At a certain moment in history, the “civilized place” of humans conceived the idea of nature; it needed to name that which had no name. Thus, nature is an invention of culture; it is the creation of culture and not something that comes before culture. And this had a huge utilitarian impact! “I separate myself from nature, and now I can dominate it.” This notion must have arrived with the very idea of science. Science as a form of controlling nature, which comes to be treated as an organism that you can manipulate. And this is scandalous. Because once someone thinks this, they damn themselves, don’t they? They leave that organism, cease to be nourished by the fantastic cosmic flux that creates life, and come to observe life from outside. And while humanity observes life from outside, they are damned to a sort of erosion.
I find it interesting that one expressive construction of modern thought is around the idea that nature and culture are in conflict with each other—many twentieth-century philosophers debated this idea. There is an enormous amount of writing on this topic, all of which is based on a confusion produced by thought that is logical, rational, Western. The scientific and technological disorientation that the West is now experiencing is the product of this separation between nature and culture.
Firstly, people create nature and separate themselves from it; then, they idealize it. For example, the conception of the Atlantic coastal forest, the Mata Atlântica, is considered part of this idealized nature. In reality, the Atlantic coastal forest is a garden—a garden constructed and cultivated by Indians.
White People Love to Separate Themselves
I think that the concept of Amerindian perspectivism developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro—the potential for different visions, from other places of existence besides the human—can also be applied in other contexts. It is a very powerful concept to help us understand the time in which we are living. If people were not in the situation of being divorced from life with the planet, perhaps this concept would only be a product of knowledge without direct implication for our collective life, or the sustenance of life on earth. But, in the stage of divorce we are in, with humans detaching themselves from here like a caterpillar from a hot roof, disconnecting as if they did not have any empathy….
It is absurd. It is as if a glass divider separated, on one side, the experience of the fruition of life, and on the other, the place from which we originate. This division reveals another, more profound divorce: the idea that humans are different from everything that exists on earth. And there is a type of person, a type of mentality, that detests the idea that people can live so involved in the daily life of the planet, without detaching ourselves from it. They think this idea weakens them, that it is a rejection of the imagined power of people to distinguish themselves from nature—to become people!—a rejection of this thing that white people love to do: to separate themselves.
Ecology Is to Be Within the Will of Nature
Recently, I met with a group of heirs from some very old, wealthy families. They said to me, “We want to create a fund to take our families’ money out of circulation because this money is financing the destruction of the planet. We have been thinking of buying land in the Amazon and giving it to the Indians.” So, I told them: “Don’t do it! You will wind up making the indigenous move to places that are not theirs. That are not them, that don’t have the necessary ecology and their culture already within. You really want to detach? You cannot buy land, land is not a commodity.”
At this meeting, I talked about Chief Seattle’s letter. Sometime around 1850, the western frontier of the United States was already devouring everything. The American cancer had already metastasized, had left the East Coast and come to the Pacific, where the Seattle tribe lived. I went to learn about the economy of this group of indigenous people prior to the arrival of white Americans. At that time, they lived off salmon fishing. Their beach was divided with rocks. The waves threw fish onto the rocks, and that’s how they would catch the fish. It is equivalent to an image described in a Caetano Veloso song: “An Indian raises his arm, opens his hand, and picks a cashew.” There was a time of year when the Seattle people fished. This involved the patience of looking for things. This is ecology: it is being inside the earth, within nature. Ecology is not you adapting nature to your will. It is you being inside the will of nature.
(…)
Yvy marã e’ỹ and the Wormhole
According to Yanomami cosmology, we are living through a third version of the world. The first was extinguished because a taboo internal to their tradition was broken, and in that primordial world, the sky fell and split the earth. The sky, though it looks light, is very heavy; it can fall and split the earth. Since then, the shamans have dedicated themselves completely to maintaining the supports of the sky. They are like architects in this cosmic engineering of building supports for the sky.
Joseca Yanomami, prompted by Cláudia Andujar, who gave him pencils and colored pens, drew these supports of the sky to show how this idea takes shape. You look, start thinking of the greatest contemporary artists: How is it that this Yanomami, who has never picked up a pen, makes a drawing like this? When Claudia saw the drawings, she felt completely fulfilled because she discovered that now, among the Yanomami, there was a language that could dialogue with her photographs. She had been photographing the Yanomami and perceived that the language of photography did not make sense to them.
After that, she begins to dialogue with Yanomami thinking about the world, which is a complete transformation in the appearance of things. A tree or a piece of wood, for example: Joseca draws a suspended shape, resembling a spider web, with glowing things and antennas coming out of it, and tells you that this is, in fact, the forest. “But where are the roots, the ground?” There are none, the forest is in space. The Yanomami can perfectly imagine a forest floating in space. Because, for them, the forest is an organism, it does not come from earth, it is not the product of another event. The forest is an event itself. And if it comes to an end on the earth that we people know, it will still exist in another place. In a way, for the Yanomami, everything that exists in this world also exists in another place.
The Guarani also think like this. For them, this planet is a mirror, an imperfect world. Life is a journey heading toward a place called Yvy marã e’ỹ, which the Jesuits translated as “land without evils”. The idea of "land without evils”, of the promised land, is altered from the Christian idea because in the Guarani worldview there was never a world that had been promised to someone. Yvy marã e’ỹ is a place after, a place that comes after the other one. A place that is nevertheless the image of this one, is nevertheless the mirror of a place to follow. The Guarani pajés (shamans) say that we live in an imperfect world, and because of this, our humanity is also imperfect. Living is the rite of crossing this imperfect earth, moved by a poetics of a place that is the mirror image of this one. And if we were to imagine the nhandere—the path that, leaving from that which is imperfect, seeks to come close to that which is not imperfect—a series of events will occur that, as the journey goes on, will bring an end to this image here and create another.
If you were to ask a Guarani, “Does this place you are heading exist?” They would say, “No.” “And this place in which you are?” They would respond, “It is imperfect.” “Okay, but you are escaping from an imperfect place and running to a place that does not yet exist?” They will say, “Yes, because it will only exist when this one here comes to an end.” I find this wonderful! And mainly, I find the exercise of thinking this way to be wonderful.
(…)
A shaman once told me this story: Omama, the demiurge of the Yanomami, has a nephew who is the son-in-law of the sun. In that moment, I thought: “So the Yanomami have kin with the sun? Someone who is married to a person from the sun’s family? I need to stay calm to understand if this sun he is talking about is the star up above, if it is the actual sun.” Calmly, I went exploring this topic until he confirmed that it was the same sun.
I found this story wonderful because it shows that, for the Yanomami, there are beings that can negotiate with other entities, other existences, other cosmologies.
A shaman left this galaxy and went to another, completely unglued from ours. He tried to come back and could not: he fell into a kind of wormhole. He was sending messages, asking for help from the other shamans and from his pajé friends. He said that he had gotten lost and could not find the coordinates home.
It was a tremendous job for the shamans to bring him back. They succeeded, but he arrived defective. He spent the rest of his life sitting in the yard, sitting in the canoe. They had to place him in the sun, take him out of the sun. People would start talking, and he’d be there among them, silent, arranging little sticks on the ground.
It’s quite dangerous to enter a swerve like this, isn’t it?
- Excerpt from "Our Worlds Are at War" by Ailton Krenak and Maurício Meirelles, published in "Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology." First published in Portuguese in Olympio–Literatura e arte, #2, 2019, and in English online in e-flux Journal #110.
