In this meeting, we discuss the research of Joana Cabral de Oliveira, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Unicamp, who has been working with the Waijapi peoples for years and, more recently, has been collecting stories about cassava. Her research starts from the assumption of an ontological multiplicity and is based on materialist feminism as a theoretical reference, opposing the idea of a single nature and a linearity in plant domestication processes.

Her ethnographic study reveals the centrality of cassava for the Waijapi, as well as for many other indigenous peoples, especially in the Amazon. It is interesting to note that cassava was not a central food for pre-Columbian peoples, who had a more diversified diet. However, with colonization, cassava acquired a central position in the diet of the colonial population. In the form of flour, it was used daily, transported as a supply in collection expeditions, enslavement of indigenous people and wars. It even crossed the Atlantic, serving as both food and currency in the slave trade on both sides of the ocean. In addition, it became of unprecedented importance to the indigenous peoples themselves.

Colonization turned cassava into a commodity, placing it at the center of colonial dynamics. Conversely, through other paths and other histories, which are not aligned with homogenization, cassava has also become a central element for indigenous peoples, for whom, for example, biju, and not the flour, is the most important food.

Given that cassava can reproduce not only by planting pieces of its root or stem, but also by seeds, it is more interesting to question how the domestication processes took place, rather than seeking answers as to where and when this process occurred. The process of domestication is not linear and offers multiple possibilities, including “rewilding”, challenging the very concept of domestication, which is defined by the plant’s dependence on human agency for its reproduction. Thus, multiple stories emerge. Therefore, rather than asking about the time and place of cassava domestication, the central question should be: through what processes did it occur?