“We respect the jaguar. And the jaguar has to respect [us]. We are also jaguars. We eat meat. But we cook it and they eat it raw”. This was the answer I received from an elder of the Akwẽ-Xerente indigenous people to one of those questions that most of us anthropologists ask, even though we know they are stupid, in the hope that our interlocutors recognize our ignorance and, perhaps, even out of compassion, share a little of their knowledge, perceptions, and worldviews. The question was about why the Akwẽ-Xerente do not eat jaguar meat. I was interested to hear something more substantial about what could determine whether an animal is game or not—and ultimately indigenous ways of classifying and categorizing animals. I did not get exactly the answer I wanted, but I was able to hear the elder’s meaningful response that the Akwẽ are also, in some way, jaguars.

This episode occurred while I was carrying out a preliminary field visit to the Akwẽ territory, located in the Central region of Brazil, in September 2024. The Akwẽ people occupy a large area located in the state of Tocantins, and their territory is divided into two Indigenous Lands: Xerente and Funil. They currently have a population of approximately four thousand people, spread across one hundred and ten villages. The choice of the research location was based on the aims of the project ABIDE – Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities, which focuses on regions where large wildfires have occurred. In Brazil, the chosen region is part of the so-called “Amazonia’s arch of destruction”, or the four states in the eastern Amazon, known as the MATOPIBA region. As these are areas coveted by the economic interests of agribusiness, most fires occur for criminal reasons. Among the various indigenous peoples that inhabit this region, the Xerente stand out for their initiative in creating an association of indigenous firefighters (ABIX – Associação de Brigadistas Indígenas Xerente) and in their commitment to fighting major wildfires in their territory.

Firefighters using the counter-fire technique. Xerente Indigenous Land, Tocantins, Brazil, 2024. ©Izadora Acypreste/ABIDE.

Multispecies Ethnography

Much more than just understanding the native classifications of animals, the research primarily examines the more-than-human lives and the multiple engagements between humans and animals in this small strip of Cerrado. We are interested in observing the animals’ practices of recovery that emerge in the context of large wildfires. Whether they get burned. Whether they flee, and how they flee. How long it takes them to return to the burned areas and how this reoccupation takes place, if at all. To this end, it will be necessary to hear those who observe these animals the most and are in constant interaction with them through hunting practices and walks through Cerrado, among other daily activities. The Xerente, in addition to also suffering from the risks and impacts caused by large wildfires, observe how animals are impacted. The objective is to answer the ABIDE project’s main question: “How do animals recover from wildfires?”. Whether or not we find the answer to this question, when we look at animals, it will be possible to explore the paths of possible multispecies interactions that wildfires cause through multispecies ethnography. The latter will allow us to access animals’ perspectives on recovery and to answer another question from ABIDE: “What can we learn from animals about post-wildfire recovery?”.

Kuzâ: The Jaguar fire

During the preliminary field study, it was possible to follow several fire-related activities, especially the actions of indigenous firefighters in combating wildfires. However, what caught my attention the most was one of the most important myths of this people, which tells how the Xerente became the owners of fire, or kuzâ, in the Akwẽ language. The myth is extensive and there is no room to describe it in full here. In any case, this same myth was retold in several anthropological works, especially by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the first volume of his Mythologiques collection, The Raw and the Cooked, which shows us that it is also present among other South American indigenous peoples. Even among the Xerente, the myth is told in various versions. Here, I will only highlight some points relevant to this discussion.

The first of these points is that, before having access to fire, the Xerente did not eat roasted meat. The second one is that, in mythical times, it was the jaguar that held dominion over fire. And finally, when fire was discovered, several animals, which were previously people, were transformed into animals. The image below is a drawing produced by Valter Krãirdu Marinho Xerente for the book Kunmã Krãiwatbroze (‘Appearance of fire’) and illustrates the moment when the Akwẽ and some animals (peoples) gathered together to dispute the dominion of fire.

