Societies and Nature in the Sahel
... As festas, ocasiões em que a música kuximawara assume papel especial, fornece um momento para intensas trocas socioculturais entre os grupos indígenas que pertencem ao contexto pluriétnico local. Essa prática da música popular atualiza o entendimento indígena sobre música e conecta vários povos que habitam a região há mais de 5000 anos (Descola, 1992), entre eles o povo Baré, Tukano, Baníwa 6 . É certo que cada um desses povos indígenas possui a individualidade de sua língua, de seus conhecimentos ancestrais, mas conforme a bibliografia (Andrello, 2004;Maia Figueiredo, 2009;Descola, 1992), existe a compreensão de que há uma rede de troca simbólica entre os diferentes grupos indígenas dessa região. ...
... Essa prática da música popular atualiza o entendimento indígena sobre música e conecta vários povos que habitam a região há mais de 5000 anos (Descola, 1992), entre eles o povo Baré, Tukano, Baníwa 6 . É certo que cada um desses povos indígenas possui a individualidade de sua língua, de seus conhecimentos ancestrais, mas conforme a bibliografia (Andrello, 2004;Maia Figueiredo, 2009;Descola, 1992), existe a compreensão de que há uma rede de troca simbólica entre os diferentes grupos indígenas dessa região. Um exemplo clássico desse compartilhamento são as "flautas sagradas", assim como as cosmologias que explicam esses instrumentos. ...
... Com dados obtidos a partir de 2013 no decorrer do trabalho de campo 8 na cidade de São Gabriel da Cachoeira (AM), busco evidenciar a ideia de que por meio da música popular entre indígenas que vivem no município praticase a relação entre mito e música. Essa relação é recorrente nos trabalhos antropológicos sobre a música indígena em diversos contextos culturais das Terras Baixas da América do Sul 9 (Menezes Bastos, 2011; Montardo, 2015;Seeger, 2015;Hill, 2011;Piedade, 1997;Hugh-Jones, 2002;Maia Figueiredo, 2009;Barros, 2009;Brabec de Mori & Seeger, 2013;Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1968;Descola, 1992). O objetivo aqui é mostrar como essa relação entre mito e música se manifesta na crença de que os instrumentos musicais são considerados pessoas entre os indígenas que se dedicam a um 7 Também conhecidos na literatura como Tukano. ...
... Die epistemologische Positionierung des Autors wird anhand von vier theoretischen Konzepten erläutert, und sie folgt (i) der Anthropologie des alltäglichen Zusammenlebens, der Ästhetik und emotionalen Gebahrung (conviviality), wie sie von Overing und Passes (Hrsg. 2000) formuliert wird, hier in einem in erster Linie auf emphatischem Verstehen orientierten Sinn; (ii) der Interpretation indianischer Wahrnehmung von Mensch und Kosmos nach den theoretischen Konzepten Animismus, Perspektivismus und Multinaturalismus unter anderem nach Viveiros de Castro (1997); (iii) der Unterscheidung von alltäglichen Praktiken und magischen, intendiert manipulativen Tätigkeiten und Konzepten nach Brown (1986) und Tambiah (1990), wobei sowohl dem Praktischen als auch dem Magischen eine rationale Grundhaltung und die Möglichkeit von Forschung und Erklärung zugestanden wird; und schließlich (iv) der ontologischen Herangehensweise an das "Andere", wie sie von Descola (2005) und Halbmayer (2010a) formuliert wird, und die davon ausgeht, nicht eine Beziehung zwischen Kultur und Natur, sondern Prozesse innerhalb einer jeweiligen Lebenswirklichkeit, einer Ontologie, als Grundlage für Interpretationen heranzuziehen. ...
... La postura epistemológica asumida frente al análisis del material y el marco teórico se explica en referencia a cuatro conceptos principales: (i) La antropología de la conviviencia y la estética de la vida diaria, siguiendo lo propuesto al respecto por Overing y Passes (2000) y aplicando básicamente el sentido de la comprensión emocional y enfática de ideas indígenas; (ii) la interpretación de la percepción indigena en relación a la posición del ser humano en el cosmos, siguiendo los conceptos de animismo, perspectivismo y multinaturalismo (Viveiros de Castro 1997); (iii) la distinción entre las prácticas y las canciones de la vida diaria de las prácticas y canciones dirigidas a la manipulación mágica, haciendo en ello referencia a lo trabajado por Brown (1986) y Tambiah (1990). Según su definición del campo mágico, tanto lo 'cotidiano' como lo 'mágico' dispone de racionalidad e incluye la posibilidad de investigación y explicación; (iv) el acercamiento a la alteridad así como la antropología ontológica propuestos por Descola (2005) y Halbmayer (2010b). La antropología ontológica niega la separación de 'cultura' y 'naturaleza' pero investiga las relaciones sociales establecidas entre los habitantes de una realidad vivida dentro de una sociedad, incluyendo en ello todo lo que según esa sociedad se considera pasible de ser comunicado e interactuado. ...
... These four points of departure are: (i) the anthropology of everyday life and of emotional motivations within the concept conviviality as formulated by Overing and Passes (eds., 2000) which is, in the present case, based upon empathic understanding of people's actions by the immersed author; (ii) the interpretation of indigenous perception and understanding of man and cosmos and their mutual interrelatedness within the theoretical framework of animism, indigenous perspectivism and multinaturalism proposed by Viveiros de Castro (1997); (iii) a discrimination between everyday practice of perception and action and magically intended perception and action following the considerations of Brown (1986) and Tambiah (1990). This distinction enables rationality for both areas of practice, as well as an inherent possibility that both areas of practice may engage in explications and find solutions, too (it disables, at the same time, the use of the epistemologically weak but popular term "shamanism"); (iv) an ontological approach to alterity, as proposed by Descola (2005) and Halbmayer (2010b), among others. This approach assumes, that a separation of culture and nature is only viable within a naturalistic (like the western) ontology. ...
... In parallel, however, a theoretical and methodological trend known as the "ontological turn", which began in some quarters of Brazilian, Israeli, French and British anthropology in the 1990s, has become one of the major trends in mainstream Anglo-American anthropology since the 2010s (Descola 1992;Latour 1993;Viveiros de Castro 1998;Bird-David 1999;Strathern 1999;Mol 2002;Holbraad, Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro eds. 2014, Kelly ed. ...
... But different societies may posit that nonhumans have interiorities similar to humans, or not; and that non-humans have similar exteriorities to humans, or not. By combining these possibilities, Descola (2005) generates a typology of four ontologies or integrative schemas: animism, naturalism, analogism and totemism. ...
The "ontological turn" refers to a movement within anthropology since the early 21 st century, whose proponents question the metaphysical dichotomies between nature and culture or reality and representation that underpin the social sciences. Instead, they seek to understand, not different cultural "representations" of a single world, but different modes of world-making. This approach is "ontological" in that it both unpacks the naturalist ontological assumptions of social theory, and seeks to understand indigenous ontologies and the worlds they create. By relativising "nature" as a Western ontological category and studying how different societies distribute agency and personhood among humans and non-humans, ontological anthropology is directly relevant to geographical concerns about the relationships between humans and the land, the living beings, and the spiritual entities that constitute their worlds. In this essay, I discuss four key texts that illustrate different approaches within the ontological turn, and their relevance to the geography of religion: Michel Charbonnier's The End of the Great Divide, Philippe Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture, Tim Ingold's The Perception of the Environment, and Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think. I conclude with a brief discussion of resonances between these works and recent trends in the geography of religion.
