Indigenous women, nonhuman world and gender: Comparing the Amazon and Siberia

ongoing

ECOFEMINDI investigates the relations between women and nonhuman world, importance of traditional ecological knowledge that women possess in indigenous societies and how this knowledge affects the role of women, their status and prestige in the household and the society they live in. After decades of discussions about nature/culture dichotomy and the dominant role of humans on nature and other nonhuman persons, today ecofeminists agree that there is also a parellel between the domination of nature and exploitation of women. Meanwhile, in the middle of environmental conflicts, political ontology discuss the need for pluriverse as a possibility instead of dualism of human and animals in Western world, taking indigenous ideas about their geography that involves nonhumans and master spirits more seriously. Siberia and Amazon regions often host the base for theoretical discussions about animism and nonhuman persons in literature. However, the gender perspective of these ontologies is hardly mentioned and this caused the human-environment relations being described rarely through the lens of critical feminist anthropology. Ecofem.indi aims to go beyond the literature that depict women only as victims of environmental degradation and asks if in societies where the separation of nature from the human world is not that strict, such as some indigenous societies, does this automatically assign women who are associated with nature to a higher status ? And secondly, do women have a different ontological perception about nonhuman world, beyond their subsistence roles? Ecofem.indi’s design is grounded in empirical and interdisciplinary research crosscutting the fields of environmental anthropology and gender to understand the dynamics of relations between women and nonhuman world. In order to answer the research questions, the project will use qualitative research methods of social anthropology in two indigenous communities in Amazons and Siberia with a participatory methodology.