Introducing the problem and the terms of its analysis

Nowadays, the conception of cultural patrimony is reproduced by the diffusion of a globalized ideology, in which “the preoccupation with preservation is connected to the consciousness of the importance of diversity – be it biodiversity or cultural diversity – for the survival of humanity” (Lobo, 2012, p. 69). Defined in these terms, the conception of diversity is regularly projected on cognitive dualisms that are equivalent to societal dynamics approached in different ways, sometimes referring to nature, sometimes to differences amongst human beings (Fonseca, 2009). Opposing these dualisms, some contemporary approaches argue for a conception that considers biodiversity as an epistemological and societal assumption that incorporates any type of expression of bio-socio-political-cultural diversity in vital arrangements constituted by humans, non-humans and supra-humans among themselves. However, we suppose that this premise is still tensioned by perspectives of “sensible consciousness” and “intellectual consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty, 1958).

In this article, we intend to consider and analyze diversities as substantial dimensions that arrange themselves in a relational perspective, based on the hypothesis that cultural diversity reproduces itself as a process of learning of and about biodiversity.

The first question to be faced is the use of such terms in the present text. This is due to a phenomenological orientation based on Merleau-Ponty’s conception of perceptual experience (1958, p. 237): “If there is, for me, a cube with six equal sides, and if I can link up with the object, this is not because I constitute it from the inside: it is because I delve into the thickness of the world by perceptual experience”. Based on this phenomenological perspectivism, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the perception that we have of the world is an experience that gives identity to the things and objects through the way our body lives and explores them: “The identity of the thing through perceptual experience is only another aspect of the identity of one’s own body throughout exploratory movements; thus, they are the same in kind as each other” (Merleau-Ponty, 1958, p. 215).

This experience of the presence of one’s own body takes place in the perceptive activities as mediations that we establish in the world that give a meaning to the body movements in the direction of or in the company of the things of the world we sense. The author denominates these mediations operated in the movements or in the sensations that we feel in the experience with the things of the world as “the flesh of the world”. In this sense, the body is not a reunion of particles but, on the contrary, “in order to express it, the body must in the last analysis become the thought or intention that it signifies for us” (Merleau-Ponty, 1958, p. 229-230).

In this view, there is no distinction between the perceptual experience of my own body and others’ bodies in the same experience, except that the experience is lived as a drama which passes across the body. In other words, exterior perception and the perception of one’s own body change in conjunction because they are the two facets of one and the same act. Therefore, the forms of external experience imply, reciprocally, the consciousness of one’s own body.

In the mediation operated by the sense-experience of the flesh of the world, Merleau-Ponty maintains the distinction, expressed in language, between the activities of perception of the body and external perceptions: “Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of my body is made explicit in the language of external perception” (Merleau-Ponty, 1958, p. 239).

Therefore, as Steil and Carvalho have argued (2012, p. 37),

[…] Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh, at the same time that it establishes a continuity between the human body and the flesh of the world, also keeps the otherness between these poles as constitutive of the experience that reveals itself through the ecological path of the encounter of the human subject with nature as well as in the very intimacy of the human subject in the experience of the sacred.

And it is in the experience revealed by the “ecological path of the encounter of the human subject with nature” that the second question to be considered emerges. According to Lobo (2012), in order to understand the meaning of biodiversity and its importance as a value to be turned into heritage, “[...] it is not enough simply to understand the general characteristics of the natural environment. It is also necessary to assimilate the specific concepts of the relations between man, society and nature, as well as the devices and the properly social (or institutional) means through which some members of a particular society, living at a particular time, produce discourses about it” (Lobo, 2012, p. 69-70).

Inquiring about the scope of these questions, we consider in the following some cases investigated in different regions of Brazil, in order to recognize their situational and discursive agency and the perceptions of otherness that constitute the experiences revealed by the ecological path.

Communities, ecological path, negotiations and policies

The cases considered here result from a huge research effort made in a project of national scope designed to investigate the trajectories and practices of collectivities and communities of actors that produce goods to specify identity or social markers of difference (artisans, collectors, fishers etc.), that recognize themselves in a particular environmental context and that use, in their activities, heritage technologies that integrate the local perceptions of culture and environment.

