Lecture | Research Seminar
Runaways, refugees and slavery temporalities
- Date
- Monday 18 November 2024
- Time
- Serie
- CADS Research Seminars
- Address
-
Pieter de la Court
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 5A42
In this presentation, Dr. Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha discusses the Maroon ethnography in Suriname concerning critical themes in recent Amazonian ethnology, foregrounding some emergent conceptual problems. Emphasizing how the production of difference is a crucial form of relationship for diverse Amazonian communities, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues that "If we call the very goal of social life' freedom,' then, in the case of the Amazon, the necessary means to this end are not equality and fraternity, but difference and affinity" (In A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem. São Paulo: Cosac Naif, 2002, p. 423, my translation). In this presentation, she reflects on the opposition between slavery and freedom, a key marker of Maroon historicity directly associated with different ways of producing alliances and living in a socio-cosmos with other human and more-than-human beings. Dr. Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha is particularly concerned with the need to examine Cottica Ndyuka Maroon's modes of creating worlds, including their cosmological principles and understanding of the myriad beings with whom they live.
About the speaker
Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and visiting research at the University of Amsterdam (2024-2025). Her research interests include creativity, plantation, and plantationocene effects in the Caribbean and Amazonian region, focusing mainly on the Maroon and traditional people's cosmopolitics.
Her recent publications include The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artifacts (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2020) and the edited volume Maroon cosmopolitics: Personhood, creativity, and Incorporation (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2018).