Event Description
Wixárika conceptions of sickness and healing are rooted in a cosmology of body and more-than-human landscapes in what is now called Mexico. I propose the analytic of “accumulation” to refer to social and biological processes that degrade landscapes and produce toxicity over time and the ways Wixarika people address the variables they perceive to be the cause. I will discuss how inequitable social and racial formations established in the colonial era are re-mapped on the region through state, federal, and developmental policies that perpetuate a resource war deemed by Indigenous people as “the Second Conquest.” This talk analyzes ethnographic moments where people move from monitoring the ever-present process of accumulation to identifying breaking points to attempt structural interventions. Ethnographically investigating peoples’ senses of accumulation can help structure community-based efforts to unravel the toll of toxicity and oppression, and to attempt to disrupt the accumulation of injuries to bodies and landscapes of communities and of indigenous people globally.
Speaker
Salvador Contreras, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Anthropology, UC Berkeley.
Cosponsors
Hosted by the Institute for International Studies' Berkeley Center for Social Medicine,and cosponsoredby the Center for Latin American Studies and the Medical Anthropology Program.