Xerente, Valter Krãirdu Marinho. 2011. Kunmã Krãiwatbroze. Palmas: Federal Univeristy of Tocantins (UFT).

It is from this moment on that several transformations took place: some people became animals, the Xerente gained their body painting, and even animals, in their failed attempts to master fire, gained certain bodily characteristics. One of the birds, the curassow (Crax fasciolata Spix), tried to catch the fire and burned the feathers on its head, which now resemble charred leaves. The six-banded armadillo (Euphractus sexcinctus) tried to bury the fire and put it out, as it took it underground. Other birds, such as the seriema (Cariama cristata) and the guan (Penelope purpurascens), tried to peck and eat the embers of the fire, and so the seriema ended up with a red beak and the guan with a red neck. Although the myth may vary on this point, it is unanimous that the encounter with fire led to the emergence of body painting in each clan. There are currently six clans and each of them has their own body painting.

In the myth, the hero is a young man who, due to an adventure with his brother-in-law, is abandoned on the top of a hill. After days of hunger and thirst, a male jaguar appears. Speaking in common language with the young man, the jaguar calls him ambâdi (grandson) and invites him to come down. Fearful of being devoured by the jaguar, the young man resists but accepts the invitation and calls the jaguar dahîkrda (grandfather). Back on the ground, they both set off on a journey back to the jaguar’s home, where he lives with his wife, a female jaguar. The wife does not accept the young man’s presence and has plans to devour him. During his stay, the man eats roasted meat offered by his dahîkrda. Curious, he asks how that meat was prepared. At that moment, he encounters fire for the first time. To avoid being devoured by the female jaguar, he receives help from the male jaguar to return to his village, where his relatives live. Besides the help to return, he receives some gifts, including a cofo (basket made of moriche palm straw) with roasted meat. When he arrives at his village, the roasted meat arouses the curiosity of his relatives, who organize themselves to look for fire. When this happens, the Akwẽ paint themselves for the first time and the other peoples become animals.

Since fire is now in the hands of the Akwẽ, they are the ones who eat roasted meat, while the jaguar only eats raw meat. Nevertheless, as is clear in the quote cited in the beginning of the text, the Akwẽ recognize the differences between jaguars and humans, but also the common humanity of both. This has been argued by Viveiros de Castro (2005, p. 38) for a long time, when he states that in Amerindian contexts, “the visible form of every species is an envelope (a ‘clothing’), concealing an internal human form”; and “this internal form is the spirit of the animal: an intentionality or subjectivity which is formally identical with human consciousness, materialisable, let us say, in a human bodily schema concealed behind an animal mask”. Following the author’s thinking, we understand that what distinguishes humans from animals in these contexts is not an absolute essence, but rather a perspective or point of view. Thus, by refusing to eat jaguar meat and, more than that, by claiming to be jaguars, they possibly perceive this ontological continuity between humans and jaguars, despite the manifest bodily differences.

We are also jaguars

By briefly recovering some aspects of the narratives of the myth of fire, I sought to emphasize the singular presence of animals and the ways in which they appear in the mythological and cosmological systems of the Xerente people. Although the proposal here is merely exploratory, the objective is to advance, through multispecies ethnography, towards a deeper understanding of the modes of relationality between humans and animals in indigenous territories. And, who knows, to look for ways that can explain in more depth the speech of the elder Akwẽ regarding the Xerente also being jaguars.

Izadora Acypreste is a postdoctoral student at PPGAS/UFSCar and postdoctoral researcher at ICS/ULisboa within the scope of the ABIDE project. She holds a degree in Social Sciences and a master’s and a doctorate degree in Social Anthropology. She is a researcher associated with LETS (Laboratório de Etnologias Transespecíficas) and Grupo de Estudos Humanimalia (Antropologia das Relações Humano-Animais), both at UFSCar. Since 2010, she has been carrying out research with riverside populations (artisanal fishers and vazanteiros) and quilombolas on the banks of the São Francisco River in the northern region of Minas Gerais. She has experience in the areas of rural anthropology, anthropology of Afro-Brazilian populations, and multispecies anthropology. She is currently researching the relationship between animals and wildfires in an indigenous context.

