Indigenous Amazonia: The forest as a subject

Abstract

Managed and cultivated by humans for millennia, the Amazon rainforest was altered, but (as the subject of its own renovation) is still a forest. In other words, Amazonia became 'anthropogenic' - both cultural and natural, the result of a two-way relationship between subjects: Man and the Forest, with the activities of one not nullifying those of the other. Thanks to anthropology, we know that the indigenous societies of Amazonia confer the dignity of a person or subject on non-humans. The relationship between subjects (symmetrical, dialogic, reciprocal) is an ethical as well as poetical relationship. On the other hand, what prevails in western civilization is the subject-object relationship (asymmetrical, authoritarian, dominating), which generates Nature as an object, opposed to Man as a subject, the sole bearer of Culture. Meanwhile, "the other as an object" means denying the other and denying ethics. This is the substance of the radical alterity of indigenous ways of being and thinking with regard to the West; this "indigenous alterity" for us is a treasure of wisdom. Yet there is a childlike, poetic West that recognizes itself in the indigenous people and in their experience of the world.