“Pensare con” i popoli indigeni dell’Amazzonia i rapporti tra uomo e cosmo

Abstract

Despite the devastation produced by centuries of European colonization, Amerindian societies have maintained worldviews and conceptions of humanity which present a great richness, originality and variety. As shown both by Lévi-Strauss (1992) and, in a study perspective closer to Eliade's approach, by Sullivan (1988), they share some common characteristics which it is useful to compare, by difference and analogy, with those of Euro-Western cosmologies. As Viveiros de Castro argued with specific reference to the indigenous cosmologies of the Amazon, the importance of the aspects of relationality of reality, its eminently transformative dynamic nature, the ontological multiplicity of its components, the importance of the perspective of observation and of the situation of interaction for the determination of the reality of what "is seen", the joint consideration of 'society' and 'nature' in terms of an inseparable intertwining of relational networks, are in fact characteristic features of what he proposed to call "perspectivism Amerindian ". To these features must be added what the Brazilian anthropologist calls, giving the adjective a different meaning from the more common one, the "anthropomorphic" but not "anthropocentric" character of the ontologies widespread in the indigenous Amazon. Contrary to the tendency, prevailing with the development of modern sciences, to contrast 'cosmology' and 'anthropology', Amazonian indigenous "socio-cosmologies" offer an example of how humanity and the world they can be thought along lines of interdependence. In this paper, I provide an overview of recent debates on these issues, particularly focusing on the case of the ethnographical studies on Makuna people.