The project has investigated 33 collectivities and communities according to the research criteria, distributed in 17 Brazilian states. The investigations were guided by the procedures of case studies based on the ethnographic approach (Van Velsen, 1987), using techniques of investigation stipulated as common practices of research in the field of the Social Sciences, such as direct observation of the investigated contexts, interviews, collecting of documents and application of questionnaires.

Most of the selected collectivities and communities (seven in the North, eight in the Northeast, four in the Midwest, eight in the Southeast and six in the South of the country) were visited twice for an average period of six days, according to their distance to the capital of each state concerned. They were all followed up, before and after the visits, by e-mail or a regular monitoring of their activities presented on the web. This regional variation sought a suitable sampling representativeness, considering their insertion in the production and distribution networks of goods or products created in each context.

Besides the data collection, on many occasions the researchers also helped some actors of the investigated communities and collectivities to create advertising web pages for their products, especially on Facebook. Therefore, the potential of audiovisual products about the activities of the investigated collectivities and communities became an important strategy of negotiation between researchers and actors, as those materials create publicity and recognition of the actions performed by them. At the same time, the audiovisual products make it possible to document actions, practices, projects and reports of the people concerned through a technical record that enables many interpretations, interlocutions and academic outputs.

The project provided a vast and diversified knowledge about the collective practices and arrangements that the communities and collectivities actualize in their encounters with nature and in response to demands for cultural and environmental policies in Brazil. It also allowed us to recognize the processes that occur in these encounters, producing demands for cultural patrimonialization.

In this sense, it would be more appropriate to define these demands as processes of pre-patrimonialization, according to Trajano (2012). For this author, the analysis of processes of patrimonialization are usually centralized by the state, in the form of “official processes of recognition of the cultural goods as representatives of the local or national culture or history” (Trajano, 2012, p. 14). However, the growing and recent participation and influence of institutional agents in these processes of patrimonialization led that author to consider the community and collective movements and demands for the patrimonialization of some goods as trajectories of “pre-patrimonialization”. Trajano explains that even where there is an active participation of communities or their actors in the definition of a cultural artefact as an element of special value for a region or nation, the process usually “seems to require some institutionalization, which implies diverse cultural mediators that may belong or not to the community in which the cultural artefact exists” (Trajano, 2012, p. 12).

The investigations conducted in the framework of the present project indicate that the constitution of these trajectories of pre-patrimonialization may change in relation to that formalization and institutionalization as the approximation and negotiation of the investigated collectivities and the exogenous cultural mediators produce tension in relation to the values that the former ascribe to the identity goods concerned. Thus, we discuss here three epistemic questions elaborated on the basis of the analysis of these trajectories in order to point out the tensions projected on them.

Biodiversity and cultural diversity

The majority of investigations indicate the dissemination, among socially marginalized collectivities and communities, of a capacity for a direct and autonomous relationship with the market that – it is believed – they had not experienced before. This economic insertion is, of course, the correlative of a new visibility of cultures that were disqualified in the past, which is made possible by the transformation of the Brazilian territory into a “technical-scientific-informational” environment (Santos, 1997). The geographically and socially generalized interconnection turned cultural segregation into a situation more difficult to be perpetuated and also more unstable. This phenomenon comprehends the emersion of innumerable cultures that were previously hermetically closed in niches of marginality, imposing the matter of fact of cultural multiplicity.

What is the relation between this multiculturalism – not as a sociopolitical claim but as a matter of fact – and nature? If human action on nature is oriented by culture, there may be a relation between biodiversity and cultural diversity. If so, what form does it take? What is the mechanism through which it operates?

