The clash of cosmographies: indigenous societies and project collaboration - three ethnographic cases (Kaingang, Sateré-Mawé, Baniwa)

Abstract

Departing from three ethnographic cases the article discusses impacts and native responses to developmentalist cosmography in the presence of market-oriented projects of "sustainability" (as among the Baniwa and Sateré-Mawé) or in the absence of it (as among the Kaingang). The legitimation of anthropological discourse within construction of alterity and (des)exotization of indigenous societies and of the environment they live in is discussed as a privileged field of mediation and encounter of different actors and proposals of projects. Among the cultural pre-conditions that steer these encounters there are religious pluralism and the inherent pragmatics of indigenous conversion, which are responsible for ruptures and continuities of indigenous cosmovisions and - practices and man-nature-relations. They act upon aesthetics, social morphology, distribution of power and local economics. Although these encounters are prone to generate internal conflicts they are perceived as promoters of indigenous well-being through processes of naturalization sustained by occidental regimes of alterity that legitimate their presence.

Found again in translation? Standardizing the authenticity of guaraná among the Sateré-Mawé people (Brazilian Amazon)

“…In this case, it rather involves a controlled revisitation of what Sateré-Mawé tradition is-including epistemological practices and other ways of being-in-the-world related to guaraná-and how it can be made legible to support a multiscalar strategy of "global localization" (Escobar 2001) aimed to reappropriate the plant and to reroot it in its original territory. Our analysis thus extends existing anthropological works on the Waraná Project, which have so far focused on its insertion in the historical and cosmological trajectory of the Sateré-Mawé people, in a context of prolonged contact with the "outside world" (Kapfhammer 2009a(Kapfhammer , 2009bWright, Kapfhammer, and Wiik 2012;Figueroa 2016).…”

Role of Traditional Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Indigenous Communities in Achieving Sustainable Development Goals

“…Indigenous and tribal communities use thousands of plants for medicinal purposes, many of them are not even botanically named, and many drugs of the plant origin are waiting to be discovered by modern science [82][83][84]. The famous anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis had emphasized the role of tribal communities in assisting the discovery of more and more medicinal plants which are used by them for medicinal purposes [85]. Ethnobotanists can expedite the identification process of probable medicinally valuable plants, and it is suggested that instead of undertaking random screening expeditions, clues and leads can be derived from the ethnobotanical knowledge that can ease the task of bioprospecting of the plants [86].…”

The sustainability challenges of indigenous territories in Brazil's Amazonia

“…But not every village is connected to a potential market and commercialization in fair trade circuits is not easy nor always profitable (43,44). Productive activities were encouraged by special financing schemes in the 2000s, but with mixed results, either because of the difficult intercultural relationship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous technicians involved in these projects (45) or, more generally, because they implied a capitalist orientation that more often than not conflicts with Indigenous social norms and cosmology (some authors have noted however that these relationships can be different among those influenced by Evangelic missionaries, see 46), as the frustrating attempts of the Body Shop multinational with the Kayapó clearly showed. Furthermore, agricultural activities may result in land cover change which raises the same environmental and symbolical issues as above.…”