Nobody dies on the eve:

knowledge and feeling-thinking in times of confinement.

Abstract

The present work was woven amidst the COVID 19 pandemic and is part of the walk that was possible for me outside the confinement provoked by the mobility restrictions imposed by the virus. The high lethality of the virus and its reflection on the invisibilized populations, have potentiated the historical impacts of pandemic racism which is institutionalized in the Ecuadorian state. For several centuries the state has been absent (and perhaps remains absent), in many corners of the country. This is particularly true in the Valle del Chota, located in the ancestral Afro-Ecuadorian territory in the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi. Through a brief ethnographic fieldwork, I gathered some of the experiences that, along with their philosophical, cosmogonic, and woven knowledge in Afro-Ecuadorian communities, have sustained life in the face of continuous and historical neglect. Through testimonies I propose what I call pedagogies of existence. These are pedagogies based on community practices and values that are lodged in people’s memory which have been instruments to face non-ethics of death or state-embraced necropolitics. The relationship with death has gained other shades within the communities, to which the 'prodigal children' have returned in a reverse flow, from the cities to the rural areas, responding to a need for rehumanization and return-to-being in pandemic times.

Keywords: pedagogies of existence, non-ethics of death, necropolitics