Project ERC ABIDE – Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities is coordinated by PI Verónica Policarpo, and funded by the European Research Council, European Union (ERC, ABIDE, CoG ID 101043231). More information about the project and the team available at www.abide.isc.ulisboa.pt . Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Kuai Shen & Nuno Negrões

Each fire has a story. Like a living being, each fire has an origin—a place where it comes to life and someone or something that keeps it alive. After the first spark the fire grows, nurtured by what its environment provides. Vegetation, wind, humidity, and temperature determine how a fire grows and where it will inhabit. Sometimes a fire runs fast and wild, while in other occasions slowly, but intensively, that fire can expand throughout an entire landscape. Eventually, every fire will diminish and find an end whether it is by human hands or due to the lack of fuel. Everything in this world ends, even fire.

Fire does not have a voice to tell us its story. Yet, post-fire, a more-than-human echo remains. Once fire touches a forest, fast combustion sets in motion processes of transformation. Crossing flames change chemical identities, vibrating with frequencies humans cannot easily understand by means of their own senses, inciting rhythms of evasion, sheltering, forces of attraction and repulsion. Fire imprints signatures on landscapes that conceal multispecies stories, which can be puzzled together by combining quantitative and qualitative methods.

The driving question for us centres on what recovery means for the humans and nonhumans whose relations depend on fire. In this regard, we have established an ethical framework that guides our research and practice, namely to avoid non-intrusive methods with the animals we want to follow—no tracking collars, nor any form of capture or captivity. We therefore are exploring methods which, as far as possible, aim at safeguarding the wellbeing of the species we encounter. 

…across Serra da Estrela

We, Nuno and Kuai, decided to try two distinctive approaches that could aid us in drafting an epilogue about the stories behind the fires that severely burned Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela in 2017 and 2022. For the period of 6 days in September 2024, using sound recordings and camera trapping, we mapped six sites around the freguesias of Sameiro, Vale de Amoreira, Verdelhos, Valhelhas, Folgosinho, and Famalicão. We deployed automated recording units (ARUs) using Audiomoths. Additionally, we registered the soundscape by employing a 32-bit portable recorder (Zoom F3) coupled with condenser, piezoelectric, and seismic microphones. This kind of acoustic mapping was complemented by three camera traps (Browning) placed next to the ARUs. The primary intention was to begin an audiovisual inventory of the species that inhabit burned and unburned landscapes.

The scars left by the fires that affected Serra da Estrela in 2017 and 2022 conceal stories bound to different ecological contingencies and distinctive kinds of fuels.¹ Both were deemed as wildfires that severely changed the land. The fire of 2017 lasted less than one day, whereas the fire of 2022 lasted more than one week. On most sites, we witnessed Serra da Estrela’s fire-prone vegetation: where there was an extensive pine forest (Pinus pinaster), now giestas (Cytisus striatus) and esteva (Cistus ladanifer) dominate. Between carbonised areas, new Pinus trees sprouting, some tiny ones we barely saw, whilst others were already stretching 50 cm high. On other places, we admired the fire resilience of oak trees (Quercus pyrenaica and Q. robur), the sweet chestnut forests (Castanea sativa), and the riparian vegetation, which altogether performed as a firewall, reducing the advance of fire fronts in 2022—even stopping it completely.² Quercus pyrenaica is a fire resilient and pyrophilic species, and we did find several of these deciduous trees completely burnt. However, the charcoaled, burnout first-impression is deceiving. New branches from the buttress of a burned stump of Quercus pyrenaica, in Valhelhas, were greeting the sunlight of a new day. Maybe recovery is a process rather than a destination!