... Since the 1990s, the social sciences have encouraged the effort to make the ontological multiplicities of these human-environment entanglements visible in what has been called the ontological turn. Ensuing debates occurred within various disciplines, including among anthropologists (e.g., Descola 1992Descola , 2005Salmond 2014;Viveiros de Castro 2015Kohn 2015;Boellstorff 2016;Holbraad/ Pedersen 2017;Ōmura 2019;Tsing 2019) and scholars of science and technology studies (e.g., Mol 1999;Pedersen 2012;Gad et al. 2015;Jensen 2015Jensen , 2017Jensen , 2020Jensen/Morita 2017;Pickering 2017). Still, debates about ontology remain vibrant. ...
... They thus challenge the philosophical claim of an all-encompassing, universally valid ontology. Instead of this universal ontology, scholars think of ontologies in the plural to distinguish between »modern« and »non-modern« (Latour 1993) or relational ontologies (Blaser 2009); or to categorize animism, naturalism, totemism, and analogism as four key alternate ontological orders (Descola 1992(Descola , 2005. These classification schemes should not be misunderstood as static or limited by clear boundaries. ...
This introduction to the issue presents the political dimensions of research car-ried out within the framework of the ontological turns that stretch between Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Drawing on the concept of political ontology, practical ontology, and the papers assembled in this issue, we embrace the political to be practically sitting transversally in different political fields that foster the constitution of new forms of life as alternative ontologies. In this sense, politics is a critical endeavor to unravel power asym-metries. It attempts to not only illuminate different ontologies, but to realize and co-consti-tute them. To avoid getting trapped in a mere description of alteritarian worlds and their po-litical power structures, we propose focusing on the largely invisible moments of ontological uncertainties. These eerie moments, which exist in common but non-contemporaneous envi-ronments appearing in between something and -time, can provide a learning opportunity for understanding inheritance as responsibility. Their appearance jumbles time and ontological orders, granting us insights into automatic modes of action that normally go unseen. We thus sketch a policy for making oddkins throughout worlds, including its specters.
... With time, Tylor's ideas of animism became untenable due to its evolutionary and derogative perspective and even though anthropologists continued to produce excellent research on indigenous cosmologies the issue of animism was generally avoided. In principle it was not until the 1990s that the concept of animism resurfaced within anthropology, albeit in a somewhat revised form (cf. Descola 1992;Viveiros de Castro 1992;Bird-David 1999;Stringer 1999). Today, this process of 'reclaiming animism' has come to be a valid and legitimate concept within anthropological research in general and within the ethnography of indigenous peoples in particular. ...
... Teoretiskt sett tar denna studie avstamp i hur man inom antropologin på senare tid har omdefinierat begreppet animism (Descola 1992(Descola , 1996(Descola , 2012(Descola , 2013Bird-David 1999;Stringer 1999;Viveiros de Castro 1992Willserslev 2007;Clammer 2004;Harvey 2005;Sahlins 2014) vilket till stor del innebär ett avståndstagande av e.g. Tylors (1920) tidigare definition av animism som något primitivt och irrationellt. ...
... Århem sugiere el concepto de «ecocosmología» para designar estos modelos integrales de conectividad entre los humanos y la naturaleza, con base en las ideas de Croll y Parkin (1992 Concepciones sobre los animales en grupos mayas contemporáneos • Fernando Guerrero Martínez «animismo» y «totemismo» con el de «ecocosmología» a partir de su trabajo en la Amazonía; sin embargo, critica la separación analítica de estos dos sistemas, como lo hace Descola (1992), debido a que tienen en común la propiedad fundamental de suponer dicha relación de contigüidad entre naturaleza y sociedad, en la que se integran conocimientos prácticos y valores morales (Århem 2001:215). ...
... Por otro lado, Kirsch (2006) caracteriza, a partir de su trabajo en Nueva Guinea, lo que llama «modos indígenas de análisis del ambiente». Esta interesante propuesta combina diferentes conceptos desarrollados principalmente por antropólogos que han trabajado con grupos amazónicos, como el animismo (Descola 1992), la agencia o agentividad (Bird-David 1999, Ingold 2000, el totemismo Concepciones sobre los animales en grupos mayas contemporáneos • Fernando Guerrero Martínez te una comunicación en ambos sentidos entre los diferentes seres con los que el humano comparte el medio, ya sea en la vida cotidiana o en los sueños, pero como un tipo de revelación: «estas formas mágicas de revelación constituyen un modo indígena de análisis del ambiente» (Kirsch 2006:63). ...
RESUMEN Las concepciones de los grupos mayas sobre la fauna involucran conocimientos y prácticas que son resultado de una percepción aguda del entorno. En este trabajo se articulan algunos de los aspectos importantes de la interacción humano-animal para mostrar la complejidad subyacente a la noción de lo que significan los animales en el mundo maya y sus implicaciones para sus pobladores. La narración del origen de la fauna en diferentes relatos mayas justifica la naturaleza de los animales, su papel en el mundo y su relación con los humanos. La posición privilegiada de aquellos como puente del humano con las deidades y otros seres se verifica mediante las señales y los presagios que da la fauna. El contacto con los animales del entorno posibilita relaciones de diversa índole que son útiles para la población indígena, para desarrollar su forma de vida y sus explicaciones sobre el mundo. PALABRAS CLAVE: percepción del entorno, fauna, zoogonía, adivinación y señales. CONTEMPORARY MAYAN GROUPS' CONCEPTS ABOUT ANIMALS ABSTRACT The concepts Mayan groups have regarding fauna involve knowledge and practices that result from sharp observation of their surroundings. This paper articulates important aspects of human animal interaction in order to demonstrate the complexity underlying the notion of what animals mean in the Mayan world and the implications for the inhabitants of these areas. Narratives regarding the origin of animals in different Mayan stories describe the nature of animals, the role they play in the world and their relationship with humans. Animals' privileged position as a bridge between human beings and deities and other beings can be read through animal signs and omens. Contact with animals in their natural environment enables diverse kinds of relationships that are of use to indigenous people in developing their way of life and their explanations about the world.
... (Bruzzi da Silva, 1994, p (Feld, 2012;Samuels, 2004 (Montardo, 2009;Citro, 2009;Hill, 2014;Travassos, 1997Travassos, , 2007Domínguez, 2009;Oliveira, 2013). (Descola, 1992;Hugh-Jones, 2002;Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1968;Piedade, 1997 Dissertação, publicações e principalmente a convivência com os antropólogos indígenas do NEAI e Maracá (Rezende, 2004;Sodré Maia, 2016;Barreto, 2013;Azevedo, 2016;Lizardo Salgado, 2016) me levaram a entender por essa perspectiva as práticas de música popular. Também no contexto de prática do kuxiymauara surge com frequência uma noção básica que se encontra entre as cosmologias ameríndias do Noroeste Amazônico: a relação entre mito e "música". ...
