“No one dies on the eve”: feel-thinking knowledges and doings in confinement times

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 in Afro-Ecuadorian communities that, along with their philosophical, cosmogonic, and woven knowledge, have sustained Afro-Ecuadorian lives in the face of continuous and historical neglect. Building upon testimonies I propose a concept that 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 the non-ethics of death or state-embraced necropolitics. During the pandemic the relationship with death has gained other nuances 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.