lanloss · Landscapes of Loss: Mapping the Affective Experience of Deforestation Among Diverse Social Groups in the South American Chaco

Landscapes of Loss: Mapping the Affective Experience of Deforestation Among Diverse Social Groups in the South American Chaco

LANLOSS is an anthropological and multidisciplinary project - drawing on ethnography, satellite data, ethnobiology, and local artworks - with an aim to trace the lived social and affective experience of deforestation and its attendant losses in the South American Gran Chaco. Rates of deforestation in the understudied Chaco region are among the highest in the world, and are rapidly impacting the landscapes and livelihoods of Indigenous, peasant, and white settler groups in both shared and unequal ways, whilst heightening historic antagonisms over resources. Yet researchers still know little about the affective drivers and impacts of this problem among local populations. Given that Latin America is home to 50% of the world’s remaining biodiversity, it is critical to uncover the affective and social impacts, as well as the affective drivers, of an expanding deforestation frontier the increasingly rapid loss of dry forest in the Chaco region (Latin America’s second biome after the Amazon) is an urgent matter, largely driven by agribusiness expansion. Therefore the project proposes to deploy ethnographic and multi-disciplinary methods to trace the diverse lived experiences of Chaco deforestation by recording and comparing the distinct memories and feelings of women and men from different social groups that have been affected in shared and divergent ways by the loss of particular landscapes, taking into account the histories of racialized and settler-colonial hierarchies (e.g in the twentieth century cotton plantations) as well as the agribusiness models that have shaped these differences among the distinct groups.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union