In the scope of the investigations conducted in collaboration with the Laboratório de Antropologia of the Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA), in August 2013, some artisans of the Associação dos Artesãos de Abaetetuba in the state of Pará where interviewed. They produce objects with leaves of the native palm tree called buriti^[4]. In these interviews, the artisans defended their craft as necessarily sustainable. In fact, collecting the “arms” of the palm tree would only damage the plant if the green and crude ones – the arms that grow in the upper part of the plant – were collected. But nobody collects them, as the green arms are not good for the craftwork. However, some collectors report that some people completely destroy the palm tree. This is the case of the collectors of açaí, who usually uproot all the plants around the açaí palm trees^[5] in order to give them better growing conditions. The problem is that buriti palm trees are frequently found around the açaí palm trees, which means that they are being decimated by açaí collectors. In the community of Abaetetuba, however, the açaí collectors have given this practice up due to the awareness-building effort promoted by the artisans who work with the leaves of the buriti palm tree.

In this case, on the one hand, it is important to highlight that there is a trend toward the monoculture of açaí, as a result of the process of standardization of production designed to respond to a globalized demand for this product (an evidence of this fact is the construction of a harbor specialized in the export of açaí at Belém, the capital city of Pará); on the other hand, there are interests related to the material culture, i.e. the material culture of the buriti. And here it is useful to consider that the defense of biodiversity is more a result of a social mechanics than of a moral rule: if there is cultural diversity, there is diversity in the types of claims. This creates diverse interests that push toward guaranteeing multiple natural inputs for multiple demands, namely, more biodiversity and less monoculture. In other words, cultural diversity is a factor that operates structurally in favor of biodiversity.

Similarly, but in opposite directions, other collectivities are also facing this kind of conflict. The dissemination of the exploitation of açaí and other species that form the biome of the Amazon region, such as buriti, jarina, jatobá, paxiubinha, ouriço da castanha, babaçu, inajá, tucumã etc. is the motivation for interactions among the female artisans of the Cooperativa de Trabalho dos Artesãos de Rondônia, in Porto Velho (former Cooperativa Açaí), as they are concerned about sustainability^[6]. In Goiabeiras, a neighborhood of the city of Vitória, in the state of Espírito Santo, we find the “paneleiras”, black women who live in “quilombos”^[7] and produce saucepans made from clay. They used to extract the raw material (clay and red mangrove bark) from a mangrove that surrounds the neighborhood and forms an ecosystem from which other people also make their living. Besides that, the mangrove has borders with the Vitória airport and Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, from where other actors manage projects of environmental preservation. Given the obligation to preserve the mangrove, the clay used to produce saucepans is now extracted from a field call Barreiro, located in the Mulembá Valley, in the neighborhood of Joana D’Arc, on the Vitória Island.

The “figureiras”, female artisans who produce figures of clay portraying some aspects of the countryside culture of Taubaté, in the state of São Paulo, have faced a situation analogous to that of the “paneleiras”. This centenary activity was based on the extraction of clay from de banks of the Itaim River, which runs through the borders of Imaculada, the neighborhood where the majority of the artisans lived in Taubaté. In the 1990s the actions to preserve the river, which is an affluent of the Una River that supplies de city, implement by environmental NGOs and by the local municipality imposed on the “figureiras” the need to find clay somewhere else. Nowadays, the clay is supplied by a private enterprise to the Associação das Figureiras^[8].

In the cases reported, one can notice that the actors of the collectivities and groups mentioned started to formally organize their activities and working processes when faced by exterior demands in order to widen the network of relations formed in the production of the goods that identify them.

The entering of previously excluded groups in the scene of culture and the market is occurring in great speed. This cultural diversity is already a reality and not a product of the researcher’s imagination or desire. In other words, the emergence of cultural diversity as an element of interest to the market and a new factor of social integration is a sociologically defendable claim, as stated by Yúdice (2006) and Comaroff and Comaroff (2012). And to what extent can the multiplication of these occurrences create processes that promote the preservation of biodiversity?

The disjunction between the instituted society and the instituting action of the actors

In order to complement the previous discussion, we reflect here about a possible discrepancy between the instituted society and the forms of instituting action performed by the investigated actors. This issue was dealt with in a previous study (Lopes et al., 2015), so that the following is worth mentioning here: this discrepancy is based on a disjunction between the intellectual consciousness that guides the institutional actions in cultural terms in the country and the sensible consciousness of artisans, indigenous people and other “socio-technical collectivities” (Latour, 1994; Miége, 2009). This phenomenon occurs despite the partnerships and supports that are constantly increasing but that paradoxically strengthen the indifference toward these social actors.

