Kinship with the land and indigenous cosmopolitics of care¹

ABSTRACT

This article addresses issues related to the Anthropocene from the perspective of indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, which disrupt non-indigenous understandings of humanity, nature, supernature and, consequently, life, death and extinction. From an ethnographic perspective, we focuses on indigenous ways of thinking, inhabiting and transforming their “forest-lands”, through relationships with “other-than-human” beings, both living and non-living, regulated by a series of precautions. Our hypothesis is that the multi-species kinship allows us to understand both the creation and sustainability of the vitality/fertility of the “Earth/Land/ Forest” and its coexistential networks, as well as its depredation/extinction in terms of the rupture of relations between beings through estrangement and abandonment, configuring “cosmopolitics of care”.

KEYWORDS:
Anthropocene; Indigenous onto-epistemologies; Cosmopolitics; Care; Kinship

RESUMO

Este artigo aborda problemáticas relativas ao Antropoceno a partir das epistemologias e ontologias indígenas, que desordenam os entendimentos não indígenas sobre humanidade, natureza, sobrenatureza e, consequentemente, sobre vida, morte e extinção. Desde uma perspectiva etnográfica, o foco se coloca nos modos indígenas de pensar, habitar e transformar suas T/terras-florestas, por meio das relações com os seres outros que humanos, vivos e não vivos, reguladas por uma série de precauções. Nossa hipótese é que o parentesco multiespecífico nos permite compreender tanto a criação e a sustentabilidade da fertilidade/ vitalidade da T/terra-floresta e de suas redes coexistenciais, quanto sua depredação/extinção em termos de ruptura das relações entre os seres por meio do afastamento e do abandono, configurando cosmopolíticas do cuidado.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Antropoceno; Ontoepistemologias indígenas; Cosmopolítica; Cuidado; Parentesco

Introduction: The Anthropocene in light of indigenous concepts and worlds

This humanity that doesn’t recognize that this comatose river is also our grandfather, that the exploited mountain somewhere in Africa or South America and transformed into merchandise somewhere else is also the grandfather, the grandmother, the mother, the brother of some constellation of beings that want to continue sharing a life in this common house we call Earth. (Krenak, 2019, p.23)

Anthropocene is how the scientific debate has been calling our new geological era. Its most common definition attributes to the human species the predicate of a greater geological agent, insofar as its actions alter the thermodynamic equilibrium of planet Earth, compromising its conditions for habitability. Climatic emergency, ecological disequilibrium, erosion of the soil and hydrological resources, cascading extinctions… Nature responds on par with the domestication and exploitation to which it has been submitted, not allowing itself to behave mutely and passively according to human convenience. However, it is worth asking: what Anthropos is this?

From such questions, Anthropology has been contributing in diverse manners to complexify the comprehension of the Anthropocene in non-western terms from a decolonial perspective (Ferdinand, 2022; Soares-Pinto, 2021; Tad- dei et al., 2022; Marras; Taddei, 2022). Starting with the criticism of a generic and universal humanity understood in the notion of Anthropos as determining agent of the Anthropocene, that disregards the plurality of modes of existence and forms of inhabiting the Earth, and takes the diversity of anthropogenic actions as homogenous cause of increasing environmental degradation.

Such destabilization brings us to certain philosophical developments, and also to the anthropological critique relating to the Nature/Culture dualism, with prominence given to the important recontextualization promoted by Amerindian ethnology (Viveiros de Castro, 2002; Lima, 1996; Descola, 2005). From this broad discussion, we can perceive that the epistemological, ontological and political bases of ecological devastation reside in the “modern Constitution” of the (supposed) separation between Nature and Culture which, as Latour (1994) put it, grounds the vision of an inert, mechanical and objectified Nature. However, continues Latour (2020), it is exactly in this sense that the Anthropocene provokes rattling in the modern imaginary with the violent irruption of Nature respondent in history, politics, and other human affairs. Or, in the words of Stengers (2015), the “intrusion of Gaia” multiplies itself in a myriad of devastating occurrences, on global and local scale, that characterize the Anthropocene.²

The contemporary discussion regarding the Anthropocene also pulls back the curtain on the intrinsic relations between the construction of colonial modernity and the environmental crisis, its daughter, whose origins we can localize in the politics of the holds of ships of enslaved people (Ferdinand 2022). The violence and environmental racism historically perpetuated against traditional peoples, racialized and/or minorities, that persistently re-exists in environmental and civilizational barbarism, constitutes the other face of the separation of Nature and Culture. The “common logic of environmental attacks and racist violence” is thus exposed, as stressed by Shiratori (2022, p.111), in proposing an approximation between the notions of “colonial habitation” in Ferdinand (2022) and “generalized domestication” in Hage (2017): both conceptualize the predatory mode of territorial occupation through objectification, exploration and annihilation of the earth, of landscapes, of human and non-human bodies. How, then, to take seriously other forms of making and inhabiting worlds? “Inhabiting the Earth starts with the relation with others” (Ferdinand, 2022, p.48).

In order to contribute to this debate, the present article shall address the Anthropocene’s problematics from indigenous epistemologies and ontologies that upset non-indigenous understandings regarding humanity, nature, supernature and, consequently, about life, death and extinction. We are especially interested in the pragmatic of these onto-epistemologies, that is, in their alternative modes of affecting, doing and multiplying world(s). In The origin of table manners, Lévi-Strauss (2006, p.460) already called attention to the fact that: “the origin of the more general mode, of decorum, is found in a deference to the world, whose civility consist, precisely, in respecting obligations, it follows that the immanent morality of myths goes in the contrary direction to what we currently profess”.

