Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Geographies of Gratitude

2023; University of Texas Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lag.2023.a915680

1548-5811

Case Watkins,

Indigenous and Place-Based Education

Geographies of Gratitude Case Watkins Let's talk about gratitude. i'm so grateful for the generous and insightful reviews submitted by my colleagues, each of whom graciously donated their time and intellectual labor to comment on my work and place it in context. More broadly, I remain profoundly grateful for the privileges of living, learning, and writing with so many lovely people, plants, and places over the past two decades. While the book listed here has my name on it, it seems to me much more honest to think of it as a collaboration; a testament to the many teachers I've had the good fortune to learn from—some of them human and some in universities; some in rural agrarian communities, development agencies, archives, and other public institutions; and still others rooted in tidelands, fields, and forests in northeast Brazil and beyond. So in this response, I sit with this gratitude and map some of its geographies. Along the way, I engage with the generous reviews from my colleagues, focusing especially on the areas where they correspond and converse, and discussing how they provoked me to think about the book and its relationships. I also take this opportunity to reflect a bit on the book as a collaborative community, narrating just a few of the uncountable places, ideas, and collaborators that joined forces to make the book possible. Foregrounding gratitude reveals the relationships we foster—and hopefully cherish—with other beings; and in their collective, these relationships allow us to realize ourselves (Levinas, 1985). I am delighted that each of the reviews picked up on the book's approaches to [End Page 196] engaging across boundaries. Blowing up binaries is fundamental to the worldview expressed in the book, and this is evident in each review, even as they span geography, anthropology, and environmental history. Karl Offen found the methodological approaches "mutually entangled." Vanessa Castañeda details a "transoceanic dialogue of exchange" that works "across fields and interdisciplinary boundaries." Martha Bell uses "boundary object" to describe "emergent groves" as the book's central socioecological framework. Samira Moretto discusses "cross-cutting" methods used to connect the colonial past with the neoliberal present. Nia Cambridge applies a framework of "liminal geography," or "points of connection where various worlds collide," to generously situate the book within literatures and practices of Black ecologies. Where some may have rightfully found contradictions, these reviewers find instead generative tensions and opportunities. Yes, palm oil was and is a symbol and source of violence in the transatlantic slave trade and in modern plantation monocultures gashed into tropical rain forests from Southeast Asia to the Amazon, where they wage the ongoing "guerra do dendê" that Samira Moretto mentioned. Yet dendê is also a wellspring of resistance, of joy, of thriving in Afro-Brazilian landscapes, religions, cultures, and economies in Bahia. I appreciate the "both/and" analyses offered by my colleagues, not only because of the way they break open possibilities for seeing the world (and our research on it) in complex, layered, and inclusive ways, but also because they enroll their approaches in broader projects of epistemological humility. So even as I look forward with the ideas and contexts my colleagues have offered, I reflect on the lineage of these approaches, as I have tracked them. For me, these liminal geographies or boundary objects of exchange emerge from millennia of Indigenous and otherwise non-Western intellectual commitments to human-environmental community and inclusion. Plural, fluid, and defiant representations feel all the more honest, earthly, and embodied. They stand on the shoulders, as Martha Bell points out here, of the cultural landscapes first theorized by Carl Sauer and passed down through generations of geographers. Still, as Sarah Whatmore (2006) has made clear, those approaches mesh productively with the more recent theorizations we now refer to as more-than-human or multispecies. Blow up the binaries. There exist few academic myths more misleading than the "single-authored monograph." In the book's preface, I begin with an anecdote about my first encounter with palm oil in Bahia—sitting at a plastic table in a cobblestone alley devouring a steaming pan of seafood moqueca tinged with azeite de dendê. A...