This indifference or disjunction reaches the so-called minorities through the imposition of the conception of entrepreneurship that predominates in the institutions of support to craftwork such as SEBRAE (Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às Pequenas e Médias Empresas [Brazilian Service of Support to Small and Medium Enterprises) (Nery, 2014). In these institutions there is a prevalence of a functional-materialist conception that is expressed by Ingold (2012, p. 26) in the following terms:

In order to create something, according to Aristotle, it is necessary to join form (morphé) and matter (hyle). In the subsequent history of Western thought, this hylemorphic model of creation has developed even more and, at the same time, has become unbalanced. The form started to be conceived of as being imposed by an agent with a particular aim or goal in mind upon a passive and inert matter.

This institutional conception is imposed as a structure of influences, in which the actors of these collectivities are seen as historical beings in a linear sense, i.e. as pre-modern people with a tendency to become modern. Particularly, we highlight that the interventions of public and non-public institutions such as SEBRAE, SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio) and Rotary Club, among others, promote in these collectives – in order to promote their insertion in the market – the adoption of fragmented working processes, divided into production lines, that weaken the collective dynamics of participation. This fragmentation, which is perceived by some collectivities and denied by others, breaks the relations of symmetric reciprocity that characterizes them, changing the meaning of communal sustainability in which these people ground the logic of the activities and goods they produce^[9].

Reacting to this influence, many collectivities strength the mutual commitments among themselves negotiating the symbolic forces of their own traditions by using their cultural references as goods of social marking (Douglas and Isherwood, 2006) or as goods singularized in collective biographies (Appadurai, 2008; Kopytoff, 2008). In these cases, the sensible consciousness of the actors operates an agency that imprints a distinct ontology on the experience of encounter with nature. This ontology, according to Ingold (2012, p. 26), gives “primacy to the processes of formation instead of the final product, and to the flows and transformations of the materials instead of the states of the matter”.

One exemplary case of this use of symbolic forces can be found at Associação Art’Escama, an artisan association located on Ilha da Pintada, in Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul. In the association’s blog, some phrases express these negotiations: “We defend people and nature, not capital!”, “We fight for the construction of a fair world for everybody!”, “Community handicraft, here another world takes place!” and “We discuss our practices collectively!”.

Identity or label? On culture as an appeal to culture as a trademark

The third epistemological question refers to the perception shared by the actors about the developments of social conflicts resulting from the interaction with biodiversity in convergence with the expectation of being recognized as legitimate representatives of their local cultures, at the levels and in the spheres of the modernity.

Since the elaboration stage of this project, we had supposed that the collectivities and communities to be investigated followed the logic – which is disseminated in marginalized or popular cultures – of making extensively use of their own cultural traits as identity resources in the dialogue with modernity. This logic becomes the basis and resource of the strategies of these collectivities and communities in the contemporary scope of struggles for recognition and of the policies of respect for the differences that complement the demands for patrimonialization of the goods produced by them (Honneth, 2003; Lifschitz, 2011). However, in the first research incursions into selected the communities and collectivities it soon became clear that there were tensions between the negotiations of the actors (who are usually organized as institutionalized associations) and the cultural formations that are disseminated in the globalization processes (Agier, 2001; Lopes, 2009). Here we highlight three of these formations.

The first one is the formation involved in the diffusion of a culture of entrepreneurship, which is based on the interaction between consumption trends and market opportunities of products and usually complemented by the industry of ecological or cultural tourism. Although this culture of entrepreneurship has been formed on the basis of the constitution of the relations of production that shape a consciousness of industrial society (especially by mediations operated by the institutional agencies, according to which “the relation between workers and capital implies the notion of rational-economic rather than technical calculation” [Aron, 1977, p. 108]), this culture of entrepreneurship has been adopted as a strategy by governmental organizations (especially in SEBRAE), private institutions and universities in their policies of affirmation and promotion of traditional communities and groups that are outside the market.