... O objetivo aqui é descrever momentos em que a música proporciona o encontro entre o povo Baré, Tukano, Baniwa, Yanomami 2 e vários outros dos 23grupos indígenas que habitam a região há mais de 2000 anos. É certo que cada grupo possui a individualidade de sua língua, de seus conhecimento ancestrais, mas de maneira geral, existe a compreensão de que na região há um compartilhamento de sistemas simbólicos e dos mitos entre os grupos indígenas falantes de diferentes línguas(Descola, 1992). As flautas sagradas, por exemplo, chamadas de jurupary entre os Baré, de koái entre os Baníwa , e de miriiã entre os Tukano são um exemplo desse compartilhamento.Nos mitos de criação do mundo, nos quais grupos indígenas explicam o povoamento da região, é possível perceber momentos de encontros entre falantes de diferentes línguas para festejar com música e dança. ...
Apresento um conjunto de expressões que surgiram no decorrer do trabalho de campo entre músicos indígenas de São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Amazonas, Brasil. Esta lista de expressões representa práticas e conceituações utilizadas entre indígenas do Noroeste Amazônico que praticam e escutam música popular. Sobre as bases de certo repertório, os músicos indígenas praticam sequencias musicais que duram mais de 12h, criam um gênero local chamado kuxiymauara e praticam o “amanhecer o dia”. Em tese, a música popular proporciona um contexto profícuo para a lógica, escuta, prática e interpretação indígena de um repertório que agrega música brasileira, colombiana e venezuelana. Desenvolve-se a ideia de uma agenda política na medida em que a música popular apresenta uma cena, um espaço no qual se articula a prática e o pensamento ameríndio sobre música.
... The idea of amerindian perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 1997Lima 1999) is based upon an animistic perception of the cosmos as attributed to Amazonian indigenous societies by many authors (Baer 1994, Gow 2001, Descola 1992, 2005. Every language group and even many families or individuals in the Amazon basin perceive their world in a very specific or individual way. ...
... With this concept, many different "natures" emerge, which can be subsumed as "multinaturalism" (Viveiros de Castro 1997: 106-107). Descola (1992) and Lima (1999), among others, explain how social relationships between humans and non-humans are made possible. It is mainly the task of specialized "shamans" to relate and coordinate between these multiple natures and manifold societies. ...
In this article, I will focus on the processes of learning how to sing – that is, of acquiring curing songs – as well as on the musical phenomena occurring during the current performance. The native people’s communication with beings surrounding them is tightly bound to regarding these as self-reflecting, more or less intelligent agents. As I will show, musical learning and performance addresses such non-humans. A closer view on the singer’s subject positionality during the iteration of musical structures of curing songs can help to understand the role non-humans play in Shipibo ‘medicina’ and further on, in the Shipibo lived world.
In order to unfold my argument, I will first embark on a cultural analysis of the contexts, origins, and functions of the songs. Doing so, I will mainly refer to what the singers themselves told me about their art. These indigenous explanations provide a synthesis of my field research in the region. The fieldwork was conducted mainly from an intracultural point of view, combined with interethnic comparative data. The cultural analysis will include indigenous terminology with regards to cosmology and musical phenomena, an exploration of the ontological status of ‘a song’, and a detailed description of how the singers are supposed to acquire their songs from non-humans. Thereafter, I am going to present and analyze four Shipibo curing songs. Their melodic form, excerpts from their lyrics, and their performance modalities will be compared. Discussing the similarities and differences between these songs, I seek to explore if an analysis of performance could shed more light on the songs’ meaning than an analysis of their form.
... No estudo de Descola (1992) sobre os achuar, povo jívaro da Amazónia equatoriana, o autor pontuou a relação entre formas de conceber e de experimentar o "mundo natural", enunciando relações sociais plenas entre os homens e o "mundo natural" por via da constatação das relações de reciprocidade e respeito que os ameríndios estabelecem com elementos como a água, os animais de caça e as plantas cultivadas. ...
... Daí que poderemos sugerir que o vulcão, sendo um irmão do caldeirense, também é caldeirense. São atribuídas ao vulcão qualidades antropocêntricas e sociais, funcionando em regimes próximos de sociabilidade com os humanos, daí as semelhanças ao animismo enunciado por Descola (1992). 10 A relação com esse amigo é de fidelidade, respeito, nela há confiança mútua, e essa relação proporciona felicidade. ...
... Apoiado em teorias antropológicas e sociológicas, categorias conceituais e denso trabalho etnográfico no sentido preconizado por Geertz (1973) Um aspeto importante que aflora nessa discussão é a noção de 'humanidade' e -o seu oposto -a 'animalidade' (DESCOLA, 1992;INGOLD, 1994 ...
Apoiado em teorias antropológicas e sociológicas, categorias conceituais e densa etnografia, e numa perspectiva comparativa e intercultural, o objetivo principal do artigo é discutir o processo de mudança religiosa que está em curso na Terra Indígena Sororó (Suruí-Aikewara), no Pará. Com a introdução do protestantismo pentecostal, e utilizando a sua cosmologia animista anterior, a maioria das aldeias, em fase de conversão evangélica, incorpora, ressignifica e cria novas expressões do sagrado. De uma disputa real e simbólica, entre o Pastor e o Pajé, surgiu a categoria êmica de 'índio-crente' e um tipo ideal, no sentido weberiano, que estamos denominando de ‘pentecostalismo indígena'. Com uma lógica comparativa e complementar, discute-se também a etnografia feita com a pajé cunhã-karaí, da etnia Kaingang, em Santa Catarina. Nesses dois contextos indígenas, não ocorre uma ruptura com as cosmologias originais, mas sim uma lógica de correspondência, coabitação de contrários, estratégias de acumulação de diferenciadas lógicas de pensamento, de categorias simbólicas e práticas religiosas. Mesmo constituindo-se como paradigmas distintos, os dois modelos – xamanismo-indígena e cristianismo-pentecostal - estão imbricados numa teia de relações mágico-religiosas, materializadas num evidente hibridismo religioso, numa nova religiosidade sincrética e, na lógica lévi-straussiana, com eficácia de cura, real e/ou simbólica.
... What I am trying to say, therefore, is that social phenomena cannot only be found among human beings since non-human organisms establish forms of association that can be considered as social (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 189;Tsing 2014: 27). Seen in this light, the recent revival of animism (Descola 1992(Descola , 1996(Descola , 2005(Descola , 2013a and the philosophical inferences of perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004, 2012a tend to assimilate human and non-human sociality into the mythical order of things. Amerindian and elsewhere ontologies are, to some extent, the main focus of inquiry whereby the universe's relationalities are possible due to the intersubjective communication between the entities who populate the layers of the cosmos. ...
Based on a discussion of the theoretical contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres, this article explores social relationships as more than a human dimension. Though strongly analysed by both anthropologists, these relationships appear to involve indigenous societies' whole ecological and cosmological system. In this sense, reciprocity, social cohesion, and exchange can be understood as material and immaterial interrelationships between entities of a more than a corporeal world. I argue, then, that to go beyond the mere anthropocentric conceptualisation of sociality in a nature good to think, we need to holistically conceive the interconnected levels of trophic, socio-structural and socio-cosmic relationships and exchanges between human and non-human beings in the ecosystem.
... Th is area of the African continent along the southern edge of Sahara had always experienced variable rainfall. A transitional landscape characterizes the region, morphing from arid to semi-arid to savannah without a clear demarcation between these diff erent ecological zones (Austen 2010;Raynaut 1997). Th e Sahel indexes a certain ecological liminality and off ers a fi tting example of an "ecotone, " a destabilizing ecological formation that opens up new pathways of relational inquiry (King 2019: 2). ...