From an ethnographic perspective, the reflection proposed here has as a focus indigenous modes of thinking, inhabiting and transforming the Earth/land-forest, via relations with other than humans beings that there coexist, living and non-living, and even those that escape the life-death distinction. The expression purposefully joins the “Earth/land” proposal (Coelho de Souza et al., 2017) and notions of “land-forest” present in Kopenawa and Albert (2015, 2023). Earth/land takes care to be a “reminder” of the polysemy that the term seeks to evoke, harboring “both the meanings contained within it and those not contained, compelling its overflowing: Planet/soil, Globe/surface, Conceived/lived, Container/content, Ego/oikos, cosmology/economy etc.” (Coelho de Souza et al., 2017, p.39; note vii). With it, the aim is the “opening that these peoples […] are telling us about what the land is and what it does, what are the spatial-temporal compositions producing and being produced with the land” (Lewandowski; dos Santos 2019:07). Our proposal is to converge this more general notion of Earth/land with the more particular Yanomami land-forest (Urihia), understood as “complex sociocosmological pluriverse” (Kopenawa; Albert, 2023, p.39), living and lived entity, effect of the coexistence between beings and territories of multiple ontologies.

A central idea is that the forms of territoriality and stewardship of indigenous worlds are implied in a cosmopolitics of care, in relations with spirits and, especially, with a particular kind, the Owners of places, of plants and of animals. With the cosmopolitical term we refer principally to hesitation as a knowledge practice and the deceleration of the construction of a “common world”, as counselled by Stengers (2018, p.447) when she points to the “unknown that constitutes these multiple divergent worlds”. Not only evidencing that indigenous politics extend to the cosmos, but thinking how such relations can affect and transform our political meanings.

Now the notion of care requires some considerations. We shall concentrate on the modes of relations transmitted via entities and agencies. When we attempt to apprehend indigenous ecologies, the intensification of mutual dependence passes through a perception of different forces that compose the cosmos, the mode how “agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit” (Barad, 2003, p.826). In this sense, also to Bellacasa (2017, p.161),

care is everything that is done (rather than everything that “we” do) to maintain, continue, and repair “the world” so that all (rather than “we”) can live in it as well as possible. [...] What the “all” includes in situation remains contingente to specific ecologies and human-nonhuman entanglements. What counts is the “interweaving” of living things that holds together worlds as we know them, that allows their perpetuation and renewal-and even that which helps to their decay [...] Acknowledging the necessity of care in more than human relations, [...] intensifies awareness of how beings depend on each other.

Indigenous notions of care also require the understanding of their double meaning: “care, protect and make grow”, with emphasis on the interdependence between subjects that “act keeping others in mind” and subjects that “place themselves under the attention or care of others” (Kelly; Matos, 2019); but also “taking care, respect, precaution”, keeping in mind that lack of care and attention can revert into predation of Earth/land-forest entities in relation to humans. The breaking of certain negotiation protocols that indigenous peoples affirm having to respect in order to maintain good relations in sustaining the Earth/land-forest, can awaken the fury of and abandonment by Owner-spirits: sorcery, disease, death, as well as drought and extreme rainfall, erosion and scarcity are indexes of their “vengeances”. Thus, “Disrespected moral rules, excesses in supplying, sundering of well-established etiquette formulas can be the causes of the destruction of the known world, in physical and metaphysical terms” (Tola et al., 2019, p.810).

The question of care brings us closer to indigenous kinship, in its general preoccupation with relations with other than human beings (Vilaça, 2002). As such, the hypothesis to be tested is how multispecies kinship and indigenous cosmopolitics permit us to comprehend both the creation and sustainability of fertility/vitality of the Earth/land-forest and its co-existential networks, and its depredation/extinction in terms of the rupturing of exchange and care relations between beings through forgetfulness, distancing and abandonment (Soares-Pinto, 2021, p.18).

Kinship is the name given here to the dynamic of relationality imbedded in ontologic and epistemic commitments between beings: constitution and undoing of beings and their living spaces according to various ontologies. In this dynamic, we shall emphasize tactfulness and responsibilities in front of Others, an expertise of making and unmaking kinship, mediating distances and paying attention to the modes how cosmic forces like to be visited and received. We are interested in the image of the cosmos that emerges from this kinship with the Earth/land-forest. Our wager is that attention to beings that appear in indigenous cosmopolitics (in daily life) permit us to look at land from within: “The world thus seen - better, lived - from here, the ‘center of ecology’, the indigenous heart of this vast and unlimited cosmopolitical Earth where the innumerable Terran peoples nomadologically distribute themselves, and not as an abstract sphere, a globe seen from without” (Viveiros de Castro, 2015, p.16-17). As Bird-Rose (1996) emphasizes, the unquestionable force of the sentiment and connection with the land of indigenous peoples is less so informing us about the “landscape” as it is demonstrating completely surprising ontic and epistemic commitments.