In this formation, the actors of the investigated collectivities are stimulated to be assimilated to the market and, at the same, to distinguish themselves from other actors with which they compete, although being assimilated and distinguishing oneself require opposite attitudes. Nevertheless, the engine of the economy based on consumption seems to lie in the consumer’s tendency to be assimilated to other groups, which, each one at a time, express new “differences” (Brewer, 1991, 1993; Timmor and Katz-Navon, 2008). Nowadays, this mechanism is getting out of the control of the “industry of differences” and the circuits of fashion and reaching the dynamic of social inclusion. Valuing cultural differences in an economic manner is a way in which marginalized groups are appropriating the inertial forces of the consumption society (Tomasi, 2013; Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012), and it influences different processes of patrimonialization. On the other hand, in order to acquire a market value, the differences need to fit models (Yúdice, 2006), and this process promotes their devaluation.

The second formation refers to the dissemination of a model of public policies of inclusion in the countries affected by excluding social processes resulting from the internationalization of the economy and its consequences in the national processes of social regulation. According to Dupas (1999), these changes occurred in the 1980s and reduced the scope of strategic action of the policies of national states. These changes also affected the individual sphere by modifying solidified values and standards, and this is one of the main roots of the sense of insecurity that is emerging everywhere and is the basis of fear of social exclusion.

Changes in the conception of employment (precariousness) affect procedures designed to obtain income and social integration of individuals, besides the formation of their personal identity, causing perplexity. Since the notion of differentiated consumption structures “[...] personal and social fulfillment” (Dupas, 1999, p. 17; Berger and Heath, 2007), becoming a sign of success, the feeling of exclusion can vary in each society, and it has to complement its subjective and economic character with sociological issues, that is, by considering “[...] local circumstances [that shape...] the moral imagination” (Dupas, 1999, p. 17) of each society (patterns of economic growth, income distribution, inequality and social integration).

In this context we highlight the changes in the scope of cultural policies in the West that now begin to be guided by the implementation of inclusive programs, in the logic of “activation trends” (Hespanha, 2005). In the specific case of Brazil, the changes in these policies have occurred in recent decades and can be well apprehended within the Programa Cultura Viva [Living Culture Program], managed by the Ministry of Culture, which has been concretely implemented in the Pontos de Cultura [Points of Culture]^[10] since 2005.

Since 2011, the Programa Cultura Viva also includes another action of the federal government, the Programa Brasil Plural.^[11] While the first program seeks to rescue creative powers that already exist in the Brazilian cultural scene, but were relegated to the margins or even to deletion due to historical processes (already analyzed by Rubim and Rocha, 2012; Calabre, 2010; Pierucci, 1983), it is the integration between this program and the second one that allows us to state that changes in these cultural policies correspond to the contemporary models analyzed by Dupas and follow their development.

In the scope of the productions of the communities and collectivities that are considered here, several of them are Pontos de Cultura located in different regions of the country or establish partnerships with local ones.

The insertion of these communities and collectivities in the government program has, on the one hand, favored the assemblages^[12] of their actors and given visibility to their purposes and projects, but has, on the other hand, implied adjustments in order to meet the criteria established by public bidding processes for that insertion. In these bidding processes there is a convergence of new social conditions (Lopes, 2006) conveyed by electronic and virtual environments that imply the knowledge of information and communication technologies by the actors, besides social technologies such as drafting projects, organizing associative processes, planning the production of goods by demands of orders, among others. Besides these adjustments, there are factors of the first cultural formation shown above, and they produce a social “rooting” of technologies (Miége, 2009) by which the actors begin to entangle their interaction with other actors in networks that shape an instituting public sphere, on channels such as Facebook or YouTube.

These new conditions have been apprehended in all investigated communities and collectivities to a greater or lesser degree. Those that are more developed in these processes already hold an outstanding position among the others, as they have an origin certification of the raw material they use and produce a trademark of their goods, usually referring to the culture and the territory (or biome) by which they are identified.