The observations from our field trip signal to stories of survival, resistance, adaptability; the entanglements that are hidden to our limited senses when we do not carefully include other lifeforms affected by fires. Many animals can’t be seen, because they conceal their lives, or are so small that escape our awareness. When we look at territories that have lived with fires for decades, we only perceive a small amount of what happened, what is happening, and what could happen. The camera traps revealed shy nocturnal animals which avoid being seen, and those who remained or moved to places untouched by fire. The sound recording method allowed us to hear the entanglement of biophony and geophony: birds, insects, bats, even the  burned wood was populated by invisible insects; and fire-plants, through their vascular and root system, the xylem and phloem running through the branches, amplified the sound of the wind. And, although we became audience for a concert of dialogs conducted in cryptic frequencies, and we went the troubles of grasping to understand a different language written by and with fire, we cannot avoid thinking that our human presence also means something to them—that we are part of the recovery orchestra that is now playing.

The Abide family seeks to carefully watch and listen to the remnants of wildfires and the multispecies voices within. We are working in creating a narrative capable of overturning the tone of disaster that usually colours wildfires through the senses of species which return to, benefit from, or re-emerge out of the soot and ashes.

^{1, 2} Conversation with Jacinto Diamantino, ICNF, Manteigas.

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The Project ERC ABIDE – Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities is coordinated by PI Verónica Policarpo, funded by the European Research Council, European Union (ERC, ABIDE, CoG ID 101043231). More information about the project and the team available at www.abide.isc.ulisboa.pt . Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The golden hour
Under the golden hour light, the green of the trees seems deeper and magical. It sparkles. We walk silently up a path covered with leaves from last autumnal season. There are footprints from wild boars and we all bend to watch them closely, a mix between curiosity and fascination. We finally set near a path leading to a thicker set of trees. Ricardo Brandão, the coordinator of CERVAS, the Centro de Ecologia, Recuperação e Vigilância de Animais Selvagens, lays down the box he carries, where a small tawny owl crouches in motionless silence. This member of the strix aluco family reached the centre a couple of months before, injured, where he was cared for by the CERVAS team. What does it mean, to take care of another living being so that recovery from trauma and disaster is possible? How can we look into the marvel of another living being in their recovery process? How can we turn the awe we feel into humble learning?With confidant hands, Ricardo invites us to hold the small tawny owl before setting him free into the wild. One needs to learn how to hold gently, in a delicate balance between holding on and letting go. This seems to be the secret of caring relations. One of us holds the feet, the other the small body, all silk-like smoothness. We can feel the gentle beat of the small heart. Suddenly, the head turns and the big eyes look straight at us. In that particular moment, as Derrida described about his cat, we connect deeply to the singular subjectivity of this animal. We can feel his fear. We can feel his desire for freedom. We can attune to his power. We then follow Ricardo’s instructions: by holding him gently but firmly, we finally launch him, to watch him flying towards the high canopies of the forest. There is a moment of deep and meaningful silence. We are united in a kind of gravitas and sense of wonder.

Figure 1. Returning a young tawny owl to nature, after recovery at CERVAS. Photo by Filipa Soares.

The ABIDE project: learning from animals how to recover from disasters

This moment, which took place in May 2023, during a retreat of the ABIDE Team in Serra da Estrela, somehow encapsulates our shared purpose in project ABIDE: attune to the experiences of animals and other-than-human beings, in an effort to know their worlds and creative processes of recovery from wildfires. The project is funded by an Advanced Research Grant of the European Research Council, and will run between 2023 and 2028 at the Human-Animal Studies Hub and ICS-ULisboa. As explained in our website, the acronym ABIDE “stands for dwelling, abiding, abode, a place of living. It represents symbolically the aspiration to build a safe place for multispecies cohabitation, one where both human and nonhuman animals may all live together, cooperate and flourish.” 

