“Antidomestication in the Indigenous Amazon: multispecies anarchism”

In recent years, the concept of domestication has been subjected to a new critical revision by authors of the multispecies ethnography. By widening the meaning of domestication and insisting on its use, the concept assumes new forms, including practices marked by unexpected intimacies, ontological uncertainties and bodily co-constitution between different beings. This suggests the existence of other narratives about domestication, especially if these are analyzed from a non-anthropocentric point of view (Swanson et al., 2018). Moreover, historical ecology has promoted a dissociation between the notion of plant domestication and the dependence on intensive agricultural forms of cultivation established by the so-called Neotropical "Neolithic revolution" (Clement et al., 2021).
In the context that interests us, we are inspired by the critique proposed by Carneiro da Cunha (2019), which shows another type of relational scenario in the Amazon, where agriculture is not at the expense of the forest, but is configured as a science of and in the forest, which implies a different relation with the territory, mobility and time. Therefore, the relationship between indigenous peoples and their crops is not based on control and subordination, insofar as plants have their own volitions and are understood as people. Thus, based on ethnographic cases, our proposal is to reflect on the analytical and critical strength of the notion of antidomestication in the description of the multispecies relational scenario of the Indigenous Amazon with a focus on the plant worlds.