Aníbal G. Arregui

Aníbal G. Arregui is a Serra Húnter Tenure-eligible lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, and a research associate of the BOAR project. After his PhD at University of Barcelona (2013), he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Rostock (2013-15), Charles University (2018), and University of Barcelona (2019-21). Between 2016 and 2019, Aníbal held diverse courses as an external Lecturer at the University of Vienna (Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology). 

In geographical terms, Aníbal’s area of expertise and long-term interest has been Amazonia, in particular quilombola and ribeirinho communities, where he has conducted fieldwork since 2006. In his ethnographic work, Aníbal has described how ‘traditional’ practices – hunting, fishing, horticulture, leisure activities – and bodily self-conceptualisations orient Amazonian identity politics, economic projects and engagements with the environment in general. With this focus, Aníbal departs from usual cosmological or ontological approaches to Amazonian peoples, and instead highlights the significance of attending to the centrality of everyday practice and corporeality in organizing society, orienting history, and reshaping the environment. In a work-in-progress book, which connects and synthesises his main contributions (published mainly in journal articles and book chapters), Aníbal puts forth the notion of “corporeal ecologies”. This is suggested as an ethnographic lens into how human and other-than-human bodies entangle in the formation of socio-ecological textures that are hardly graspable with the analytical tools of natural sciences.

Since 2017, Aníbal conducts also fieldwork in Barcelona around emerging forms of human-wild boar relations. Drawing on his corporeal-ecological ideas, Aníbal still pursues an understanding of how humans and wild animals engage in the practical everyday in ways that exceed the interspecies relational schemes of conservation biology, veterinary medicine or urban planning.  In his ongoing work, Aníbal is describing how suburban dwellers affect and are affected by ‘urban’ wild boar following a situated and reversible logic, one that allows beings and their relational spaces to flip from ‘wild’ to ‘tame’, form ‘plague’ to ‘neighbour’, or from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’.  In his comparison of scientific and vernacular classifications, Aníbal attends ethnographically to corporeal or affective forms of reversibility in human-wild boar relations. This situated reversibility conforms multispecies relations whose materialisation depends on the particulars of often creative specimens and highly variable, intimate encounters, thus challenging and repurposing the relational schemes that draw on wider scales of ecological ‘habitats’ and ‘species’ ethological hallmarks.

Education
2013 | PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Spain
2008 | MA in Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Spain
2006 | BA in Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Spain
2005 | BA in Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain 

Selected publications 

Peer-reviewed journal articles 

• 2022 | ‘Activating Dark Earths. Somatosoils and the Carbonic Loops of Amazonian Ecologies’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 28 (3): NS. (Accepted/ forthcoming)
• 2021 | ‘The Quilombola Movement: Sensing Futures in Afroindigenous Amazonia. Ethos, 48: 336-356. https://doi-org.sire.ub.edu/10.1111/etho.12280
• 2020 | ‘Conectando con la Amazonia transparente. El cuerpo Afroindígena y la communicación más allá de las élites’. Revista Española de Antropología Americana 50: 291-306.
• 2020 | ‘Viralscapes. The bodies of others after COVID-19’. Allegra Lab. March 31, 2020     
• 2020 | Positional Wildness: Amazonian Ribeirinhos, Pink Dolphins and Interspecies Affections, Ethnos, 85:5, 819-842, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1619606
• 2020 | Embodying equivocations: Ecopolitical mimicries of climate science and shamanism. AnthropologicalTheory, 20(3):330-356. 
• https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499617753335
• 2015 | ‘Amazonian Quilombolas and the Technopolitics of Aluminum’. Journal of Material Culture. 20(3):149-172
• 2014 | ‘“Teoría”, “Inteligencia” y “Ciencia” como Índices Bajo Amazónicos del Conocimiento Incorporado’. Amazônica – Revista de Antropologia. 6 (1): 90-108
• 2011 | ‘Too “High” Tech: Metonymical Fallacies and Fetishism in the Perception of Technology’. Journal of Contemporary Anthropology 2(1): 46-62.
• 2008 | ‘La Tecnología en el Cuerpo: Biomecánica de los Quilombolas en dos Selvas Brasileñas’. (Con)textos: Revista d’Antropologia i Investigació Social 1: 23-40.

