Abstract

Inhabiting suggests interconnecting spaces and emotions. Early social life experiences provide the world with key connotations that grant ontological security to subjects. The emotional grid of habitation enables recreating spaces of certainty, even in ever-changing territories. The expansion of capital into rural areas imposes forms of territorialization that constrain every aspect of local life, reducing the dimensions upon which habitation forms and practices are based and jeopardizing emotional constructions associated to a given place. This paper suggests that, in such circumstances, the long-term presence of inhabitants –and other variables– depends on the modification of their emotional connection with their environment. The experience of small farmers in Colliguay, central Chile in their reconversion into apiculture reveal the reinvention of the local space and the generation of emotions associated with a territory that gives new meanings to once-ignored dimensions: these events take place in a scenario where life dimensions have been dramatically reduced (from seeds to pollen and from cattle to hives), which however enable the creation of emotional bonds to aspects related to this new activity. Together with highlighting the emergence of renewed types of emotional attachments in inhabited space, this paper stresses the access to autonomy and sustainability opportunities provided by these scenarios.