Humanscapes and ecological societies: socio-affective narratives on beings, knowledge, and doings

This article addresses beings, knowledge, and doings, understanding them as natural, cultural and supernatural or spiritual spaces. In this sense, we bring the narratives of working women – Louceiras do Maruanum, who produce ceramics. We contemplate the narratives about the removal of clay, as we perceive a mystical entity brought up in the speeches of these women about the “mother of clay”, a female deity and protector of both the clay and the place in the forest. As aim of our investigation, we adopted the narratives of the women from the Quilombola Santa Luzia do Maruanum Community as possibilities of presenting the symbiosis between beings, knowledge, and doings as an addition to culture and as an opportunity for a dialogue between different areas of knowledge. We employ critical ethnography as a methodological approach, emphasizing the relationship between socio-environmental spaces and culture, which generates places of representativity and socio-affective belonging. We follow interdisciplinary paths and focus on authors such as Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Mesquita, and Seemann, among others. The discussion is permeated by the idea of humanscapes, cultural mapping and ecological societies as significant landscapes between beings, knowledge, and doings as approaches to ethnomathematics and as natural, cultural, and spiritual spaces.