A Viscous Law and the Sticky Bodies of Cocoa: For a cosmopoetics of justice

The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the formation of more-than-human collectives able to generate justice for black and indigenous communities and to sustain more ecological, mutually dependent and politically autonomous ways of coexisting in the context of climate changes. The latter is approached under the concept of Anthropocene. The empirical context of the investigation is the southern region of the state of Bahia in Brazil, which concentrates an important part of the cocoa production in that country, and also the place where I come from. I use an autoethnographic approach to explore the history of the formation of my native village – Florestal, district of the city of Jequié – around the production of cocoa and analyse how the modernisation of cocoa agriculture changed the relationship between people and nature and contributed to the erasure of indigenous memory. I approach ethnographically the experiences of the landless workers’ movement and indigenous communities that by recovering indigenous ancestry and its cosmological knowledge are also recovering more ecological ways of coexisting with nature. I suggest that these experiences are examples of more-than-human collectives that are important for reinventing societies before the challenges posed by climate change. By observing how these experiences change space, I develop an ecological conception of a viscous law emerging from the composition of human and non-human bodies in space. This thesis contributes to the liberation of the law from its modern, liberal, individualistic, Eurocentric, normative and anthropocentric matrix genealogically rooted in the interiority of the rational subject; and it intends to explore the genesis of the law in the non-determinative self-emergence of bodies composing the space.