We start this journey with an overarching question, which hopefully will open new avenues of enquiry. We want to know how animals recover from catastrophic wildfires, in order to include them, their experiences and perspectives, in a new model of multispecies governance of disasters. We are driven by scientific curiosity, empathic engagement, and ethical care. We wish to know more about how animals reoccupy the territory, and the more than-human maps they contribute to build in that process. About their relationships with other animals, including humans. About the entanglements with plants and other more-than-human agents. About their multiple modes of resistance to adverse conditions. About their creative practices, and the meanings they convey through them. About the ways in which traditional and indigenous knowledge addresses them and the management of fire.

The project unfolds in four different phases. Exploring the narratives of animals in disasters, in policy documents and the media; observing how animals are recovering, through multispecies ethnography and geographic mapping; storying and reconstituting multispecies and animals’ biographies of post-disaster landscapes – what we call zoegraphies of disaster; and engaging with multilevel stakeholders to co-produce and test our pilot in multispecies governance of disasters. We focus in three countries, severely affected by extreme fires over the last decades: Australia, Brazil and Portugal. In each country, we will work in particular “more-than-human contact zones”, where we expect to engage with the local and/or indigenous communities, acknowledging ancient ways of relating to the more-than-human worlds. 

In our endeavour, we aim at making our nonhuman kin full partners in research. We need to give them back the agency and recognition that was always theirs, even though ignored and unacknowledged. We aim at building a kind of knowledge that surpasses speciesist barriers. To that purpose, we need to learn how to listen to them differently, and cultivate new ways of paying attention to their ways of being and living. We need to go out of our comfort zone, and venture into worlds that are unfamiliar to us – and that is really their beauty… And we also need to hold our more-than-human-partners, and their experiences, gently and with compassion, combining knowledge and ethics in order to provide a safe space for all.

The ABIDE Family: facing the challenges of interdisciplinarity heads onTo address these challenges, we are armoured with the best tool of all: a team made of highly motivated researchers, in several stages of career, from different scientific backgrounds. Anthropology, geography, conservation biology, visual arts, multispecies ethnography, ecology, sociology. Our strength is made of the plural languages we speak, and the capacity to turn them into a real and fruitful dialogue. For that, we train ourselves to listen to each other authentically. That requires humbleness, a willingness to go out of our epistemological comfort zones and dare to learn from each other, and from the animals we work with. It also requires that we support each other, while taking responsibility for oneself. That is why we often name ourselves a “family” rather than a team. We put so much of ourselves into making this project happen, that we can only reach the other side of this process transformed. Which certainly resonates with the ultimate goal of ABIDE: to contribute to build a world where all animals, human and nonhuman, may flourish.

Figure 2. The ABIDE team during the team’s retreat in Sabugueiro, Serra da Estrela, Portugal. Photo by Chiara Beneduce.

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* Verónica Policarpo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, where she coordinates the Human-Animal Studies Hub and the the post-graduate course Animais e Sociedade. In 2022 she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant with project ABIDE. 

The Project ERC ABIDE – Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities is coordinated by PI Verónica Policarpo, funded by the European Research Council, European Union (ERC, ABIDE, CoG ID 101043231). More information about the project and the team available at www.abide.isc.ulisboa.pt . Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

This article was first published in the SHIFT Blog, here: The ABIDE Project: Attuning to animals and multispecies experiences of disasters – Blogue SHIFT 

The Project ERC ABIDE – Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities is coordinated by PI Verónica Policarpo, funded by the European Research Council, European Union (ERC, ABIDE, CoG ID 101043231). More information about the project and the team available at www.abide.isc.ulisboa.pt . Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Before the beginning of the summer holidays, at the end of July, the HAS HUB members went to the Tapada Nacional de Mafra for a warm team building day dedicated to walking through the park, observing the landscape and its inhabitants, but also talking and sharing time and food with each other. During our visit, animals crossed our path in several different ways, from  a fleeting group of deer, curious birds, hungry insects, timid boars and  working birds of prey.

