Transcorporeality and thick time in an era of climate uncertainty: relocation on the Island of Cardoso

Abstract

This ethnographic study focuses on the planned relocation of Enseada da Baleia, a small island fishing community on the south coast of Brazil. It examines the entangled mobilities of human and non-human agents—such as water and marine life—in the context of climate change. In 2016, following a cyclone and significant erosion of the sandspit where they had been living, the inhabitants of Enseada da Baleia relocated to a new site on Cardoso Island. The put the questions: how these geographic and ancestral mobilities support adaptation and continuity. It finds that the community’s relocation was not solely a material response. Nor did it represent a crisis and rupture as depicted in much of the climate migration literature. Instead, it reflects deeper temporal and spatial connections between the community, their ancestral lands, and non-human entities such as fish and trees. It suggests these connections are captured in the concept of ’thick time’ where past and futures are entangled in the present. This temporality includes ’transcorporeality,’ the impossibility of separating human bodies from non-human agents. This is central to understanding the decision to relocate to a place where their elders once lived. The relocation reestablished relationships with both material and immaterial aspects of their history, reinforcing their cultural continuity in the context of adaptation to climate change. The community’s relocation draws on ancestral knowledge to adapt to socio-environmental changes. In the case of Enseada, relocation operates as a culturally embedded adaptation strategy. Through this lens, the paper engages with broader debates on climate migration, decolonial approaches, and the politics of time, arguing that Enseada’s relocation represents a translocal adaptation process that opens political possibilities for decolonizing climate change agendas by emphasizing the intimacy of the relocation process.