Walking Through Amazonia: An Embodied Perspective on “Natural” Environment

Based on the ethnographic analysis of a Brazilian quilombo’s1 subsistence practices in Eastern Amazonia, the article shows how walking represents an embodied, non-logocentric tool for knowing, experiencing and producing a “so-cio-natural” environment. First, I will focus on walking as a “technique of the body” (Mauss 1935) that the anthropol-ogist needs to re-apprehend according to a local habitus (Bourdieu 1977) in order to understand how the forest space is perceived. From this perspective, movement in space assumes a methodological value. Secondly, by interweaving the related concepts of space and place, I will reveal how two different complementary modalities of experiencing the terri-tory emerged during my fieldwork. One of them was somewhat more ephemeral and subjective whilst the second one was longer lasting and shared. On the one hand, by moving in space in accordance with his/her original trajectories, each individual knew a particular forest, which s/he also ultimately altered through specific “territorializing acts”. On the other hand, the ephemeral signs impressed on vegetation by the individual intersected a shared mapping of “natural” places which remained relatively steady in time.