Resumen de Insurgent Archivings: Sensing the Spirit of Nature and Reckoning with Traces of Our Dead
While studying immigrant worlding in Brazil’s nineteenth-century southern settler frontier, I stumbled across multiple ways of archiving, from poor farmers’ viva voce prayers and reminiscences to the nurturing of herbal gardens and usage of forest medicinal products to communal vital registries and home burials (including my ancestors’)—all bridging the sensual and conceptual realms through specific material constellations. I take the traces emanating from this unschooled sensorium as an “unfinished system of nonknowledge” forged against the specter of death, as in the 1874 fratricidal conflict that crushed the natural enlightenment of the so-called Mucker false saints. Here, on the edges of colonization, traces-of-what-one-does-not-know testify to the house as an ongoing index of survival and insurgency: both a cluster of materialities, relations, and affects through which complex practices of healing and living on emerge together and an archiving operation combining the historical and the unhistorical in the refiguration of humanness and futurity. As these flickering homespun traces exceed the racialization and necropolitics conjured by the ruling classes and confront brutal efforts at “silencing the past,” they also carry “the poetry it is possible not to write”—that is, folks’ imaginative and horizon-making capacities, which include the Spirit of Nature and relationships to our dead and which storytelling animates time and again.