In the poem “ca’line’s prayer,” Lucille Clift on marks the progression of Black generational memory through the metaphor of drought. The poem’s 1969 publication coincided with one of the worst droughts in modern history. Across the West African Sahel late rains and the onset of famine led to widespread death and displacement. Starting from this conjunctural moment in the late 1960s and using Clifton’s provocation about the “Blackness” of drought, this article contemplates representations of arid environments in African and Afro-diasporic texts. I consider various imaginings of arid spaces, presented simultaneously as wasteland and homeland. Surveying critical scholarship on the Sahelian drought, I interrogate the contested meanings of Black life and death in deserts. I also consider the contemporary resonances of these themes, engaging African eco-critical and Afro/African futurists texts. I show how these portrayals of actual and imagined deserts reveal alternate modes of encounter forged through Black/African ecological thought.
... 6 Vozes vegetais provides the reader with a broad theoretical overview of the place of plant agency in worldmaking from the perspective of traditional peoples in Brazil, as well as with clear examples of the inseparability between humanness and plantness in Amazonian Indigenous thinking. It is no news that humanity, for Amazonian Indigenous peoples, is not a domain separate from plant and animal life in the same way that culture is not a domain separate from nature (Viveiros de Castro 1996, 2002aDescola 1986Descola , 1992Descola , 2005. As Davi Kopenawa powerfully epitomises, "no forest, no history" (Dias and Marras, 2019). ...
In this essay, I consider intersections between environmental thinking and Indigenous art-making in recent scholarship and artistic production in Brazil, situating some of their contributions to Latin American Cultural Studies in recent years. I examine Stelio Marras, Joana Cabral de Oliveira, Marta Amoroso et al.’s Vozes vegetais: Diversidade, resistência e histórias da floresta (Plant Voices: Diversity, Resistance and Forest Histories, 2021) and Ailton Krenak’s A vida não é útil (Life is Not Useful, 2020a). I show that both works challenge extractivist paradigms and the hierarchisation of life forms. I then consider works by two Indigenous artists: Glicéria Tupinambá’s powerful reclaiming of the traditional Tupinambá cloak, and Denilson Baniwa’s critical engagements with museums and collectionism. By mapping some of the emerging directions in environmental thinking and Indigenous arts in Brazil, I argue that recent shifts in scholarship and artistic production in the country owe much to Indigenous approaches to interspecies relationality, offering valuable lessons about forms of creativity that resist commodification.
... However, beginning in the 1930s, the term increasingly became identified as Tylor's specific, now dated, contribution (e. g., Radin 1937;Eller 2007). It is only since the 1990s, with the work of Philippe Descola (1992), Nurit Bird-David (1999) or Tim Ingold (2000, that the term has gained new currency. The past few years have seen a wave of new volumes dedicated to the subject (Brightman, Grotti, and Ulturgasheva 2012;Halbmayer 2012;Harvey 2014;Praet 2014;Århem and Sprenger 2016;Swancutt and Mazard 2016;Yoneyama 2019). ...
The term “animism” is at once a fantasy internal to modernity and a semiotic conduit enabling a serious inquiry into non-modern phenomena that radically call into question the modern distinction of nature and culture. Therefore, I suggest that the labelling of people, practices or ideas as “animist” is a strategic one. I also raise the question if animism can help to solve the modern ecological crisis that allegedly stems from the nature-culture divide. In particular, animism makes it possible to recognize personhood in non-humans, thus creating moral relationships with the non-human world. A number of scholars and activists identify animism as respect for all living beings and as intimate relationships with nature and its spirits. However, this argument still presupposes the fixity of the ontological status of beings as alive or persons. A different view of animism highlights concepts of fluid and unstable persons that emerge from ongoing communicative processes. I argue that the kind of attentiveness that drives fluid personhood may be supportive of a politics of life that sees relationships with non-humans in terms of moral commitment.
... Paradoxerweise hat gerade eine Disziplin mit dem Namen Anthropologie gezeigt, dass scheinbar menschliche Gesellschaften tatsächlich Tiergesellschaften sein können (Descola 1992;Viveiros de Castro 2012;Kohn 2013;Holbraad 2014). In Totemgesellschaften streben alle Mitglieder dem Totemtier nach -in ihrer historischen Genealogie, ihrem Verhalten und ihrer Sinnlichkeit. ...
... A ideia de uma natureza socializada não é novidade no contexto amazônico e o alargamento da condição de sujeito para os não-humanos serviu de base para a formulação das teorias do animismo (Descola, 1992(Descola, , 2006) e do perspectivismo ameríndio (Lima, 1996;Viveiros de Castro, 1996). Considero a segunda mais pertinente para os fins aqui propostos. ...
Este artigo explora como algumas categorias do discurso ambientalista podem ser acionadas pelos Yanomami de Maturacá (São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Amazonas) a partir de sua participação em um projeto de ecoturismo de base comunitária, uma vez que, além de representar uma nova fonte de renda, a proposta é vista por eles como um meio de combater o garimpo ilegal e de “proteger a natureza e a floresta”. O Projeto Yaripo consiste em uma proposta de visitação turística à Terra Indígena Yanomami e ao Parque Nacional do Pico da Neblina, que conta, para além do envolvimento indígena, com o apoio do Instituto Socioambiental, da Fundação Nacional do Índio, do Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade e do Exército Brasileiro. A hipótese central é que há neste cenário mais de uma forma de compreender os conceitos de “natureza”, “floresta” e “território”, isto é, os locais destinados à visitação turística, e que essas percepções díspares pautadas por pressupostos ontológicos distintos estão conectadas de algum modo. Pretende-se, assim, refletir como a noção de urihi, a floresta yanomami – um espaço cosmopolítico habitado por subjetividades não humanas –, aparece nesse arranjo, levando em conta as questões que me foram colocadas pelos Yanomami sobre algumas das implicações do trânsito por esses lugares – com ou sem a presença de visitantes –, bem como de seus desdobramentos na elaboração do projeto.
... In animist cosmologies, nonhuman animals are actors that sustain the other half of their social world (i.e., nature) from their "human" social world (i.e., society). Some social scholars have argued a society is inseparable from nature because the boundary of society is merely an analytical framework defi ned by the human observers, and society and nature are actually intertwined in the dynamism that ecologizes society and socializes ecology (Descola 1992). Studies on indigenous worldviews and environmental stewardship practices indicate that their relation with nonhuman animals has been symmetrically maintained among multiple worlds, including human and nonhuman worlds. ...
The roles played in fishery resource management by the nonhuman species
that coevolve with humans are often marginalized in both discourse and practice. Built
on existing reviews of the multispecies ethnography of maritime conservation, domestication, and marine biology, this article aims to reconceptualize the politics of difference in stock enhancement. By examining the herring stock enhancement program in
Japan as an assemblage of multispecies inter- and intra-action in the context of marine
science and seascaping, this article recontextualizes fisheries management and crosses
the methodological and ontological borders in maritime studies. The article shows that
multispecies ethnography serves as a heuristic means to describe the co-constitution of
seascapes, which are beings, things, and bodies of information and processes that shape
marine surroundings, or what fisheries biologists and fisheries resource managers tend
to overlook as mere background.