Earth/land-forest: territories and beings from multiple ontologies

The Owners and the deterritorialization of the human

Diverse studies have demonstrated that indigenous lands are the most preserved forested areas of Brazil (Fa et al., 2020; Carneiro da Cunha et al., 2021), and that the knowledge and practices of these peoples contribute to the generation and maintenance of biodiversity and agrobiodiversity (Emperaire et al., 2021; Morim de Lima et al., 2021). However, if, on the one hand, the efficiency of indigenous techniques has more recently been recognized by different sciences, above all, in relation to the importance that they acquire in confronting the planetary ecological crisis, on the other hand, the local theories that underlie them are still frequently “purified” by biological explanations, conceived as “beliefs” in distinction with scientific knowledges. How to show, on the contrary, that indigenous theories are an “integral and fundamental part of sophisticated corpus of knowledges that permit the stewardship of the world which guides itself by respecting the diversity of forms of existing, a non-exploratory or predatory stewardship, but that goes in the direction of producing differences” (Morim de Lima et al., 2021, p.88).

Historical Ecology, Archaeology and Amazonian Ethnology have been demonstrating that the Amazon, far from being a “pristine” forest, possesses a strong anthropogenic component (Balée, 1993, 2013; Levis et al., 2018; Clement et al., 2015; Neves et al., 2021). These studies evidence that the historical occupation of the territory, as well as knowledges and practices of stewardship and cultivation by indigenous peoples (past and present) contribute in different ways to the construction and diversification of niches and landscapes, as well as the increment and maintenance of biodiversity. The idea of an “anthropic forest”, thus, points to the impossibility of thinking of amazonian biodiversity with its sociodiversity and its regimes of historicities. Contrary to what pessimist conservationists claim, “humanity” is not, therefore, incompatible with the generation and conservation of biodiversity.

However, from an indigenous point of view, the notion of a “pristine forest” can sound as strange as its reverse image: a “cultural forest” constructed via techniques that define themselves as exclusively and primarily human. From an indigenous perspective, “forest are not natural, but the domus of different beings who inhabit, care and cultivate them” (Clement et al., 2021, p.1). Brazil nut groves are the agouti’s gardens, say the Wajãpi, just as that which from a human perspective may seem “savage” or “undomesticated”, may very well be the cultivation of other “peoples” (Cabral de Oliveira, 2016).

If it’s possible then to say that the forest was “domesticated” by indigenous peoples who live within her, the meaning of domestication certainly is not of a passage from a state of savage to domesticated in function of human interests and in dismissal of the other entities that inhabit the forest. Also the idea of a “given” Nature, “passive surface awaiting the mark of culture” (Barad, 2003, p.827), needs to be abandoned here. The notion of a “domestic Nature” refers rather to social, and not only ecological, relations that indigenous peoples establish with what the West conventionally calls “nature”, relations that are very often similar to those lived in the domestic household of daily life (Descola, 1986). But what “domestic” means in these worlds can very well enter into equivocation with our own way of thinking a place under control or dominion of a Subject.

The idea that different places and earthly, aquatic and celestial landscapes that compose the forest, as well as the plants and animals that inhabit them, have an Owner is quite diffused in the indigenous Amazon. They are non-human entities, thinking and sentient, who possess their own agency and sociality, and who are frequently glossed over as “spirits”. The Owners take care of their “people” in a similar manner to the relations between parents and children, chiefs and followers, shaman and auxiliary spirits, women and pets or cultivated plants (Fausto, 2008). It is necessary to know how to involve oneself with them through careful relations in which a series of precautions are implicated that, if unobserved, provoke or elicit the enmity of the Owners.

Ultimately the efficacy of human activities depends on the relations with spirits and Owners: hunting, fishing, gathering and cultivating, the clearing of land for agriculture, villages and paths etc. As such, if the position of Owner generally implies protection, knowledge and responsibility over one’s “rearing”, such attributes cannot be confused with notions of property. The question is more one of “how to coexist ‘properly’, understood in ‘appropriate’ terms, not in terms of ‘property’” (Soares-Pinto 2021, p.13).

In what concerns the actions between Owners and their rearing, “there is an ambivalence here, as who exactly causes the action and who is acting is not known” (Fausto, 2008, p.343), and that “maybe it’s based on a codependency, a mutuality and an alternation between being the cause of action and agent, one in front of the other” (Kelly; Matos, 2019, p.408-10). What interests us here is the form how this mutuality passes through mechanisms of care and precaution necessary to dealing with cosmic forces, implicated in the making and unmaking of kinship bonds.

In order to move this premise forward, let’s first introduce a spiritual dimension, that goes to the center of the discussion regarding occupation and living in the Earth/land-forest; afterwards, we shall perform a reading of the notion of body-territory that comes from indigenous intellectuals; to finally dwell on some ethnographic cases that detail the methods of care/tact and precaution that guide relations between indigenous agriculturists, hunters, shamans and dreamers with the Owners of plants, animals, places etc.

Ecology and kinship with spirits inside

Our Ecology (the ecology of the non-indigenous) “was born as knowledge around communities produced by ways of life that have nothing in common beyond the absence of spiritual and intellectual life” (Coccia, 2023, p.12). But for the Yanomami, for example, the true holders of ecological knowledge are the spirits of the forest, the xapiri pe, who are Yanomami ancestors metamorphosed into animals. Furthermore, continues Coccia, “it is only because this knowledge doesn’t belong simply and exclusively to the Yanomami people and culture, but to another “people”, composed by other “realities”, that Kopenawa can say ‘we were born in the center of ecology and in her we live’” (ibidem, p.19).

