The Agency of Nature: On Ethical Dilemmas of an Ethnography Beyond Human Interaction in the Field

Abstract

In this article I present the first ethnographic records - both textual and imagery - of my thesis research. In the first con- tact with fieldwork, the aim was to study families who left the city to live in areas considered rural in southern Brazil, starting with the family of two women, Iti and Carina, women who had moved their lives from the city of Porto Alegre, in August 2020, a few months after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, to a small town in the mountains, called Nova Petrópolis. The location is around 180 ki- lometers from the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, between Picada Café and Gramado. This first trip to the field not only brought to the research an active proposal for change in ethnographic me- diation and conduction, but also opened up space for new reflec- tions on the expansion of anthropological ethics beyond human interlocutors. In this sense, this experience identified in practice the agency of nature crossed by the erasure of the collection and the capture of field production as a response to this anticipated non-elaboration.