Agrobiodiversidade Tentehar na Aldeia Olho D’Água, Maranhão: trajetórias, saberes e práticas

Abstract

In this research, I addressed the topic of agrobiodiversity among the Tentehar people of Olho D'Água Village, Bacurizinho Indigenous Land, Maranhão State, Brazil. Agrobiodiversity, in the context of this study, is understood as the part of biodiversity that encompasses agricultural varieties and genetic resources, sociocultural processes, knowledge associated with plants, and animals managed and hunted for food purposes. The methodological approach included participant observation, impression management, collective memory, oral narratives, semi-structured and open interviews with 13 women and 11 men, a questionnaire, and a field notebook. These strategies were crucial for the construction of an attentive and aligned ethnography based on scientific, social, and political dimensions for a successful research conduction starting from a dialogical relationship between the researcher and the interlocutors. The farmers recognize or cultivate an immense and rich set of ethnovarieties of edible crops of all kinds. In the backyard areas, in addition to the cultivars, there is animal husbandry, such as pigs, goats, chickens, guinea fowl, ducks, turkeys, and quails. From the forests, the Tentehar people obtain the game that is so important to their food culture, including armadillo, “peba”, “catingueiro” deer, “mateiro” deer, collared peccaries, agoutis, white-nosed coatis, guans, “juriti”, “lambu”, among others. The relationship between agricultural practices, both in crop fields and backyard areas, game obtained from the forests, and the agrobiodiversity as a whole is part of the debate on food sovereignty and security, giving the Tentehar food culture its unique traits. Agrobiodiversity constitutes the thread that intertwines the relationships of the farmer with the management of crop fields, backyard areas, and game, referring to the sense of trajectories, identity, and authenticity, in which interspecies relations, rules, prohibitions, and restrictions are established. As guardians of agrobiodiversity, the Tentehar farmers resist with their crop fields, cultivating, multiplying, and exchanging seeds with relatives and neighbors. In the backyards, they conduct experiments with animals and plants, producing seedlings of cultivars that circulate among them, in a system of genetic resource conservation, “in situ/on farm”. In hunting practices, ancestral knowledge, the tactics used to capture animals, weapons, traps, and interspecies interactions permeated by the ambivalence between killing game to eat and the fear of reprisal from the “piwáras” (spirits) are present. Therefore, the data from the research indicate that the place of agrobioversity in Tentehar life is the place of resilience and resistance, strongly linked to the material and symbolic reproduction of families, holding great significance in maintaining Tentehar ways of life.