To Kopenawa, all forest beings possess an image (utupë), that in becoming xapiri dance for the shamans: the ancestral animals, but also the trees, the leaves and vines, the earth, the rocks, the water, the wind, the rain… “Don’t think the forest is empty. Even though the whites don’t see them, multitudes of spirits live in her”, stresses Kopenawa (2015, p.118). The Yanomami conception of diversity, as presented to us by Kopenawa, can thus be interpreted as one of different worlds/natures, multiple territories and ontologies, populated by an infinitude of image-beings, miniscule and brilliant as “luminous flecks of dust”. The ecology of these relations is what interests the shamans and, in this sense, it would be more interesting if we thought, in indigenous terms, in an “ecology with spirits inside”, keeping in mind “the network of co-existential relations that connect the most diverse beings in a double dimension, the natural and supernatural dimension of each and every event” (Soares-Pinto, 2021, p.14).

The Earth/land-forest cannot, therefore, be conceived as an asocial landscape, wellspring of “natural resources” to be controlled by humans. As Kopenawa tells us:

This is more of a vast entity endowed, as all others, with an essential image (utupe a) that the shamans call Urihinari a. This image (urihi a ne urupe) refers first to the visible unity of the forest, it’s corporeal form: the soil is thus an “external skin” (sipo so) and the vegetation it’s hairiness. It also refers to its vital animatio: the forest is endowed with a breath (urihi wixia), humid exhalation whose freshness grants its “fertility value” (urihi a ne rope), that is, the strength of growth both of its vegetation as well as all the cultivated plants in the gardens opened there. Like the humans, the “land-forest” suffers and feels pain when her trees are felled. She dies when she is set ablaze, giving way to a dry and hot land, where Ohinari, the spirit of hunger, will install himself. (Kopenawa; Albert, 2023, p.43)

Body-territory living and lived

Continuing with this relation of co-extensivity between body and Earth/land-forest, an important contribution is being developed by indigenous intellectuals, who highlight territory as a living body, that feeds itself, reproduces itself and weaves alliances with other bodies. Its stewardship is done via the management of fluxes and vital substances. Among the Baniwa, Braulina Baniwa (2018) conceives of menstrual smell as a poison to the Owners of places and invisible beings of the rivers and air, that take revenge on humans. The absence of adequate precautions with the body is extremely detrimental to women and her surroundings. In this same direction, while thinking about the relations between gender and territory among the Katukina from a feminine perspective, Barboza, Tukano and Waiwai (2019) bring the concept of “bodyterritorialization”, stressing how feminine agencies and precautions re-actualize important bonds with land and territory.

Barreto (2021, p.71) states that for the Tukano (Yepamahsã) the terrestrial world generates and maintains life, thusly being compared to a feminine body and its power of fertility, as the kumu specialist Durvalino Fernandes states: “the terrestrial world is like the uterus of a woman”. Barreto presents us, on the one hand, with the human body itself as a microcosm composed of different qualities “light/life”; “forest/life; “earth/life”; “water/life”; “animal/life”; “air/life” and “human/life” (ibidem, p.45). In this sense, disturbances in the body, environment and cosmos are connected and can manifest themselves in diverse forms, for example, through disease, accidents, social conflicts, scarcity and ecological imbalances. The health of body and territory, as well as the assemblages of relations with the non-human Owners (Waimahsã) that this involves, are part of the same problem.

This image of territory conceived as a feminine body also inspires Daiara Tukano’s gigantic mural Mother jungle of the boy river, painted atop the cement of a building in Belo Horizonte: Body-jungle is an indigenous woman and mother to body-river, a child composed of water and fishes. These bodies and territories need to be reactivated and demarcated as places of retrieval, of memory and the confrontation with diverse violences and erasures suffered with the “colonial rape”, asserts Célia Xakriabá. In the final document of the March of Indigenous Women (Marcha das Mulheres Indígenas of 2019 (2021), the feminine collectives insist on reaffirming and reclaiming their body-territories: “Territory for us is not a good that can be sold, exchanged, exploited. Territory is our own life, our body, our spirit […] Losing our territory is losing our mother. Who has territory, has a mother, has a lap. And who has a lap has a cure”.

As can be noted, the notion of territory resists current abstractions regarding portions of land that are mappable, scrutinizable and appropriable. We will retain this image of “cure” in order to approach the notion of kinship with the Earth/land-forest, that here matters to us as a theory capable of cultivating (or being cultivated by) the ties that co-create beings.

Making and unmaking kinship

Powerful sons, shattered fathers

Among the Yanomami, the relation between a shaman and the xapiri draws attention to how, indispensable for the ecological equilibrium and fertility value of the Earth/land-forest, it is codified in the register of kinship, not referring itself exactly to moral rules, but to mechanisms of improvisation whose index is the very relation (Kelly; Matos, 2019):

The xapiri of a shaman call him ‘father’ because they remain close to him, who feeds them with yãkoana dust […] Well-fed, they exclaim with joy: “Our father treats us well! He knows how to respond to our words!”. If, on the contrary, they are kept hungry and irritated, they feel ill-treated and end up fleeing back to the place whence they came, never to return. (Kopenawa; Albert, 2015, p.126)

The shaman is like a father because he feeds his xapiri children, but is always under threat of abandonment. They can see and make the xapiri dance, establishing relations with them that can be both friendly and hostile: “It’s this ontological diplomacy that gives them the power to care for human beings and guarantee the regularities of meteorological, ecological and cosmological cycles” (Kopenawa; Albert, 2023, p.45). It is the xapiri that, as they are moved by the songs of shamans, their parents, cede to them the “fertility value” of the forest (Në roperi), that leaves it humid and fresh, making everything grow; if not done so, the forests would only have the “hunger value”, the earth would become dry and hot, the fruits of trees would cease to grow. When the image of fertility becomes distant, it is the shamans that drink yãkoana and bring them back with the aid of their xapiri children. “She can run away at any moment and never return” (Kopenawa; Albert, 2015, p.210). As such, Kopenawa tells us, the xapiri protect humans from hunger and epidemics, from extreme drought and flooding, without them all would be shrouded in the darkness of night and the sky would once more collapse on the earth, as in the first times.

