Culinária da floresta - técnicas indígenas na produção alimentar amazônica

Abstract

There is a great diversity of ways in which the traditional peoples of the Amazon process and consume plant species, which unfolds in different ways of knowing, producing and promoting the biodiversity of the forest. A wealth of techniques, built up over time and connected to cosmological formulations, have been and are used to transform plants in a wide range of ways, whether they are cultivated or not, domesticated or wild, from farming or gathering, native or exotic, from the fields, the forest. In this work, we present a selection of three plant species - açaí (Euterpe sp), mairá potato (Casimirela sp) and umari (Poraqueiba sericea) - looking at the ways in which they are technically transformed in order to obtain key ingredients (gum and dough) or to change the state of the plant material (smoking, fermentation). Indigenous peoples conceptual and practical elaboration of fruit is expressed not only in the material ways in which it is processed, but also in cosmologies and rites, as we tried to show in our analysis of the umari among the Tukano peoples. This cultivated and uncultivated fruit, present in the capoeiras and in the forest, and its various forms of processing help us to think about how technique presents itself as a useful tool for dissolving antinomies adopted historically to talk about the intertwined relationship between indigenous peoples and the Amazon Forest.