At the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, in Belém do Pará, my field research at the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30/UNFCCC) involved me in circumstances I could never have imagined and which led me to write this account.
A fire broke out in the tents of the Blue Zone, the area restricted to accredited delegations, and sent me running without a backward glance, dropping my field notebook with my annotations on two weeks of intense activities as I fled. These notes not only contained factual information of events and interlocutors but also the impressions, hesitations, scenes and contacts I had accumulated since my arrival in the city. At that moment, the loss felt overwhelming.
I feared I would never be able to assemble back together what I had observed and experienced. But an anthropologist friend reminded me of Edmund Leach and the story of how he lost part of his fieldnotes before writing Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954). Another recalled that Berta Gleizer Ribeiro, a Brazilian anthropologist, had experienced a similar situation on expeditions through Amazonia. As later debates have shown, Leach did not write out of thin air. He reconstructed his notes from memory, added new observations and integrated historical materials (Sanjek 1990). Even so, the loss provoked later reflections on the relationship between data, memory and ethnographic writing.
In Fire, Loss, and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1990), Roger Sanjek discusses the status of fieldnotes, their material risks and symbolic effects. Drawing on diverse similar experiences lived by anthropologists, he describes situations where fire and other hazards threatened researchers’ fieldnotes. In my case, the blaze forced me to turn to photographs for support and question the methodological nature of what we conventionally call ‘data.’
Unlike my notes, the photographs I took survived online in the cloud. Revisiting them, I realised they functioned as an index of my trajectory, my observational stance, the angles from which I accompanied the rituals, protests, press conferences and informal gatherings. They, too, are a form of data production.
I photographed every event I attended. The images enabled me to reconstruct locations, events, sequences and interlocutors. Using them as cues, I was able to access records on official websites and social media, compiling objective information about dates, venues, institutions and participants. Much of this data is still digitally available today.
However, the photographs also returned something to me that official records failed to capture: they became an ethnographic device. They documented my participation in COP30’s rituals, understood here in the sense proposed by Peirano (2002) with all their communicative and performative dimensions.
Both inside and outside the Blue Zone, the conference was organised as a sequence of diplomatic, legal and performative rituals: plenary sessions, press conferences, marches, symbolic trials, people’s tribunals, negotiations and blockades. It is within this environment that I situate what I have elsewhere termed ‘social fires’ – processes of social contestation that expose fissures in the hegemonic models of climate governance (Bronz 2026).
The meanings associated with fire, heat and warming have been part of the symbolic repertoire of environmental struggles for decades. They also connect to the concept of overheating proposed by Eriksen (2016), designating a historical moment marked by the acceleration and dealignment between economic political, and social systems. From this perspective, COP can be understood as a laboratory of this ‘overheated’ globalisation, a space where multilateral decisions, diplomatic negotiations, science and activist mobilisations intertwine in a constant sense of urgency.
In this essay, I present a selection of images from a wider collection to illustrate the power of these social fires in rituals of mobilisation. The images are accompanied by brief explanatory texts without any intention of exhausting their analytical potential or the complexity of the ritual dynamics in which they are embedded.
Boat regatta at the People’s Summit, 12 November 2025
The People’s Summit, one of COP30’s major parallel events, has become established as an explicit counterpoint to the institutional language of official negotiations. The boat regatta in Guajará Bay, a ritual marking its inauguration, symbolically shifted the conference’s centre to the river. The vessels formed a scene of collective mobilisation, making Amazonia visible as an active political space. The image illustrates how local forms of territorial occupation produce a climate politics that contrasts with the technical abstraction of multilateral agreements.
Before departing, indigenous leaders performed a ritual in front of dozens of cameras. The scene was composed of various layers: in the foreground, mobile phones captured painted bodies and indigenous chants; the boats of social movements forming a chorus alongside the Greenpeace ship, symbolising transnational ecology; and the river stretching out behind as a backdrop.
People’s tribunal and ancestral jury, 13 November 2025
The Ancestral Jury: Trial of Projects on Indigenous Lands, organised by the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), represented one of the most intense moments of political contestation. By putting mining, energy and infrastructural projects on trial, the tribunal delivered a direct critique of the developmentalist model underpinning global climate governance. The photograph captures not only an act of denunciation but the creation of an alternative political authority in which territory emerges as the central criterion for justice.
The spatial arrangement, the division of roles, the sequence of speeches and the repurposed legal aesthetics all contribute to the ritual dimension of the event. Indigenous lawyers wore robes adorned with indigenous designs. The form of western law was appropriated and transformed, placing the Brazilian state and corporations in the dock.