Kopenawa describes in detail the precautions that shamans must take, especially during the period of initiation (abstaining from sexual relations, appropriate ornamentation, restricted diet). For the xapiri, even in their position as sons of shamans, are powerful and dangerous spirits who, when vexed, become aggressive and can kill, or simply abandon the shaman. Yãkoana powder, food of the spirits, reveals the xapiri’s words to the shaman, who dies and becomes a “ghost”. The death is painful, the shaman’s body is dismantled to be reconstructed as the spirits’ house. Also because of this, the shaman must cautiously follow due prescriptions, so that the xapiri install themselves in his chest and dance for him. In a complex game of seduction and approximation, the xapiri descend through luminous and sinuous paths to the shaman’s body-dwelling, to finally inhabit there when he shows himself prepared to shelter them. To see and be seen by the xapiri it is necessary to learn to listen and respond to their songs. Otherwise, they flee and go away.

As such, the father-son relation between xapiri and shaman must be permanently cultivated, given the always latent possibility that the slightest carelessness may cause it to rupture or revert into predation and abandonment. It is in the act of the shaman living together and feeding the xapiri with yãkoana, that the relation of commensality between both is constructed. However, if the shamans feed and rear the xapiri, they also are raised by their children, their body is dismantled and remade by them.

Vegetable kinship: care and interdependence

Among different indigenous peoples, humans and plants establish relations of mutual care, making (and unmaking) kinship ties that guarantee their coexistences and the continuity of their human and vegetable collectives. Generally, indigenous cultivation technologies also involve seclusions, enchantments, blessings, etc. The rupture of these ties due to carelessness and inattention leads to abandonment and predation, cultivation being equally surrounded by risks and ontological uncertainties.

“Care” and “make grow” are understood less as a relation of dependence of plants in relation to their cultivators, and more as an interdependence between humans, plants, and also other agencies acting in the cultivation who need to be coordinated. Plants cultivated in gardens depend on humans to grown and reproduce (even if not always and not only on them), just as humans also depend on plants that give them food, fermented drink, medicine, hallucinogenics, poisons and diverse materials. As such, we can think with Haraway (2003) that humans and plants are “companion species” (Haraway, 2003), or even that if humans domesticated plants, then these also domesticate humans (Van Dooren, 2012).

Among the Krahô, cultivation involves intimacy and corporeal co-constitution between human and plants. Just as they do with their human kin, more specifically with those connected by ties of consubstantiality (nuclear family), cultivators women must respect complex practices of safeguarding so that plants grow strong and healthy. Each plant possesses a specific type of safeguard specifically connected to its characteristics, habits, behaviors and own modes of cultivation. Sowing safeguards span a series of dietary restrictions, sexual abstinence and depend on a delicate (and also dangerous) management of substances, intentionalities, thoughts and other than human affections (Morim de Lima, 2017; Morim de Lima et al., 2020).

Plants, say the Krahô, only grow and “give fruit” to those who take good care of them, respecting the safeguards. On the contrary, they feel anger, abandoning their human owners, migrating to other gardens. They can even take revenge inflicting illnesses on their cultivators. In the case of the sweet potato, for example, the tuberous roots that serve as food are the “children of the potato” (jàt kra), given in retribution only to women seen as “good mothers”. Beyond the filial relation between the sweet potato (genitor mother) and the cultivator (rearing mother) with their potato-children, a relation of reciprocity is established here: the mother-plant “gives” (or not) her children to the cultivator, the tubercules that feed the human children, circulate between kin’s gardens, and regenerate life when replanted. From this relation pertaining to affine women, also replicated in the origin myth of agriculture and the sweet potatoes harvest ritual, depends the fertility and diversity of gardens (Morim de Lima, 2017; 2023).

Another important aspect of creative relations is seduction: “it is by seducing one another that people create themselves and care for themselves” (Maizza, 2014, p.513). As such, plants also attract, inebriate and awaken desire in their human cultivators to reproduce, as Cabral de Oliveira (2019) shows us in the case of manioc, cultivated as children by Wajãpi women. Maniocs must be pleased by cultivators, who during planting recite enchantments that act on the growth of vegetable bodies. But beyond nutrition, cultivation here is motivated, above all, by the esteem for the inebriating potential of manioc in the form of a fermented drink, the kasiri: “In a game of seductions, through the production of inebriation and all flavors, aromas and textures stemming from their culinary products, the maniocs awaken the Wayãpi desire to continue to plant and diversify them” (Cabral de Oliveira, 2019, p.82).