Books

• In preparation | Corporeal Ecologies. A praxiography of forest futures (manuscript submission expected in spring 2022)
• In preparation | (ed.) Vitalidades: Etnografias en los límites de lo humano. Madrid: Nola (with Juan M. Dabezies)
• 2018 | (ed.) Decolonial Heritage: Natures, Cultures and the Asymmetries of Memory. Münster: Waxmann. (with Gesa Mackenthun and Stephanie Wodianka)
• 2013 | La Selva Tecnológica: Sistemas Sociotécnicos y Antropología Simétrica en Comunidades Ribereñas del Bajo Amazonas. Barcelona: Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa https://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/104557#page=3

Book chapters / other

• 2019 | ‘This Mess is a “World”! Environmental Diplomats in the Mud of Anthropology’. In: Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the World. Creating a Cosmopolitics of Change. Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability. Rosalyn Bold (Ed). pp. 183-202. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2018 | ‘Ribeirinho Hunting Techno-Animism. On the Inexact Lines of Amazonian Modernity’. In: Indigenous Modernities in South America. Ernst Halbmayer. (ed.) pp: 164-183. Herefordshire: Sean Kingston Publishing.
• 2018 | ‘Displaced Bodies, Imprinted worlds’. Video-essay (10 min). In: Displacements. The 2018 Biennial Conference of the Society of Cultural Anthropology, 19-21 April 2018. Available at: https://displacements.jhu.edu/tradition-and-performance-displacements-of-the-present-in-latin-america/
• 2018 | ‘Introduction’. In: Decolonial Heritage: Natures, Cultures and the Asymmetries of Memory.pp: 7-28. Münster: Waxmann. (with Gesa Mackenthun and Stephanie Wodianka).
• 2018 | ‘Cultivating the Sky’. In: Decolonial Heritage: Natures, Cultures and the Asymmetries of Memory. pp: 257-273. Münster: Waxmann. 
• 2014 | ‘Nature-Culture-Ecologies: Heritage in Transcultural Contexts’. In H/Soz/kult. Kommunikation und Fachinformation für die Geschichtswissenschaften. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/y6vrdksu
• 2014 | ‘Digging into the Smartness: A Short Technopolitical History of Vienna’s Urban Lakeside’. Proceedings of the 19^th International Conference on Urban Planning and Regional Development in the Information Society. 21-23 May, Vienna, Austria. http://www.corp.at
• 2012 | ‘Paz implícita y violencia imaginada en comunidades quilombolas del río Erepecurú’. In: La paz dede abajo. Perspectivas antropológicas sobre la paz en contextos indígenas y afroamericanos. Canals, R; Celigueta, G; & Orobitg, G. (ed.). Pp. 39-43. Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona.
• 2011 | ‘La Selva Parcelada: Reforma Agraria y Fragmentación Social en el Bajo Amazonas’. In: Horizontes do Brazil- Escenarios, Intercambios y Diversidad, Barcelona: Ediciones APEC, p. 389-403.

Book reviews

• 2020 | DE LA TORRE, Oscar. 2018. The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835-1945. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, Journal of Latin American Studies. 52(3): 697-99 doi:10.1017/S0022216X20000851
• 2020 | CHUA, Liana; MATHUR, Nayanika (eds.). 2018. Who Are ’We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology. Berghahn Books. Social Anthropology. 28(2): 532-34
• 2020 | WAGNER, Roy. 2019. La invención de la cultura.  Traducción y prólogo de Pedro Pitarch. Madrid: Nola. 331 pp. Disparidades. Revista de Antropología 75(1), enero-junio 2020, e014a eISSN: 2659-6881
• 2012 | MARTÍNEZ MAURI, Mònica; LARREA KILLIGER, Cristina. 2011). Antropología social, desarrollo y cooperación internacional. Introducción a los fundamentos básicos y debates actuales”. AIBR Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 7 (2), p. 248-253