Browsing by Author "Riquelme-Maulen, Wladimir"

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    Becoming tree, reconstructing memory: biocultural networks in pewen (Araucaria araucana) landscapes of the southern Andes
    (2024) Ibarra, Jose Tomas; Cortes, Josefina; Petitpas, Robert; Barreau, Antonia; Caviedes, Julian; Orrego, Gabriel; Riquelme-Maulen, Wladimir; Altamirano, Tomas A.
    Relationships between people and trees are continually unfolding in the contexts of si-tuated social-ecological systems. In current studies on social-ecological systems linked with trees, we commonly find two approaches: the first focuses on 'biological entities', examining the ecological dynamics of tree species and associated biodiversity. The se-cond approach focuses on people, analyzing 'human agency' along with historical and contemporary political or other forces shaping human-tree relationships. In this paper, we explore social-ecological systems associated with the Pewen (Araucaria araucana), one of the most iconic and sacred trees from the southern Andes. We first describe some of our own research findings on Pewen for both approaches described above. We then develop a third perspective, that we call 'relational', which highlights biocultural rela-tions and has the potential to overcome both the 'ecological/social' and the 'biological entity/human agency' dichotomies. Our relational approach allows a closer enquiry on how actors (e.g. trees and their seeds, wildlife, and people, among others) interact in complex and sympoietic biocultural networks, recognizing the biocultural memory of the system that emerges as an on-going complex of dynamics relations that must be enacted and performed on a daily basis. Furthermore, it stresses that people-pewen networks are continuously built and rebuilt in open systems subjected to historical and contemporary drivers of change