Amazonian pain. Indigenous ontologies and Western eco-spirituality

Abstract

Recent discourse within Western ecologism raises numerous issues relevant for the debate on animism within anthropology. Instead of perpetuating the image of the cosmological alterity of indigenous societies and instrumentalizing it as an environmental utopia, this article argues for a certain "monism” of environmental ethics. Based on insights of Western eco-psychology, Western tradition of nature philosophy, as well as the work of anthropologists like Bird-David, Ingold, and Hornborg and their contributions to the debate on a "new animism”, it is argued that the spatio-temporal accumulation (or diminishment) of capacities to manage the borderlines of cosmological domains gives shape to the quality of human-nature-relationships. As the example from the Sateré-Mawé shows, their modes of human-nature relationship form a kind of sequence that has as much to do with historical external relations of an Amazonian society as with progressive advances and regressive longings in a person’s life cycle. Taken together, both Western discourse on an ecological turn of developmental psychology and the sequential modes of Sateré-Mawé human-nature relationships make a strong argument for a common ground of environmental ethics. Both Western and indigenous societies are nowadays challenged by the necessity to re-construct an environmentally beneficent "animic way of being” (Ingold). To be aware of this common ground opens up the space for a more "symmetric anthropology”.