... Århem (1996) suggests that predation is linked with exchange between humans and non-humans, involving 'acts of reciprocity' for which 'life and vitality on the level of the individual are exchanged for renewal and essential continuity on the level of the category (clan, species)'(ibid:189). In contrast, as described by Descola (1992in Rivière 2001, for the Jíbaro the act of hunting does not involve exchange, whereas predation over humans is responded to with revenge. Regarding this predation/reciprocity debate, Rivière (2001) introduces the Guianas case, for whom predation does not contribute to the renewal of life, but whether predation is considered an act of exchange depends on the context. ...
This research explores the Waorani notion of waponi kewemonipa (living well). The Waorani are indigenous people from Ecuadorian Amazonia. The anthropological fieldwork that informs this thesis was carried out among Waorani people living in settlements along oil roads, a particular milieu which is highlighted by Waorani as a contemporary marker of intraethnic difference. In this context, I investigate how the Waorani conceptualize and perform their living well, and how they respond to contemporary challenges, notably: liquor-related conflicts, oil-related pollution and inequalities for accessing external resources. Thus, this research endeavour is a contribution to the growing literature on Amazonian notions of living well and wellbeing. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of living well and its main dimensions which are further explored in relation to: health and vitality (chapter 2), environment and infrastructures (chapter 3), livelihoods (chapter 4), relations with the encroaching society (chapter 5), death and engagement with social media (chapter 6). Peaceful conviviality and collective happiness are at the core of the Waorani living well, these ideals require healthy people and abundance of resources for sharing among those who live together. Both health and abundance imply the constant replenishment of vitality, which I call the generative dimension of living well. There is also an ecological dimension: the Waorani relate living well with the forest of plenty as opposed to the road of “heat” and noise. Strategies for living well include aspects as varied as: opening of new settlements far from the roads, promoting football tournaments, State public services, and for some even new Christian conversions. But overall, what Sahlins called the hunter-gatherer ‘Zen road to affluence’, is ubiquitously present among the Waorani, and it has a background of laughter, encouraged through the narrative style anka totamonapa (how much we laughed) and other forms of collective happiness.
... The first of these is, precisely, how the metaphysical wave of Amazonian ethnographies was an inevitable sequitur to the article: Seeger, DaMatta, and Viveiros de Castro move effortlessly from an affirmation of the centrality of the person and the body to the outline of a radical reframing of recurring oppositions, such as that between nature/culture and individual/collective. There is also the prescient observation that a focus on the human body does not preclude the animal body, but rather brings the animal into the realm of the human while thrusting the human into the domain of animals, a theme that not only would later be central to Amazonian anthropology, but which also, arguably, is its defining characteristic (Descola 1992;Viveiros de Castro 1998). Finally, there is the incisive sketch of a research project on what we might call an Amazonian theory of the individual-or, rather, of the person who, by virtue of his or her biography, is made to stand outside of the community of common bodies, hence wielding influence over it: "the person outside the group who reflects on it and is thus able to modify and guide it" (p. ...
... Not only historical ecology but also post-Lévi-Straussian structuralism offered alternatives to environmental determinism by focusing on cognitive schemata of practice. Philippe Descola (Descola 1992(Descola , 1996(Descola , 2013a argues for the existence of a restricted number of modes of identification and modes of relations that are applied independently from environmental conditions in the conceptualization of the non-human realm in specific regions of the world. Consequently animism, one of his four modes of identification, prevails not only in Amazonia but also among North American and Arctic indigenous groups as well as in certain Southeast Asian groups (Howell 1984. ...
This book offers a new anthropological understanding of the socio-cosmological and ontological characteristics of the Isthmo–Colombian Area, beyond established theories for Amazonia, the Andes and Mesoamerica.
It focuses on a core region that has been largely neglected by comparative anthropology in recent decades. Centering on relations between Chibchan groups and their neighbors, the contributions consider prevailing socio-cosmological principles and their relationship to Amazonian animism and Mesoamerican and Andean analogism. Classical notions of area homogeneity are reconsidered and the book formulates an overarching proposal for how to make sense of the heterogeneity of the region’s indigenous groups. Drawing on original fieldwork and comparative analysis, the volume provides a valuable anthropological addition to archaeological and linguistic knowledge of the Isthmo・Colombian Area
... Von den Steinen beschreibt diese Gruppenbeziehung auch als Vergemeinschaftung bzw. Enteignung, denn das Ende der Gruppenzugehörigkeit 50 Zur Diskussion des Konzeptes des Totemismus, zur Kritik und seiner Nütz-lichkeit für die aktuelle Forschung, siehe Goldenweiser (1910), Boas (1910), Lévi-Strauss (1969) Philippe Descola (1992, 1996a) und Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1992de Castro ( , 2012). ...
Die gegenwärtige Soziologie leidet unter einer Reihe bedeutender Einschränkungen: So fokussiert sie allein die Dimension des Handelns, Kommunizierens, Selektierens und Konstruierens, an der sie, noch dazu nur Menschen, teilhaben lässt. Diese aktivistischen Vorurteile und anthropologischen Egoismen gilt es zu überwinden.
Die vorliegende Studie zeigt auf, dass die Existenzweisen und Weltverhältnisse von Subjekten, Systemen und Netzwerken nicht aus deren Aktivität hervorgehen, sondern aus sozialen Beziehungen – und diese können sowohl interaktiv als auch interpassiv sein. Das ermöglicht der hier entwickelten relationalen Soziologie außerdem, die Vielfalt der menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Akteure und Passeure in den Blick zu nehmen.
Zwei empirische Fallstudien illustrieren abschließend die theoretische und methodologische Leistungsfähigkeit des vorgeschlagenen Perspektivenwechsels. Die Beziehungen zwischen Menschen und Tieren in sogenannten indigenen Gesellschaften lassen sich damit ebenso verstehen lernen wie die immersiven Versenkungen von Hochfrequenzhändlern in ihre algorithmischen Systeme.
... Ever since Philippe Descola's (1986) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's (1996) seminal contributions, humananimal relations among the indigenous peoples of Amazonia have played a central role in what would later become known as anthropology's "ontological turn." For convenience, and sometimes for rhetorical or polemical effect, the Amerindians' different understandings of these relations are often summarized in terms of a stark contrast or radical othering between "us" and "them." ...
... É como se houvesse três posições lógicas fundamentais: predador, presa e congênere -aquele que não é nem predador nem presa. Os que comem comigo, aqueles que me comem e aqueles que eu como" (VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, 2005, p. 5 Descola (1992Descola ( e 1996. Isso porque o perspectivismo insiste, dentre outras coisas, justamente naquilo que permite aos seres se distinguirem entre si, dado o fundo bruto de subjetividade potencial que cobre todos os seres. ...
Factualmente recorrente, simbolicamente pregnante e sociologicamente estruturante, a caça é um dado fundamental na Amazônia. A série de elementos destacados pela etnologia regional revela a centralidade da atividade entre os coletivos amazônicos. Neste trabalho foco os discursos antropológicos a respeito da atividade cinegética dos povos indígenas, buscando delinear um objeto de estudo. A revisão da bibliografia se concentra em um período particular dessa produção, aquele referente às últimas três décadas, e se detém sobre alguns dos aspectos relativos à “metafísica da caça” (LIMA, 1996). Um dos propósitos é ver como os temas da “afinidade potencial” e do “perspectivismo ameríndio” rebatem na compreensão do campo cinegético, e por outro lado, ver como esse campo informa as operações analíticas desses conceitos. Paralelamente, no ensaio procuro identificar alguns dos nódulos que a interpretação da caça tem enfrentado, apontando, assim, questões para potenciais avanços etnográficos e debates teóricos.