These cases demonstrate that the link of culture (identity and tradition) and brand (author or process) may represent a frame that, although setting a pattern or model, assures a constant differentiation (Brown, 1998). The investigated communities and collectivities realize that tradition is not enough for them to escape the danger of the anonymity of the handicraft, the collecting, fishing or other activities. So they try to respond to the risk of anonymity by using the trademark or signature (each piece is identified by its origin or author). On the other hand, the emphasis given to the brand or authorship generates slips to performances of the “noble art” kind, putting at risk the differential value of goods produced by popular social groups. In this case, it is the standardization represented by the traditional style that ensures the differential value (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012).

The third cultural formation refers to the cultural patrimonialization processes and their pre-patrimonialization trajectories. These processes, as analyzed by Trajano (2012), Dias (2012) and Lifschitz (2011), in the case of traditional communities are also related to emerging processes in globalization.

In the framework outlined here, the strategies of appropriation and use of ICTs gave visibility to the activities and the goods produced by the actors in a context of growing and competitive differentiation. Thus, the social rooting of these technologies has been useful for the production of identity audiovisual repertoires which are mediated by communities and collectivities in their dealings with the levels and spheres of modernity, and the pre-patrimonialization processes have been a significant channel of these negotiations.

Examples of these repertoires and their uses were found in almost all the investigated contexts and are shown in various forms of organization and classification: from the repertoire found in the digital variations of pages on Facebook, YouTube and Trip Advisor, in the archives of digital images in computers, to the repertoires recognized in personal or collective blogs on the web, web groups or websites built to store and disseminate these records.

On these repertoires are projected, finally, structures of feelings and conventions that are formed in the recurring use and production of these audiovisual records, as supports of the collective concepts that are negotiated in these manifestations or outside of them. However, insofar as such repertoires are designed as conventions,^[13] their legitimacy varies not only due to the “collectively shared idealizations” (Schutz, 2003) among the actors or because they enable mediations in the relations between actors and institutional segments exogenous to the production of the investigated manifestations, but also due to the scope that the negotiations operated by the actors have in the pre-patrimonialization trajectories of their cultural manifestations as expressive forms.

Conclusions: Pre-patrimonialization processes and the learning of cultural diversity in biodiversity

From the descriptions of collective experiences that are imprinted on the encounter between humans and nature, there emerges a conception of biodiversity in constant formation, that ranges from the perception that communities produce of themselves in continuity with nature to the functional and exogenous influences that exogenous actors and institutions exert on such perceptions, seeking to shift the locus of these groups to the modern production-oriented and commercial context that is inscribed in the logic of insertion or inclusion. Pressed by the social formations that make up this trajectory, the investigated collectivities and communities re-signify their experiences of encounter with nature in identity negotiations that establish new collective conventions for the legitimation of their knowledge. These conventions open up the trajectories of pre-patrimonialization to a globalized context of negotiations, but which is guided by a field of performing forces that condition them.

This apparent continuum of contemporary societal settings tends, however, to subsume other possibilities that can be perceived when we focus on the learning factors that emerge from these trajectories of pre-patrimonialization.

The re-signification of communal and collective experiences of encounter with nature puts in movement two learning factors of the emerging arrangements of biodiversity. First, the entanglement among individuals, communities, native species and technologies (Andrade, 2012) produces varied arrangements of (bio)diversity that shape and shift territorialities. Sometimes these territorialities expand due to the advance of the cultivation area and the rise of the value of some native species in the market; but sometimes they withdraw due to the claim of the authenticity of a species, whenit is collectively identified with a (regional) biography of things (Kopytoff, 2008).

The case of açaí is exemplary here. While, on the one hand, the expansion of this species in the north of the country produces new biodiversity arrangements justified by sustainability, such as in the encounter of this species with other ones of the Amazon biome, as reported above, on the other hand it produces a retraction and rooting of the species in the Amazon biome territories (mainly Pará and Amazonas), in opposition to the claim of communities and collectivities located in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil that refer to the juçara^[14] as the “açaí of the Atlantic Forest”.

