Based on 18-month fieldwork with the Quilombo community in the Brazilian Amazon, this talk reveals the story of a number: 800. This community was engaged in a collaboration with a consultancy and investment bank in setting up a carbon credit project. Referring to the number of Cuamba monkeys yearly hunted by Quilombolas, the number nonetheless arose from a from a misunderstanding between Quilombolas and financiers about what ‘caring for the forest’ means. Assumptions from financiers about quilombolas’ relationships with money and labour turned the future into a site of dispute. Whilst financiers’ practices are anchored in perceptions of risk, race and market contexts, Qiulombolo engagement with the carbon economy draws from hopes to perpetuate their mode of life, and even return to an abundant past, whilst also radically improving their welfare conditions. These contrasting engagements expose the different understandings and (financial) values attached to transformation.

Please be invited to our first CCIT seminar of the semester, where we host PhD Fellow Barbara Abrahao for a talk titled "800 Cuambas Monkey!?” - Permanence and Transformations in a Quilombo led Carbon Credit Project”.

Barbara is a PhD candidate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. Her ethnography lies at the intersection of economic and environmental anthropology, and the studies of Lowland South America. She describe the world encounter between a quilombola community and a company producing carbon credits, exploring the ambiguities and multilayered entanglements of capitalism and the climate crisis. The stories she tells delve into the complex interactions linking financial actors with scientific rationalities, vernacular knowledge, enchanted creatures, nonhuman animals, and the gardening practices of quilombolas.