Lugares de gente: mulheres, plantas e redes de troca no delta amazônico

For the riverine of Caviana Island, on the Amazon delta, landscape is a social place and keeps the memory of the relation between the indigenous past and the riverine present. I sought to decipher it through the concentrations of useful trees, how they used them, how they planted and maintained them and, finally, why they did it. This thesis deals with the relationship between plants and people. Planting is part of a set of practices, from obtaining the vegetal within the forest until its transformation into plant in the domestic environment. The forest is inhabited by enchanted beings and non-human mothers of places, beings capable of activating a process of transformation of the human to the one who charmed him. In this instability of the human condition, plants play a key role because they provide the healing of this spell, the reversal of this process, ie the possibility of permanence of their existence. By selecting and planting the women transform spaces into “places of people” through the exchange of plants and medicines among relatives, neighbors and friends. Exchange is an act of caring, which reaffirms the social bonds between humans and nonhumans engaged in reciprocal relations while binds them to specific places, reinforcing their sense of territoriality and belonging within the island. Healing in Caviana is an important tool shared among women in an exchange network; this network has the function of always keeping alive the knowledge of healing, the knowledge of plants, and thus ensure the continuity of their family and, hence, of the "Caviana sons".