This entanglement produces, of course, unpredictable arrangements of territoriality and ambiance, influencing the “education for attention” to the movements that take place in it (Ingold, 2012), but also determine the limits established in the human experiences of encounter with nature to the exercise of the “will” or of the agency of things. This happens because these movements (extension and retraction of bio-diverse territorialities), on the one hand, root the experiences of the subjects in the shaping of socio-ambiences (Ardans, 2014) and, on the other, uproot these experiences, implying ways of learning about the changes caused by such shifts. Thus, in the face of (bio)diversity or perceiving in its composition the character of subject and community involves a regular reflectivity of their interaction with the landscape, as “corporeality of nature, so that the subjects’ relation with the world – their places, their way of being, their memories and beliefs – are constitutive of their living environment” (Steil and Carvalho, 2012, p. 38), but not as previously prepared forms for human occupation. Because “the landscape is not the abstract totality of an intelligible universe, but the experienced unity of this continent that shelters us in the form of a local world” (Abram inSteil and Carvalho, 2012, p. 38). In this sense, the descriptions of the previous cases must be understood as “landscape forms, as well as the identities and capabilities of its human and non-human inhabitants [that] emerge as condensations and crystallizations of activity within a relational field” (Steil and Carvalho, 2012, p. 39).

The second learning factor of the (bio)diversity arrangements refers to the very emergence of these condensations and crystallizations of activity in a relational field, so that (bio)diversity is presented as a sensible mediation for interaction between different alterities (cultural diversity) that make and remake themselves as their arrangements expand or retract human encounters with nature during the pre-patrimonialization processes.

Thus, the idea of ​​diversity refers, on the one hand, to a primordial authenticity and, on the other, to an emerging authenticity,^[15] in the process of shaping landscapes produced in the investigated communities and the collectivities. And it is here that the perception that communities produce of themselves moves in continuity with nature, and the functional and exogenous influences that the institutions imprint on such perceptions, trying to move the locus of these communities to the modern context of production and market.

The influences (or assemblages) that shift the self-perception that communities produce in relation to nature (either in the coexistence^[16] between them, or in the development of goods of identity marking, or in the processuality of heritage technologies) generate arrangements that expand the recognition by others of the primordial quality of their identity in relation to nature. This identity, having become a trademark, serves for the communities to differentiate themselves and to be recognized (socially or in the market), but, in it, communities lose sensible elements of experience with nature, to the extent that this identity occurs in correspondence with a product.

Thus, the communities and their knowledge are expressed as things sharing in their objectification, since that the primordial authenticity that characterizes them is subject to market forces and thus "the implication of fundamental character and a priori assigned [to the product] can only be understood when referring to something that happened before the interaction” (Poutignat and Streiff-Fenart, 2011 p. 90-91). Thus, these communities are recognized as residual rather than as partners in the interactions opened in the relational field of (bio)diversity.

From the perspective of the emerging authenticity, on the other hand, the object or product is apprehended by perception and is known in experience as intentionality, “which means that it does not rest in itself as does a thing, but that it is directed and has significance beyond itself” (Merleau-Ponty, 1958, p. 248). Thus, the shifts of the perception of themselves that communities produce in relation with nature do not reify their coexistence with nature, their products or their heritage technologies, but inscribe them as localized knowledge “within the horizons opened up by perception” (Merleau-Ponty, 1958, p. 241). In these horizons, the emerging authenticity suggests that one should recognize the intent of the collective experiences of encounter with nature as a dense learning of (bio)diversity in sensitive interactions:

[…] Sensation is intentional because I find that in the sensible a certain rhythm of existence is put forward – abduction or adduction – and that, following up this hint, and stealing into the form of existence which is thus suggested to me, I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. […] the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters into a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law. Let us be more explicit. The sensor and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and sensation is not an invasion of the sensor by the sensible (Merleau-Ponty, 1958, p. 248).

Therefore, cultural diversity produces interactions beyond the mere continuation of primordial authenticity, generating emerging authenticities that make explicit new phenomena and retake elements from previously existing differences, but give them different and new meaning and functions (Poutignat and Streiff-Fenart, 2011). This is the meaning of authenticity that contemporary alterities produce in learning with (bio)diversity.

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Notes

Author notes