Pombagiric politics of the common: Trapo, Farrapo and Molambo as agents of possible worlds

Abstract

This article proposes an anthropological reflection on pombagiric politics of the common, taking the figures of Maria Molambo, Maria Farrapo, and Maria do Trapo as ontopolitical agents in the production of possible worlds. Drawing on Brazilian macumbas, it argues that rags, tatters, and waste do not operate merely as signs of degradation or social exclusion, but as positive operators of value, belonging, and care. In dialogue with debates on the common, coloniality, necropolitics, abjection, and cosmopolitics, the article sustains that the remainder constitutes a central ontopolitical category for understanding forms of life that emerge in the leftovers of colonial modernity. By articulating contributions from the anthropology of the common and Brazilian medical anthropology, it demonstrates that care, in pombagiric practices, is not reduced to technical intervention on individualized bodies, but is configured as a relational, situated, and collective practice, produced under conditions of structural precarity. The notion of a cosmopolitics of the remainder thus enables a displacement of normative conceptions of the common, affirming the remainder as a sensitive infrastructure of shared life.