Among the Jarawara and Jamamadi, as shown to us by Maizza (2014) and Shiratori (2018), there still exists a direct relation between cultivation and shamanism, as well as an interdependence among the lifecycles of people and plants, their bodies and souls, that occurs also in the post-mortem: the souls of the deceased are carried by the souls of the plants they cultivated in life to the celestial tier, where they are adopted by them and marry anew. As Shiratori puts it for the Jamamadi, plants need humans so they can die as humans (and live as plants), and humans need plants so they can live as such (and die as plants).

Plants are daughters, but they are also seducers, spouses, affines, within a level of reciprocity with their cultivators (at the end of the day, the power to spread, reproduce or diversify is within the agency of the plants, even if for this a human partner is necessary). This is because their vegetable bodies maintain co-existential relations with indigenous cultivators, and vice-versa. In this sense, we can think vegetable kinship as produced under the ethic of cultivation and care, but depending on relations of exchange and affinization, crossed by the cycles of live and death.

Care and precaution

We can observe that the political ecology that governs the forest’s sociality follows a “principal of precaution”, that imposes limits to human behaviors, as pointed out by Aparicio among the Banawá (2020, p.194). Uncontrolled hunting, fishing and gathering and human excesses awaken the ire of owner spirits. The author narrates a fishing event in which the immoderate use of timbó poison provoked the anger of the inamadi spirit, who took revenge on the humans through the emergence of deadly diseases, as well as the suspension of solar movements and strong windstorm: On that day, people thought that “the world was going to end” (ibidem, p.197).

Also the Brazil nut groves, with which the Banawá establish long running relations, are inhabited by other than human beings. Because of this, it is common for camps to be abandoned a few days after the beginning of nut-breaking operations, even before they have been completely exploited: “Everything occurs as if the Banawá perceived the excess of predation that they are developing in the groves and feel the need to safeguard themselves of the potential dangers that causes” (Aparicio, 2020, p.198).

The relations that the Banawá establish with certain domesticated or semidomesticated plants, says Aparicio, evidence how human excess incites a reverse contra-predatory movement that can be seen as a “contra-domestication of human life, that spurs impermanence and destabilization with a vigor” (ibidem, p.204). As such, without paying attention to an ethic of caution, the figure of the Owner can very well be an index of metamorphoses to coresident humans, referring to an unsuccessful encounter.

Ethnographies with the peoples of the Marico Complex, in the indigenous territory of Guaporé River, southern Amazon, go in the same direction. “If everything has a place” as Moero Djeoromitxi warned, “everything has an owner”. When Owners (ibzia) are mentioned, it is always based off an event, an encounter. In the “good encounter” there won’t be an aggressive reaction from the Owner-spirits.³ The abundance of game, fish or woodland and garden produce is an index of a good relation that humans undertake with that place and its creations. Ideally such spirits should be visited in their own homes by the shamans, who see them in their human form, negotiating/asking the game, fish and produce, and being welcomed with chicha (manioc, corn, peanut or yam beer) and food (cooked fish and game), and returning to narrate the event.

In the “bad encounter”, something occurred in a careless manner. Too much engagement with a certain game animal, they were killed too much, wasted, or were not properly killed, only wounding the rearing of the Owner, who will need to heal his injured animals. It’s when the Owners attack humans who “killed badly” and transform them (their spirits) in employees in their “farm”, if it’s an Owner of game, if it’s an Owner of a tree possibly he will take someone to be his daughter-in-law.

In this sense, the anthropomorphism of the Owners, as well as the hyperbolic image of their sociality, are only made apparent when everything is well, no one is ill in the village. “The Owner’s places are attractors of a territory that only shamans should (affirm) to know […] But if a living (non-shaman) coresident knows or affirms knowing exactly where these places are located, it is because these are experiences of relative deterritorializations, that is, it is being attracted to the place, the point of view of the Other” (Soares-Pinto, 2023, p.11), which signifies its transformation into a sick/deceased person to its living-coresidents.

Among the Djeromitxi and Wajuru of the Marico Complex, the principal question doesn’t seem to be if we can or cannot point to the places of the Owners on a map, and this rarely occurs, because such places are dependent on happenstance, on encounters, on a relation that is established. In other regions, however, the relation between places and their Owners encounters a somewhat more indicial modulation, as in the upper Black River and the Xingu River. When Guerreiro (2016, p.47) points to the representation of the “Upper Xingu as a network of owners - singular and collectives -, geographically located and connected by […] memorable paths, being that the relation between an owner and that which he ‘possess’ … seems to be only activated in a confrontational or exchange relation with another potential owner” (ibidem, p.37; emphasis added); or even in the relation between clans, places and mythical events in the upper Black River (Andrello, 2012).

In any case, in the upper Black River as in the Marico Complex, the danger of not heading the protocols of visitation and negotiation of these beings is present. For the Baniwa, a people of the upper Black River, for example, Iarodatti is a term translated as “sacred places”:

The term covers the places where the yóopinai (yóopinai ipana) spirits dwell, the invisible doubles of the animals (itsirinai ipana), and also, the house of the dead, clanic post mortem destiny of people’s heart-souls (ikaale) […] When one passes by these places, they must be respected, for they shelter persons and invisible peoples who in reaction can provoke misfortunes and diseases through their attacks. (Vianna, 2017, p.234)

For these reasons, it is not uncommon that people ask permission to their grandparents when passing through mythically established places (ibidem), which occurs also with the peoples of the Marico Complex, especially in the case of cautious places and the houses of boa constrictors, considered old grandfathers. Because, precisely, stabilized or not in a mappable network, the question is the possibility of these beings residing in the locales and/or networks of relations, dependents, accordingly of protection, of caution and of respect which are to them observed.