... Other anthropological approaches focus less on changing dynamics than on identifying the underlying ontological principles of areas like Melanesia (Strathern 1988), Amazonia (Descola 1992(Descola , 1994(Descola , 2013Viveiros de Castro 2001) or Southeast Asia (Århem and Sprenger 2016). Th ese approaches are based on the assumption that Western notions of personhood, society, the nature/culture divide, and conceptions of time and space (Halbmayer 2004;Halbmayer and Mader 2004) are part of a set of multiple ontologies that are neither culturally particular nor universal. ...
... Although by no means new to anthropology, during the 1990s a renewed interest in these issues surfaced (see especially the volume on Nature and Society edited by Descola and Pálsson 1996). In an attempt to overcome the duality of nature and culture, French anthropologist Philippe Descola (1992) explains that in many native communities a vast range of animals, plants and spirits are regarded as persons not unlike humans in the sense of homo sapiens. Descola's proposal is often termed 'new animism', because it contrasts with the classical view on animism, where animals, plants or geographic entities were thought to be inhabited by a spirit (e.g. ...
This is a special issue, guest edited by Bernd Brabec de Mori with an intriguing focus on notions of humanity as opposed to beings occupying another classification. Most of us will have grown up with John Blacking’s 'How Musical is Man?' (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973) as a core pillar of our approach to music, appreciating his deft turn of phrase in mirroring his chapter titles from ‘Humanly Organized Sound’ to ‘Soundly Organized Humanity’. This issue seeks to question what might also now be perceived as an almost musicological approach by Blacking that effectively defines music as that organised sound that is made by humans. What this issue now hopes to insert into that definition is the more ethnographic question about how those humans conceive the music thus made—is it ‘made’ by them or are they a channel for musical creation and performance by other beings, and what is the nature of those entities? We don’t intend to discuss this further here—Bernd Brabec de Mori and Anthony Seeger expand this area cogently in their Introduction to this issue and the other articles it contains.
This review shows that there is a fertile field of study on drought within the humanities and social sciences that produces a complex scientific understanding of droughts as socio‐natural disasters whose origins, unfolding and impacts are shaped by both social and biophysical processes. Five cases where this research stands out are reviewed: the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the droughts in the Sahel in the last third of the 20th century, desiccation as a colonial discourse, ontologies of drought and climate history. The review shows that unfortunately this body of work is largely ignored in natural science drought research. It proposes to eschew the dichotomy between drought as a physical phenomenon and its socioeconomic impacts by framing droughts as disasters. It calls for dialogue and cooperation between the sciences of nature and the sciences of society (including the humanities) to create an integrated field of drought research, in the hope that this may bring to the public debate convincing interpretations of current droughts in a dramatically changing climate.
This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical Perspectives
A partir de un ejercicio de “equivocidad controlada” (Viveiros de Castro 2004; 2010, 71- 74), en este artículo reflexiono sobre el lugar del concepto de música en la acustemología mapuche. El texto está estructurado en tres secciones: en la primera discuto las propuestas conceptuales sobre música mapuche elaboradas por autores y autoras durante las últimas décadas; en la segunda, reviso algunas categorías clave de la lengua mapuche relacionadas con el sonido; por último, comento el trabajo de las autoras que abiertamente resisten el concepto de música y propongo algunas ideas sobre la posición de la etnomusicología en esta discusión. La examinación de las aproximaciones desarrolladas en torno a este debate me lleva a concluir que la resistencia mapuche al concepto de música es otra expresión de un proyecto descolonizador que invita a pensar desde los desajustes en lugar de intentar llenar aparentes carencias conceptuales. Propongo que puede resultar más provechoso reflexionar sobre la acustemología mapuche situando a la categoría música en un lugar periférico. Posicionarla en el centro ha producido en parte una etnomusicología normativa. El camino que sugiero es el opuesto: una etnomusicología no taxonómica que desplace el concepto de música al banquillo.
La propuesta de hacer una coedición del libro Saberes locales, paisajes y territorios
rurales en América Latina desde la Universidad del Cauca es una posibilidad de
ser coherentes con nuestros postulados por construir una academia conectada
con las problemáticas de las comunidades, sus saberes y realidades. El texto fue
publicado inicialmente en la Universidad Federal de Paraná (UFPR), Brasil en alianza
con la Red Internacional CASLA-CEPIAL de ese país, demostrando una conexión
entre problemas y preocupaciones por la diversidad, los movimientos sociales y su
impacto sobre los conocimientos y realidades de comunidades rurales de diversos
paises latino-americanos.
El libro que presentamos ofrece estudios realizados en Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Paraguay y México, en él se ha logrado reunir once estudios de caso que vienen a confirmar el conjunto de tesis y principios arriba señalados. Realizadas en contextos muy diferentes y hasta contrastantes, cada investigación contribuye a demostrar la
existencia integrada de lo biológico y lo cultural, como una totalidad que es espacial y temporalmente ubicable, un ‘holón’, en el sentido en el que fue definido por Koestler (1972), como un conjunto o sistema que es autónomo y que posee la capacidad de autorregularse. El libro puede leerse como un recorrido por casos que ejemplifican la bioculturalidad, pero también como evidencias que apuntan hacia una nueva utopística. Hoy la “nueva utopística”, según la acepción que ofreció I. Wallerstein (2003:112), es la creación gradual y paulatina de zonas emancipadas, de islas ganadas al control ciudadano o social, de territorios defendidos primero y liberados después.
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.
O foco deste trabalho são os Estudos Sociais da Ciência e Tecnologia (ESCT), particularmente as discussões sobre Participação Pública e Democratização da Ciência. Sua motivação foi a percepção de uma tendência, dentro do campo, de abandono de uma posição estritamente investigativa e de exterioridade assumida em relação aos processos estudados. A produção recente dos ESCT evidencia não somente a preocupação em informar o público sobre as incertezas e negociações que caracterizam os processos científicos, mas também um esforço em contribuir para a discussão sobre questões práticas, sobre como as tecnologias devem ser construídas e como as controvérsias científicas devem ser resolvidas. Tal esforço pode representar uma aproximação entre o campo dos ESCT, a camada política e os movimentos sociais.
This article deals with indigenous shamanic worldviews and indigenous knowledge as dialogical eco-cosmology. It shows the relevance of eco-cosmology as local indigenous ecological and spiritual knowledge in the context of global biodiversity and sustainability discourses.
Dancing for Uwí (peach palm, Bactris gasipaes), a calendric ritual celebrated by the Shuar in the Ecuadorian Amazon region, forms part of a mainly animistic ontology, and has been reframed repeatedly during the past century in interaction with shifting historical, political and cultural contexts. The power field associated with Uwí is extensive, and encompasses life and death: on the one hand, Uwí stands at the centre of the ritualization of life, growth, procreativity and abundance; on the other hand, he embodies destructive agency, which has been linked with warfare and its diverse ritual frames. Uwí represents, at the same time, a significant dimension of a Shuar theory of life, as well as a figure within their theory of power, and is closely connected to conviviality and the good life. During the 1960s and 1970s Uwí was adopted and adapted by intercultural Catholic liturgy, and has acquired new ritual elements and new meanings in this context. In recent years, after large gaps between performances from the 1970s to the new millennium, Uwí and his celebration has been merged with the performance of indigeneity as part of intercultural politics in Ecuador. In this framework, the performance of an animistic ontology has been interconnected with the cultural turn in indigenous politics. This contribution explores several questions concerning ontological trajectories, as well as the relationship of ritual and cultural performances to historical developments and political issues.
