Disturbing ethnocentrisms: knowledge, ontologies and Amerindian cosmocentrism

Abstract

In a seemingly simple but pungent statement, Pierre Clastres suggests that “if every culture is ethnocentric, only western culture is ethnocidal”. In addition to his intention to highlight the almost inexorable tendency of the West to surpass other peoples with its worldview — often culminating with ethnic extermination — the French anthropologist refers especially to the fact that all human populations build their collective cohesion and consequently delimit what is external and foreign to them from their own conceptions of reality. This study aims to demonstrate that the so-called traditional knowledge commonly associated with indigenous populations has its own forms of interaction and engagement with the environment and with the beings associated with it. Such knowledge is set apart from the modern thought, which is not only technical or empirical, but epistemological.