The indigenous Owners do not seem to us, therefore, transcendental subjects, they are indications of encounters and relations, signs of the “forces of the soil” that refuse a relational schema of colonial domestication and negation of the earth. The Owners, by resisting undue relations of appropriation of their places and creations, are their undomesticable mark. Not by accident, the effects of abandonment of the mechanisms of caution by humans are modulated sometimes by ire, sometimes by distance and distancing of these beings.

Dreaming and dying, paths that lead faraway

Walking or distancing oneself are recurring indigenous images of death. The deceased walk, generally having to choose among diverse types of paths in order to obtain a good post-mortem destiny. There is, in effect, something in this relation between bodies, places, paths and extra human entities that calls our attention and surpasses a more common understanding in regards to the regime of Amerindian transformation.

Miller (2023, p.10) offers an interesting interpretation for the relation between metamorphosis and such relations among the paths and places: “The transformation, generally described by Amerindian peoples as a process of corporal change […] also can be described as a change or switching of paths through which diverse beings transit, that is to say, as a dislocation in space”. The Mamaindê with whom this author works with elaborate an (internal) constitution of the person through a series of necklaces, which are also paths through which their doubles walk. The notion of path being prevalent in Mamaindê theory in respect to the changing of perspectives, it is through the changing of places that transformation/metamorphosis occurs.

The choice between paths appears, in the case of the Rarámuri in Sierra Tarahumara, Mexico, as a theory-practice capable of sustaining or ending the world, as Fugigaki (2020, p.3) affirms:

The more relevant premises and implications about these processes [of the Anthropocene] are present, in previous and parallel form, in Rarámuri theory-practice […]. Specifically, through the concept of walking-paths and of native actions dedicated to “caring for surroundings” and to “sustaining the world”.

Also according to the author, a “path” is capable of regenerating or degenerating bodies and worlds, which brings us back to the previously discussed notion of body-territory, informing us in regards to the forms by which beings may consubstantiate, differentiate, or even distance themselves. In this sense that distance and the relation between places interests us here, and what its connection, the paths, realizes whilst capable of codifying and sustaining processes of life and death in the co-existential network of the Earth/land-forest.

Dreaming, travelling and visiting the land of the dead are analogous experiences from the Tikmũ’ũn point of view. The dreams initiate frequently through paths that lead to the villages of the dead, referred by the dreamers as “another earth”: “the village of the dead, from the point of view of a living person, is inhabited by animals! […] the dead are animals (xokxop)” (Romero Jr., 2022, p.14). Asking for a bit of leeway, we might thus say that for the Tikmũ’ũn dying is something like “animalizing oneself”, as in the case of the Jarawara and Jamamadi it is “vegetizing oneself”, but both accomplish the difference between living and dead through the relative distance between beings and their places.

On the note of transformation as an exchange of places, attention is called to how death, extinction or falling populations of animals/plants frequently is interpreted as a distancing, a flight to other places, of the extra human beings under whose care they had been until then. This is frequently the mode how these processes of death and near-death appear in shamanic terms, which occurs in terms of the abandonment (or of collective forgetfulness) of the protocols of negotiation with (or even of) the entities with which the cosmopolitics of the earth are elaborated. There is a series of elaborations regarding the distancing of extra human beings and their creations (animals/plants/meteorological events) as a consequential refusal to the rupturing of a network of caregiving and exchanges. As Davi Kopenawa says:

The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat. The dried-up earth will become empty and silent. The xapiri spirits who come down from the mountains to play on their mirrors in the forest will escape far away. […] We [the shamans] will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall. (Kopenawa; Albert, 2015, p.6, emphasis added)

The possible flight of an extra-human being was also registered by a dreaming shaman Djeromitxi. In his dream, Tohõ (the Sun) told him he was sick from the factories’ chemicals and displeased with the conflicts among the humans. He complained with the shaman that he no longer received gifts from his human children and that, because of this, he was going away (Soares-Pinto. 2023). Thus, it is common that the effects of unchecked actions on human-entities, their places and creations, be reported simultaneously as the effects of colonizing acts, and abandonment due to carelessness or forgetfulness of traditional protocols of exchange and care relations with these beings. Such invasions and ruptures are caused by anger, vengeance and causes the flight of these beings (Soares-Pinto, 2023; Vasconcelos, 2022). The indigenous diagnostic regarding extinctions does not forget to highlight non-indigenous responsibilities, but neither does it exclude itself as a co-existential agent of the biological diversity present in its territories.

However, since such a distancing is not defined by a collective, definitive death, it is frequent that indigenous peoples register the return of extra-human entities with which they coexist. As in the songs chanted by Tikmu’um shamans, whose true owners are the spirit-peoples (Parrot, Tapir, Bat, Hawk, Manioc, Monkey etc.), and who keep a memory of the extinct biodiversity of their devastated territory by the mining and agropastoral fronts (Tugny, 2011). What the Tikmu’un tell us is that these beings do not disappear, are not extinct, on the contrary, they leave, go away, passed from the visible to the invisible, existing and re-existing by other means, in this post-ruin world (Romero Jr., 2015). As such, what seems to us to need emphasizing is the:

[…] notion that the negotiation protocols with extra-human agencies never are definitively given, their success or ruin depends on happenings, of the relation with this or that entity, where what is at stake is the capacity achieved by humans to affect a given terrain of existence, despite the violent constraints imposed by the non-indigenous. One remains alive through attention with the potencies of the land. (Soares-Pinto, 2023, p.21)

Walking, singing, dreaming, dying, re-inventing, retaking and resuming: actions of indigenous kinship that construct their bodies sustained by the “Earth/land-forest”.

