The Quilombola Movement: Sensing Futures in Afroindigenous Amazonia

Abstract

AbstractThe “quilombola movement” is a political current that supports the legal emancipation and territorial autonomy of the descendants of runaway African slaves, called quilombolas in Brazil. As an alternative ethnographic approach, this essay accompanies Amazonian quilombolas through their “movement” in a literal‐kinematic sense of the word, and as their characteristic ways of moving are “sensed” and imagined to exist in the future. Local body techniques and their related kinesthetic sensations have an important role in scaffolding present practices and in orienting subjects in unfolding ecological and economic events. Drawing on an ethnography of daily practices—hunting, horticulture, fishing, and leisure—this essay shifts the focus from ethnohistoric representations towards an embodied account of quilombola collective identification, political struggles, and projects. In dialogue with cultural phenomenology and the broadening field of the anthropology of time, this analytical avenue seeks to show how corporeal ethnographies may be reframed as future‐oriented forms of inquiry.