The Climate March, 15 November 2025
The Climate March united diverse agendas of resistance to imposed models of climate governance. The march represents a form of expressive collective action in the sense proposed by Chaves (2002), bounded in time and space, invoking established symbolic references and seeking to awaken solidarity beyond the mobilised group. By occupying the streets of Belém, it demarcated its own sphere within the social life of the Conference, emerging as a ritual capable of condensing interpretations and legitimacy.
The route taken, the organised blocks, the chants and banners, the presence of women, the theatrical protest against fossil fuel production and the performance of the Cobra Grande all formed a grand tableau, rendering visible the multiplicity of struggles. Outside the Blue Zone, climate politics was enacted as a contest over development models and ways of life. Efficacy here was not measured in documents but in the collective force of these presences.
In this same territory, artist Azul Rodrigues, linked to the Climate Art Project, wore the ‘Cloak of the End of the World,’ materialising a question about ritual continuity in a devastated world. Inspired by the historic Tupinambá cloak but crafted from plastic waste, the artwork transformed refuse into denunciation. The substitution of feathers with strips of plastic ritualises devastation, weaving together themes of ancestry, coloniality, memory and environmental collapse. Through the images and performances created by artists and activists, the Climate March was also converted into a site of aesthetic elaboration and crisis communication.
INDIGENOUS TERRITORIES IN THE GREEN AND BLUE ZONES, 10 to 21 November
The Green and Blue Zones were spaces where the event’s formality clashed with the political expressions of parallel events and Belém’s streets.
In the Green Zone, open to the public, indigenous people occupied the corridors selling craftwork and painting body designs, which became a popular trend among COP30 participants. Their presence was a striking contrast to the glowing corporate logos and official messaging. This undoubtedly comprised a form of ritualising the indigenous presence, as well as exposing or denouncing the ambiguities of COP30, where cultural recognition and aesthetic appreciation are dissociated from concrete territorial struggles.
I was not present when the Munduruku Indigenous people blocked the main entrance to the Blue Zone, but the images were widely reported in national and international media (for example, here and here). As a result, another image gained prominence– that of the COP30 president holding a Munduruku baby as he opened negotiations with Indigenous leaders.
Alessandra Munduruku was the Indigenous woman who led this action. Through it, she ritually marked the passage into the Blue Zone, where she and her group gave interviews and held meetings with authorities. This transition materialises a significant political shift. By occupying the institutional space of the COP as a public interlocutor, Alessandra challenges the historical regimes that have pushed indigenous peoples to the margins of decision-making.
In this brief account, I have compiled diverse images that distil forms of resistance and record what official documents fail to capture: the gestures, presences, performances and disputes that stretch the official grammar of climate governance. Revisiting these photographs, I realise they capture not just events but also the potential for symbolic displacement – through the eruption of alternative political languages both inside and on the margins of COP30. While the final texts reiterate limited commitments, the images preserve evidence of contestation and collective elaboration. It is in this interval between diplomatic formalisation and the public scene that the critical potency of Belém’s moment is inscribed.
Bibliography
BRONZ, Deborah. 2026. “Social Fires in Belém (Pará): COP30 beyond the Documents.” Manuscript submitted to AnthropoNews.
CHAVES, Christine de Alencar Chaves. 2002. A Marcha Nacional dos Sem-terra: estudo de um ritual político. In: PEIRANO, Mariza Gomes e Souza (ed.). O dito e o feito: ensaios de antropologia dos rituais. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará: Núcleo de Antropologia da Política/UFRJ. Pp. 133-148
ERIKSEN, Thomas Hylland. Overheating: an anthropology of accelerated change. London: Pluto Press, 2016.
PEIRANO, Mariza Gomes e Souza. 2002. O dito e o feito: ensaios de antropologia dos rituais. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará: Núcleo de Antropologia da Política/UFRJ.
SANJEK, Roger. 1990. Fire, Loss, and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In: Fieldnotes. The makings of anthropology. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Pp. 34-34.
Deborah Bronz is Professor of Anthropology at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). She is a Young Scientist of Our State research fellow funded by the Rio de Janeiro State Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ) and Vice-Coordinator of the Amazonian and Environmental Studies Group (GEAM/UFF). She is also a member of the Traditional Peoples, Environment and Major Development Projects Committee of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA). She attended COP30 as part of the observer delegation of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).