Conclusion: Resuming the bonds with the Earth/land

To the peoples that have been focused here the Earth/land-forest is not conceived as an asocial landscape, source of “natural resources” to be controlled by humans. On the contrary, this “world whose name is forest” (Kopenawa; Albert, 2023), has spirit(s) and also body(s), breaths and pulsates, vibrates in dance movements and echoes many voices, polyglot that it is. And by being(s) so alive, also suffers, feels rage, pain and dies (in the singular and plural), but returns. Among the various indigenous peoples, mythology and eschatology tell us that many times has the world ended, or almost ended, be it from the falling sky, great floods and universal fires, or even from successive cycles of destruction and recreation by the gods. In this sense, current existence can be understood as an “interval between the most recent end […] and the next end, always imminent” (Romero Jr., 2015).

The historical time of indigenous peoples is equally marked by successive “ends of the worlds”, that go back to the colonial invasion: ethnocide, epidemics, devastation of the forest, invasion and pillaging of the land. One more time: it is not possible to consider environmental barbarism separately from the civilizational catastrophe that hit indigenous peoples, who continue to this day “re-existing” the ends of their worlds. If “the whole planet” suffers with the ecological crisis, as a general rule, it is traditional populations, racialized and/or minorities, inhabitants of forests or cities, who suffer directly from violence and environmental racism (Ferdinand, 2022). It’s not a question only of recognizing that these populations are more vulnerable to environmental impacts, but to explicitly state that: “the racism, especially colonialism and slavery, helped construct a world founded upon environmental destruction.” (Davis in Ferdinand prologue, 2022, p.13).

If it’s necessary to give visibility to the indigenous “ends of the worlds”, it is indispensable that the experiences of re-existences of these people be equally placed at the forefront. Not by chance, thus, that many indigenous populations don’t disassociate the defense of their survival and a political autonomy of territorial defense, which, in turn, is connected to the diverse and unpredictable forms of life there extant. This political refusal to disarticulate or disconnect human beings and extra-humans was recently characterized by De La Cadena (2015) through the relation with “earthbeings”, and beautifully described by Benites (2014) for the retaking of guarani-kaiowa lands as animated by warrior-protector spirits. Such struggles and their modes of articulation and decodification of state machinery turn the concept of Earth/land-forest, we believe, strategic for the confronted problem.

The struggle of indigenous peoples for the recognition of their lands, essential for confronting the planetary ecological crisis, does not aim to fence, domesticate, explore and commercialize, but resume the bonds with the land and its entities, via the cosmopolitics of care underscored in this article. With the retaking of Tupinambá land in the south of Bahia, indigenous kin return and also the encantados, the Owner-spirits of places (Alarcon, 2020). The Potiguara, despite still being surrounded by sugar plantations on all sides, retake their lands through substituting the plantation’s monoculture with the growing of multispecies gardens (Cardoso, 2018). Jerá Guarani (2020) also tells us that together with the retaking of territories by the Guarani Mbyá, the forests return with their many entities, the sweet potatoes, corns, the pretty gardens, fertile and diverse, the spirits and non-human Owners.

As we have sought to emphasize during this article, from the indigenous point of view, the bonds of care with extra human entities, for whom kinship relations offer legibility, promote the Earth/land-forest’s vitality and fertility, just as the imbalance and/or rupturing of these ties can generate diseases, death, scarcity, unproductivity, extreme climatic events etc. This indigenous conception, it’s worth noting, draws near to the principles-manifestos emphasized by Povinelli (2016, p.45-9) for the peoples of Australia’s Northern Territory, in short: the idea that things exist through an effort of mutual attention and that they are neither born nor die, though they may become distant from each other and change state.

Instead of attempting to domesticate Gaia, it is imperative to align with her (Stengers, 2015). Converse with the world, sing and dance with the spirits, animate stones and mountains, make kinship with plants and animals. It is through practices of care, cultivation and of making other arrangements and relations flourish. Resurging and retaking the bonds with the land, these are lessons that indigenous peoples give us “in this common house we call Earth” (Krenak, 2019, p.23), to whose understanding of “common” Jera Guarani (2020) invites us: “I’d like to call on more people to be savages”.

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Notes

• 2
  Gaia is a mytho-scientific figure, taken first by Lovelock and Margulis in the formulation of Gaia Theory, that holds the Earth to be a self-regulatory system, a living organism. Since Gaia Theory, it is known that life did not develop from a given atmosphere, but that living beings themselves create the atmosphere, that is, beings co-create the conditions of existence. Gaia is not, therefore, a transcendental goddess, but an effect produced by symbiotic relations between different beings, living and not, that create the conditions for habitability on this planet.
• 3
  We thank Gilberto Azanha for having called the attention of one of the authors to these characteristics.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  29 Nov 2024
• Date of issue
  Sep-Dec 2024

History

• Received
  10 June 2023
• Accepted
  16 Jan 2024