Understanding the empirical relationships among three parameters is necessary to reduce household vulnerability: diversification, market dependence and economic security. A cross-sectional study of these relationships was conducted in five areas with histories of cash cropping in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and northern Nigeria. Household diversification was found to be positively associated with economic security while negatively associated with household dependence on markets. Moreover, individuals in market oriented households are more likely to adopt individualistic orientations. These findings confirm a positive role of diversification but raise concerns about how markets affect the prospects for maintaining or reducing household vulnerability.
Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics provides us with an excellent theoretical device to investigate the role of technology in relation to a culture’s self-understanding. This paper, in the first place, aims to contextualise Hui’s reflexion on cosmotechnics within the broader field of contemporary philosophy of technology, outlining its discerning potential in undermining the outworn, Western dichotomy between nature and culture. In this spirit, it is stressed how cosmotechnics nicely fits in an anthropotechnological perspective, i.e., an understanding of the relation between technics and humans as originary and constitutive. In the second place, the goal of this paper is to evaluate the explanatory significance of the concept of cosmotechnics regarding the possibility of a comparative investigation of the modes according to which different cultures conceive technics and their relation to it. In this spirit, the concept of cultural techniques, i.e., scriptural, figurative and computing techniques embedded with a self-representative potential, is brought about in order to show which kind of technologies are most likely to determine and influence a culture’s self-understanding and should therefore be privileged by the focus of a comparative cosmotechnical inquiry.
In this paper I investigate the meaning of “ritual robes” within the contemporary Pagan movement. Although they are a kind of cultural icon, I argue that for some Pagans they may be of minor significance. In the case of the Order of Zadruga (Northern Wolf) from Poland, I seek to demonstrate how a paramilitary uniform may become a sign of extreme right-wing Slavic Paganism. The examination of the uniform’s aesthetics leads to revealing the connection with so called Aryan ethics as well as “natural poetics.” An attempt of the naturalizing view would be a final step.
Keywords: Right-wing; contemporary Paganism; militarism; aesthetics; ethics; poetics; Poland; national socialism.
Cet article analyse les dynamiques des cultures alimentaires en contexte globalisé, à partir des situations chroniques de malnutrition du Sahel et du déploiement des Aliments Thérapeutiques Prêts à l’Emploi (ATPE) par la médecine humanitaire au Niger. Ces produits hybrides – issus de partenariats complexes entre recherche publique, industrie agro-alimentaire et médecine transnationale –, sont les premiers « alicaments industriels » à être aussi massivement diffusés en Afrique subsaharienne. À travers l’analyse des représentations et des usages des ATPE par les acteurs de l’aide et les populations « bénéficiaires », sont mise au jour leurs trajectoires et circulations depuis les structures de santé jusque dans les villages et les concessions familiales. En retraçant les déplacements physiques et sociaux des ATPE, nous illustrons les négociations de leurs statuts, les stratégies d’accès, ainsi que la diversité d’usages dont ils sont l’objet. En montrant comment un aliment thérapeutique redevient un produit alimentaire, et une ressource économique, sont soulignées les réappropriations locales des cultures alimentaires locales « sous régime d’aide ».
Exploring indigenous life projects in encounters with extractivism, the present open access volume discusses how current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference and ontological dynamics in the Andes and Amazonia. While studies of extractivism in South America often focus on wider national and international politics, this contribution instead provides ethnographic explorations of indigenous politics, perspectives and worlds, revealing loss and suffering as well as creative strategies to mediate the extralocal. Seeking to avoid conceptual imperialism or the imposition of exogenous categories, the chapters are grounded in the respective authors’ long-standing field research. The authors examine the reactions (from resistance to accommodation), consequences (from anticipation to rubble) and materials (from fossil fuel to water) diversely related to extractivism in rural and urban settings. How can Amerindian strategies to preserve localised communities in extractivist contexts contribute to ways of thinking otherwise?
For well over three decades controversy has surrounded the characteristics of environmental degradation in the Sahel. One reason for this prolonged debate is the dearth of uncertainty in previous Sahelian rainfall work. Global Historical Climatology Network summer rainfall data between 1930 and 1990 were used in sequential indicator simulations to reproduce global statistics over local accuracy to provide a complete assessment of uncertainty. The traditional area-weighted technique showed the characteristic decline in rainfall but represented the extreme of the simulation mean distribution. Annual estimates of the 5th and 95th percentiles of the simulated rainfall mean distribution quantified uncertainty and showed that there is no longer unequivocal evidence of desiccation in the region between the late 1960s and 1990. The probability of exceeding rainfall was calculated for 200 mm and 500 mm and presented using maps for selected years between 1930 and 1990. The results demonstrated that simple isoline thresholds did not adequately represent the boundaries for vegetation and agriculture, respectively.
The chapter by Rivera Andía examines the terms by which the Cañaris Quechua-speaking people of the Northern Peruvian highlands establish their relationship with the land in a context marked by a ghostly extractivism. Leaving open the possibility of a radically distinct multiplicity of an environment with whom humans relate in social terms that exceed modern conceptions of private property, he describes local practices and conceptions relating to the production, access, and administration of land. What emerges is an entity that is less ‘natural’ and ‘indigenous’ than what is usually the focus of Andean ethnographies: the Iglisya (Quechua term for Spanish iglesia, church). Clandestinely built of earth and plants by eighteenth-century Indians, this land- and child-temple does not only represent the land but constitutes it. Rivera Andía considers the material and ritual aspects of the human-land relationship that produces the Iglisya as a truly cosmopolitical device with which Cañarenses are able to contend on their own terms with the threat of extractivism.
The chapter by Brightman discusses the works of international environmental NGOs that seek to conserve biodiversity among native Amazonian people in Suriname as a nonconventional form of extractivism. Based on his fieldwork in Suriname, he investigates the Carib-speaking Trio people’s understanding of this relatively new economic, political, and ideological scheme promoted through the marketisation of conservation. What emerges is an account of how Trio conceptualisations (in particular, those regarding land ownership) contrast and entangle with the perspectives of technical and governmental agents intervening in their territory. Thanks to this comparative approach, Brightman is able to contribute an ethnographically informed insight into the different sets of distinctions and continuities between carbon and biodiversity accounting and other more conventional forms of extractivism.
The introduction lays the groundwork for the volume’s explorations of indigenous life-making projects in encounters with extractivism in South America. It discusses how people’s contestations of extractive endeavours have opened up questions of alternative ‘politics of nature’, bringing entities of the landscape into the political sphere. Examining ways in which current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference, and ontological dynamics, the introduction considers the contributions and problems of a ‘turn to ontology’ in anthropology. It argues for an ethnographic exploration of indigenous life projects and for the significance of ontological and cosmological dimensions of indigenous responses and creativities. Amerindian experiences of loss and suffering are discussed as a function of an inflicted inability to realise their life projects in situations saturated by extractivism. We revisit debates on continuities and transformations regarding indigeneity, capitalism, representation, and land, trying to avoid conceptual imperialism while addressing extractivism on a broad front.
