of boundaries an essential practice for achieving goals of equity and social justice?

Feminist scholar Moreton-Robinson agrees that claiming partiality in knowledge production is to consider the ‘body’ – a socially situated subject of knowledge – as a valid starting point for research. She then adds nuance to the debate pointing out that Western feminist theories are predicated on a body/earth split, which places female humans above other non-human beings (2013, p.335). Braiding ‘feminist standpoint theory’ (Harding, as cited in Moreton-Robinson, 2013) with Indigenous research methodologies, she constructs an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory that critiques the split of body/earth and considers the body’s inextricable connectedness to country, denoting both the physical land and the bloodline to which Indigenous people are tied through creator and ancestral birth. In Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory, aboriginal people’s ontology (ways of being), epistemologies (ways of knowing) and axiologies (ways of doing) are predicated on their embodied connection to Mother Earth and all living beings.

Ecofeminists, particularly from Indigenous lineages, have been insistent on a vision of the earth and other more-than-human entities as sentient agents offering significant components for knowledge production. Wall Kimmerer argues that what is viewed as ‘supernatural’ in the West, is seen as ‘wholly natural’ in the Indigenous worldview (2013, p. 69) and that “our goal should be to learn from the earth, not only about the earth” (2013, p.61). Through her academic work at The State University of New York and as director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, she leads research programs which draw from both Indigenous and Western scientific frameworks. As a propeller of interspecies principles, such as cooperation and reciprocity, she calls for culturally responsible mutuality among knowledge systems, advocating not for integration, but for “a mutualistic symbiosis between knowledge, in which the identities of each are strengthened and used together” (2013, p.60).

As I learn about these Indigenous theorists, and object against the historical erasure of their wisdoms, I admit to the temptation to romanticise their visions because they seem to hold an alternative perspective on the ecological decline which we are collectively coming to terms with. Both Haraway and Williams warned us of a type of sentimentality that aims to simplify the complex interplay between nature, culture, industry and power (Williams, 1980 p.80) and flattens the standpoints of subjugated groups as those with "innocent" and, therefore, more adequate views (Harways, 1988 p.584). So it is necessary, in the spirit of partiality and situatedness this research defends, to acknowledge that Indigenous ecofeminists also speak from a particular positionality,

and, as Moreton-Robison astutely indicates, their research methodologies are also produced within a post-colonising context, arising from colonised land (p. 336).

I could specifically identify the tendency for romanticisation signalled by Haraway when I engaged in studies of permaculture and design for sustainability in 2020 along with a large group of progressive thinkers, artists and environmentally-driven folks who, during the pandemic, felt an overwhelming sense of urgency to create a “solution” to the anthropocene. I subscribed to the ‘mythology of sustainability’, where a holistic, organic, integrated lifestyle was the middle-class reaction to what felt like the beginning of the apocalypse. However, naïveté aside, what was made clear during that time was a system of commodification and cultural appropriation, largely driven by entrepreneurial projects practised within our pervasive neoliberal consumer culture. Despite the lifting of the veil, my pursuits and critical reflections during that time were useful to restate that the methodologies of marginalised groups, i.e. those who have been historically pushed to the edges of society, are deeply creative and infused with boundary-crossing micropolitics that effectively address social issues within their ecosystem.

The Emergence Network, a post-activist movement led by Nigerian philosopher and scholar Bayo Akomolafe, offers “an entangled, mycelial network of resources – whether academic, creative, popular, experimental” to engage in a post-activist response to the crisis of our times. Another inspiring example is the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institution, a “post-capitalist, feminist, BIPOC-centred” hub that invites activists and organisers to employ biomimicry in their movements towards social justice.

The Crossroads is an Ecofeminist Space

I started this essay entering the hybrid world of the mangroves and my ancestors advise that it is now time to return. Mangroves are identified by some as a ‘lifestyle’ rather than a taxonomic group because mangroves trees are not necessarily related to each other. Botanists identify mangrove species by their traits of ecological adaptation rather than by their family lineage (Baez, 2020). Because of distinctive characteristics that allow them to live in salty, low oxygen soil, they are also seen as resilient ‘ecosystem engineers’. Their complex root system can hold onto sediments, stabilising shorelines and purifying heavy metals, which prevents erosion and eases the impact of storms. Nana Buruquê, the mythic entity who inhabits the mangrove forest, protects the diversity and resilience of this unrelated family. The oldest of all Orixás, Nanã brings wisdom from Time before time, reminding us that we all came from mud and to mud we will return. She is the patient Grandmother who teaches by example the importance of having strong – but malleable – roots and practising tolerance and cooperation in order to thrive in adversity. Her vigorous son, Exú, is the guardian of the crossroads, the trickster edge-worker who protects the bridge between the physical and nonphysical, sacred and profane, human and nonhuman. He brings chaos and order to the house. The embodiment of boundary-crossing, Exú is the one who Throws a Stone Today and Kills a Bird Yesterday, teaching us that the impact of our existence persists beyond our own time and space.

In my imagination, Exú shares a resonance with Haraway’s Cyborg – the ironic metaphor she constructed in the 1980’s as the condensed image of hybridity and blurring of boundaries to introduce non-dualistic approaches to the feminist agenda of that time. Both the Cyborg and Exú are complex, contradictory avatars that collapse Cartesian binaries of male/female, mind/body, human/non-human to facilitate our attempts to make sense of the world. We try, and they remind us that there is actually no way to fully understand the World, because the World is made of many worlds. My choice to bring trickster to my first research essay in Cultural Studies is to invite unruly possibilities as an exercise in my (micro)political work.

Mythic knowledge, symbols, metaphors, dreams and imagination can align and compliment scientific knowledge, in the same way folklore, storytelling and spirituality have always been key to our sense-making of both nature and culture. Modernity has distanced us from recognising our interconnectedness and the responsibility to engage in the practice of visioning and listening in order to co-design systems that are less organised by dominating power structures and instead fueled by possibilities and life. From the plurality of our complex and paradoxical bodies of knowledge we can find both the humility and power to remember that the world is alive in stunning, creative, magical ways. So what realities will we dare to imagine?

Conclusion

Inspired by the hybrid ecosystem of the mangroves and its metaphorical connection with the wisdoms of Umbanda, my research is rooted in personal experiences and further enriched by the theoretical frameworks of Donna Haraway and Raymond Williams, whose concepts of ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘ordinary culture’ challenge the ideologies that have long dominated Western thought. Through this lens, I recognise and celebrate knowledge production as an ongoing, embodied, contextual, politically engaged process. The rich epistemological contributions of Indigenous scholars Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Robin Wall Kimmerer underscore the importance of embracing the more-than-human dimensions in our attempt to respond to the current environmental decline, inviting us to integrate both scientific and Indigenous traditional knowledge to honour the plurality of ways in which the world can be understood. This synthesis calls for a departure from the dominant, power-driven, Euro-centric frameworks that prioritise objectivity and universality, urging instead for a multiplicity of decolonial methodologies that are life-oriented.

Ultimately, my journey through the mangroves (and the invocation of my mythic companions) reveals the necessity of breaking down the rigid boundaries that have historically separated nature from culture, human from more-than-human, imagination from possibility. By embracing a mutual and dynamic understanding of what can count as knowledge, we open ourselves to practices where multiple ways of knowing coexist

and inform one another, fostering a more just and creative paradigm of knowledge production. Let us trust in the wild, creative processes of natureculture, and in doing so, cultivate spaces where interconnected, paradoxical and inspiring visions can thrive.

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