argia.eus
INPRIMATU
The struggle of witches for land
  • This column is the sowing of many hands. He writes an agroecological that proposes ecofeminism as an alternative to nurture feminist sentiment. This wave tries to relate land expropriation, the destruction of nature and the differentiating relationship between the sexes as the basis of a world system that has not always existed. Today I invite you to look at the seed.
Amanda Dias Verrone 2023ko urriaren 30a
Ilustrazioa: Camila Schindler.

(Illustration: Camila Schindler)

When we return to the root of the oppressive model, it cannot be accepted that the plundering of land, the enslavement of people and the destruction of indigenous peoples in colonized territories were the conditions for creating a modern world. We rarely point out that these phenomena were possible, to a large extent, as a consequence of the previous knowledge accumulated by a certain type of hunting: The "witch hunt" in the Enlightenment, the most important rural event in Europe and precondist for the capitalist leap.

Women who had no access to land and customary rights among farmers. As Silvia Federici teaches us, through the figure of witches, the authorities criminalized private property, social non-dependence, the extension of pagan beliefs and the deviation from the sexual norm. At the same time, they established femininity, the heterosexual regime and the nuclear family as a guarantee of quantity, quality and control of the workforce.

Two strategies that reinforce capitalism are the commodification of land and the forced dependence of women on men. And until today, from a conditioning of their right to land dute.Alde, capitalism dirty the socio-economic freedom of women. On the other hand, the imaginary that legitimizes heterosexual marriages is the only way to obtain land.

This reality has been even more complex in the Basque Country; even the transmission of this acquired right, through inheritance, did not reach women, as it often left land to its older brothers.

The expoliation of female lands goes beyond agriculture. The wisdom of the ancestors, the desire of women, the uncompromising bodies and the denial of the feeling of belonging to nature. Dissipation of freedom and community. Persecution of everything that does not cause the male spread of capitalist accumulation.

Ecofeminism, therefore, is the planting of historicity, regaining memory and collecting the genealogy of both peasant women and those who have never been able to step on the ground. Ecofeminism was burned in flames and is to work the fraternity of the struggles of women killed by the current transnational agribusiness. Ecofeminism is to keep alive the Creole seed of those who have not always been taken into account in the story of territorial liberation, without forgetting that without land there is no sovereignty.