Addressing how indigeneity in Bolivia is actualised in social mobilisation as well as by the Morales regime, Fabricant and Postero’s chapter examines the different ways in which indigeneity is performed and represented. Focusing on protests against the construction of a highway through indigenous territories, they consider how performance can play a central role in what they call moral reflection about indigeneity, gender, and the articulation of alternative social worlds. Using the concept of ‘ethical substance’, the authors explore how, through performance, indigeneity serves as a central site of moral reflection and conduct. In so doing, they show how protests and performance also call into question the legitimacy of the Morales government’s claim to stand for all indigenous peoples. The chapter demonstrates how distinct actors can claim access to indigeneity, and that multiple actors perform indigeneity to push through their own ethical and political agendas.
The chapter by Guzmán-Gallegos’ examines the diverse and changing ways in which the Kichwa people relate to the leftovers of oil extraction in their everyday lives in the borderlands of Ecuador and Peru. She investigates these remains as part of a landscape of rubble saturated by ruination processes. The chapter shows how ruination embodies capitalist expansion through its persistent disdain of Kichwa as disposable and of their lands as a sacrifice zone. It considers ongoing attempts to take control over the toxic leakages and abandoned installations as acts of contestation that actualise singular notions and enactments of ownership. In turn, through their relational co-constitution of persons and objects, these Kichwa conceptions and practices challenge hegemonic divides concerned not only with ownership but also with the constitution of the political realm itself. Finally, the author proposes that the articulation of distinct indigenous enactments and understandings of ownership redefine the asymmetries that characterise their relations with non-indigenous actors.
Drawing on the work of the physician G. E. Stahl, Edward Burnett Tylor provided his famously terse definition of animism as “the belief in spiritual beings,” a definition which later authors, among them James G. Frazer, redefined in terms of its originary place in the evolution of religion. The subsumption of animism to unilineal evolution proved to be its death sentence, since it vanished along with the paradigm that had claimed it in the early twentieth century. The term was only recovered in the late twentieth century by anthropologists studying Amazonia and the subarctic region, feeding an interest in “indigenous ontologies” and “ecological phenomenology.” Today animism has largely broken free from its anthropological and ethnographic moorings, coming to be an important player in interdisciplinary discussions of “posthumanism” and anti‐Cartesian philosophies.
Doctoral Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015.
In this article I explore the ontological turn in anthropological theory through three interconnected approaches. First, I situate the academic success of Amerindian ontologies in the context of recent debates on the urgency of addressing the political consequences of the anthropocene. Secondly, I undertake an archaeology of the concept of perspectivism as a central stage of the ontological turn, showing how the sub-discipline of Amerindian ethnology has always had a vocation for Copernican turnings, from the time of Montaigne until today. In conclusion, I argue for a return to aesthetics and poetics as the quintessential domains for exploring how different ontologies can teach us to look at the world differently. To understand the multiple versions of Amerindian relational ontologies we have to be able to perceive the relational character of the aesthetics they reveal. The argument is sustained by a short presentation of Huni Kuin (Cashinahua) aesthetics as revealed in huni meka, ayahuasca song.
This article examines the relationship between an important local spirit cult and the construction of Isan political identity in Chaiyaphum province, northeast Thailand. Isan subjectivity has largely been studied through social or political-economic lenses. This study looks, however, at the spiritual experiences and ritual performances that crucially manufacture a local version of personhood. The spectacular annual performance of social memory and historical commemoration of Phaya Lae is constitutive of political identity for the people of Chaiyaphum province. I argue that the rituals surrounding the Phaya Lae cult enable the people of Chaiyaphum to perceive their subjectivity as Thais via the integration of the deity into the historical imagination of the state. I argue further that such local performances of spirit cults sustain Thailand as a ‘ritual state’ in which power and prestige are maintained by ritual enactments both in everyday life and ceremonial events. Through mediumship, the periphery draws charisma from the central Thai state and in turn ritually sustains the potency of the centre.
Recuperar a experiência etnográfica de parte da trajetória de vida do "Cacique Geral" Mbyá José Cirilo - além de ser uma alegria, uma honra e uma oportunidade para sistematizar uma radical transformação pessoal - permite o exercício de um diálogo lateral com as teorias antropológicas pós-coloniais, hermenêuticas e fenomenológicas contemporâneas, na tentativa de arremessar nosso entendendimento ao nível das proposições existenciais (cosmo-ontológicas) e fenomênicas da alteridade radical dos Mbyá-Guarani. Aquém e além dos "conceptos" e do "ser", a proposição filosófica dos Mbyá-Guarani é "estar" (WHITE:2008) ciente a interpretar constantemente os "perceptos" (LÉVI-STRAUSS,1997), menosprezando a introspecção mental analítica e quantitativa (racionalismo abstrato). Não se trata de um perspectivismo mental ameríndio, mas sim de perceptivismo corporal Mbyá centrado no fazer desabrochar novas percepções desde sentimentos advindos do "coração" (KUSCH, 2000) ou, ao contrário, das partes “telúricas” do corpo. A consciência é dirigida continuamente ao aleatório espontâneo, pois do caótico é preciso extrair compreensão: dos sonhos; dos pensamentos inspirados que chegam à mente e das sensações pouco ordinárias que afetam o corpo; dos fenômenos observados da natureza e do comportamento impensado das crianças. Tudo é objeto de atenção, percebido como signos ou presságios divinos quanto às circunstâncias da vida desperta, dados a serem interpretados em sua imediaticidade, a fim de que se chegue ao diagnóstico sobre a situação atual e à decisão certa a tomar em cada uma das encruzilhadas que perfazem o caminhar da vida. O Mburuvixá Cirilo é protagonista de uma legítima cosmopolítica transnacional em sua busca pelo "Belo Caminho da Tradição", pois sua trajetória começou criança nos confins das florestas de Misiones (Para Miri), tornando-se jovem liderança em comunidades na Argentina junto à dor pela morte prematura de seu filho primogênito, quando foi se esconder no fundo da floresta para se concentrar "espiritualmente", conversar com o Deus, ao ponto dele receber um canto mágico para lhe tranquilizar o coração e lhe tornar um Xondaru Marangatu (guardião da Tradição). Por indicação de Nhanderú, depois veio com a família na direção de Para Guaçu , litoral do Brasil, e tornou-se Mburuvixá Tenondé, liderança política originária que representa o respeito ao Tekó Porã (Belo Viver), preservando a alegria e o respeito à tradição dos mais velhos, velhas e das lideranças espirituais (Karai Kuery e Kunhã-Karai Kuery), verdadeiro articulador étnico, agente intercultural e mediador capaz de "sensibilizar o coração dos brancos" (mexer em nossos perceptos) e adaptar as políticas indigenistas desde "costuras" interinstitucionais que se efetivam em ações políticas concretas afinadas ao holismo do Mbyá-Rekó. E ainda mantendo a índole aguerrida dos primeiros Guarani, no sentido literal do termo, participando de processos de autodemarcação da Terra Indígena do Campo Molhado em 1994 e na recente retomada da aldeia Tekoa Ka’a Guy Porã nas matas dentro da área da extinta FEPAGRO em Maquiné, RS.
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