We started off by having a lovely time during a shared lunch at the Tapada de Mafra entrance picnic park. While we were having lively conversations to get to know each other, some animals started to grace us with their presence. Suddenly, several species of small birds started to swoop in to try to look for some food scraps. This led to some lateral conversations to arise: “What kind of bird is that?”, “I can’t tell very well, they’re so fast!”.

After this very enjoyable lunch, we initiated our walk through the Tapada de Mafra. It was a lovely hot summer day, so we set off equipped with hats to protect us from the sun, and everyone was carrying their water bottle. Due to the temperature, we chose a route that would offer more shade, making the walk easier. We went through sunny areas, shaded spots, steeper climbs, descents, and beautiful landscapes. Unlike the local non-human inhabitants, who cleverly hide away from the midday heat, we soldier on trying to catch glimpses into the lives of these animals. The entire journey offered us moments of immersion in the environment, interspersed with personal conversations and sharing. The sounds of Tapada, the smell of the air, the warm breeze, the vegetation and the presence of animals all contributed to an enriched experience. Some animals were more visible than others. At first, we didn’t see any deer or fallow deer, but the path was brimming with life. As we walked several insects crossed our path, being butterflies in the air, insects hunting each other, or just going about their day.

However, the presence of larger species was already noticeable in the tracks and trails marked on the dry summer ground. The spotting of footprints or droppings sparked new conversations. Which species could it be? Where were they going, and where had they come from? Was it a recent mark or an older one? Fortunately, we had Nuno Soares with us, who, as a biologist, enriched these conversations. We all began to cultivate an attentiveness to our surroundings, noticing traces of animals that would have gone unnoticed by less observant eyes. Finally, more than halfway through our route, we were rewarded with the sight of a few fallow deer. That moment remains in our memories and in the photographs taken by Henrique.

As a final moment, after an easy descent through the mountains, following what had been a very hot climb, we arrived just in time for an awareness session about birds of prey. There, we were able to see some flight demonstrations and to meet some of the animal staff of the Tapada de Mafra. We were introduced to a Harris’s Hawk and a Peregrine Falcon Hybrid who both worked in airports and urban spaces in order to keep other birds away. These birds, alongside others who worked in awareness sessions, called the Tapada their main home.

The main purpose of the day was to bring together different researchers of the HUB working on the relationships between animals and humans who come from different disciplines – anthropology, sociology, design and biology – so that they could meet each other in person and connect in a non academic setting. It was also the occasion to introduce the CLAN team members, Henrique Tereno and Clara Venâncio, with some of the ABIDE team members, Chiara Beneduce and Nuno Soares, all of which are working under the supervision of Professor Veronica Policarpo.

While it is possible to work within Human-Animal Studies without leaving one’s own field, it is through interdisciplinarity that the HAS can truly shine. In this regard, this type of outing is helpful to get different people with different perspectives together and aware of each other’s views. However, aside from this, there is also one very important aspect of this team building exercise, the animals themselves. One of the biggest issues within HAS is the inability to bring the animals “in”. Thus, what better place to get to know people who work about animals, than amongst the animals themselves. What we saw, listened, smelled and heard was all fuel to our lively conversations and sharing of ideas. It was through clues and glimpses that we were invited into what is a small part of the lives of the inhabitants of the Tapada de Mafra.

This event was co-organized with Project ABIDE – Animal ABidings: recoverIng from Disasters in more-than-human communities, coordinated by PI Verónica Policarpo, and funded by the European Union (ERC, ABIDE, CoG ID 101043231).

The Project ERC ABIDE – Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities is coordinated by PI Verónica Policarpo, funded by the European Research Council, European Union (ERC, ABIDE, CoG ID 101043231). More information about the project and the team available at www.abide.isc.ulisboa.pt . Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.