BSP Research Seminar

Convener(s): Laura Trajber Waisbich

Speaker(s): Dr Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon (Wits University, South Africa/Africa Oxford Initiative Visiting Fellow)

We will hear from Dr Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon (Wits University, South Africa/Africa Oxford Initiative Visiting Fellow) about his ongoing research around land claims, climate justice, and Indigenous struggles in Southern Brazil. More on the paper and on Dr Wilhelm-Solomon work, below.

All welcome.

Sacred Demarcations: Land Claims, Climate Justice and the Laklãnõ Struggle in Southern Brazil

This paper, based on research-in-progress, will discuss the land struggles of the Indigenous Laklãnõ-Xokleng community in Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. Drawing on short-term ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in February and March 2024 – as well as a review of existing legal and academic literature – it will argue that their case is significant for understanding the links between climate justice and land claims in the global South. It will argue for the concept of sacred demarcations as the unstable lines of resistance to sacrifice zones in the time of the climate crisis. These demarcations reveal the mutable material, juridical, social and spiritual contours of land disputes.

The paper will discuss the community’s victory in Brazil’s Supreme Court in September 2023 against the ‘marco temporal thesis,’ which sought to limit Indigenous land claims to territory occupied in 1988. The case originated in a land dispute around a nature reserve established in Laklãnõ-Xokleng territory. However, in October 2023, the gates of a containment dam were closed, leading to the flooding of Laklãnõ-Xokleng territory and the displacement of community members to protect primarily white communities downriver. Military police brutally repressed protests. Furthermore, Indigenous attempts to reclaim land have precipitated a violent backlash by white settlers, including the murder of a youth and the destruction of houses.

The paper will also examine a youth-based reforestation project for the sacred araucaria tree and its connection to these land struggles and global climate politics. The paper will argue that Laklãnõ-Xokleng struggles represent a microcosm of global politics around climate justice – involving restorative land claims, resistance to environmental racism, the creation of flooding areas, and the tensions of local reforestation in relation to the global politics of climate finance and carbon markets.

Author bio:

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and an Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx) Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. He is the author of the narrative non-fiction book titled “The Blinded City: Ten Years in Inner-City Johannesburg” (Picador Africa, 2022). The book covers themes of unlawful occupation, eviction, and migration. He is the co-editor of four collections and has published widely in international journals including Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology and Society & Space. He holds a master’s and doctorate in Development Studies from the University of Oxford.