Unearthing the South: Indigeneity, Globality, Community
The year 1492 marks the encounter between Europe and the Americas. In Western accounts, this moment
seeds a narrative of technological triumph and civilization. Native American populations, however, see
1492 differently: it marks the beginning of a process of land conquest and cultural domination. Its results
are ongoing and well known: an assumption that culture is superior to nature and North is superior to
South. The Western imposition of systems of knowledges, even when originating new hybrid forms, has
obscured local ways of thinking.
But what about these obscured autochthonous knowledges? How were “nature” and “civilization”
understood, expressed, and weaved together in the Americas by local and native populations?
Unearthing the South: Indigeneity, Globality, Community considers knowledges from the vantage
point of local experience and artistic practice in the American hemisphere. More than recounting how
the nature/culture divide came about, we will think about the ways in which both nature and
civilization were differently conceived. The touchstone ideas grounding this symposium include
interconnectedness, reciprocity, non-human agency, and Amerindian perspectivism. They will help us
to unearth what has always been present, but has been rendered invisible: hemispheric and
cosmopolitan indigeneity, human-animal alliances, and other ways of making sense of globality
through community.
Friday, October 14
FILM SCREENING
Embrace of the Serpent — El abrazo de la serpiente
(2016, 125 mins., English subtitles)
Granoff Center/Martinos Auditorium ▪ 154 Angell Street
4:00 - 6:00pm
Q&A with Jacques Toulemonde (co-screenwriter for El abrazo de la serpiente)
and Hugo Lucitante: 6:00 - 7:00pm
Saturday, October 15
Welcome/Morning Coffee
10:00 – 10:30am
PANEL 1
10:30am – 12:00noon
(Respondent: Dana Graef, Postdoctoral
Fellow in International Humanities,
Anthropology)
‘On the Verge of Total
Extinction’? Reframing Indigenous
History in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Heather F. Roller, Colgate University
This presentation challenges simple
narratives of decline and disappearance in the history of Brazil’s indigenous peoples during the
nineteenth century. To do so, Heather Roller examines the very sources that perpetuated the idea that
Indians were vanishing: the writings of early ethnographers, in this case three authors who visited the
Guaikurú and their descendants, the Kadiwéu, in western Brazil during the mid- to late-nineteenth
century. At first glance, these authors depict the remnants of a native society on its way to extinction.
When analyzed in the context of colonial-era records and later ethnographies, however, they reveal
important continuities in native strategies and modes of interaction with outsiders. In particular, the
early ethnographies contain evidence of deep-rooted but flexible practices of alliance, appropriation,
and resistance. Like many indigenous groups in the interior of Brazil, the Kadiwéu used these
practices to defend their autonomy and territory during the tumultuous 19th century.
Amerindian Shamanism and the Politics of Things
Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino, University of São Paulo (USP)
This presentation will explore Amerindian notions of the image-double and its cosmopolitical
consequences. Deeply involved in conceptions of materiality and circulation of objects, the dynamics
of duplication involved in shamanic practices and conceptual regimes is not compatible with the
Western processes of classification, conservation, and monumentalization of material objects.
Different politics of memory imply different ontological configurations of materiality, leading to
equivocity and cultural conflict, such as in the presupposition of art and its institutional frameworks.
Lunch break
12:00 – 1:30pm
PANEL 2
1:30 – 3:00pm
(Respondent: Joshua Tucker, Music Faculty)
Metamorphosis and Ætiology: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Native Amazonian Narratives
Lucia Sá, University of Manchester
This paper will compare the role of transformations and aetiology in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the
Pemon narratives published by the German Theodor Koch-Grünberg in early 20th century. The
purpose is not to arrive at a comprehensive model of how literature from different parts of the world
deals with inter-species/kingdom metamorphosis and ætiology, but rather to tease out some of the
philosophical, cultural and literary implications of metamorphosis and ætiology in these two distinct
cultural contexts.
A Caribbean Natural History: Blacks, Amerindians and the Creation of the New World
Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin/Madison
This paper examines the revolutionary modes of exploration, description, and classification of the
natural world that black knowledge-makers invented in the Caribbean during the 17th century. This
history, and that of their rarely examined encounters with Amerindian populations, reveal how black
Caribbean ways of knowing nature and human bodies catalyzed profound intellectual, cultural, and
material transformations in this region over the long 17th century. It was not only through their very
bodily work on plantations, farms, and households; their contributions as explorers of forests and
providers of materia medica to European natural historians; their reproduction of “African” mores and
traditions; or the shaping of cultural products and sensitivities in reaction/resistance to “western” ones,
that people of African descent fashioned the Atlantic world. Practicing in a world in which the
wondrous and experiential dominated, migration was constant, and the need for physical alleviation of
suffering was unrelenting, Caribbean black ritual specialists most freely and thoroughly pushed the
boundaries of knowledge creation. Their history provides a framework of epistemological coherence
based on innovation that exists outside Old World imagined boundaries and linkages.
Coffee break
3:00 – 3:30pm
PANEL 3
3:30 – 5:00pm
(Respondent: James Green, History Faculty)
From Local Knowledge to Global Ecology: Scales and Indigenous Communities
Brigitte Baptiste, Instituto Humboldt/Columbia University
In this talk Brigitte Baptiste will address the perspective and challenge of integrating the indigenous
and local knowledge to the IPBES (the global platform for biodiversity and ecosystem services
recently created). There is a complex relation between the many systems of knowledge in America,
such as those linked to the “Pacha Mama” cosmology from the dry high plains of the Andean range
and those attached to the view of the “Ayahuasca way of learning” about nature, mostly from the
rainforest, and many others that are even in conflict among themselves as the epistemologies they
comprise. These world views included in each culture have a strong link with the pre-Hispanic politics
and the evolution of ways of understanding the relation among nature and society in a territory. The
speaker will argue that the most complex issue behind local systems of knowledge lies in the idea of a
universal truth discovered by western science, and its use to build a global approach to biodiversity and
ecosystem dynamics.
Reparative Mediations: Indigeneity, Documentary Video, and the Future of the Ethnographic
Archive
Gustavo Procopio Furtado, Duke University
Since 1987, the nonprofit group Video nas Aldeias (VNA, Video in the Villages) has strived to put
video technology in the service of indigenous communities in Brazil. Their efforts, this paper argues,
are an attempt to invert the extractive logic that prevails in ethnographic image production. According
to this logic, the images recorded by travelers in places like the Amazon are meant only for
metropolitan viewing publics and archives. In contrast, through the repatriation of archival images and
the introduction of video for indigenous use, the VNA seeks to enable what this paper calls reparative
mediations. “The Girl’s Celebration” (1987), the group’s inaugural work, can be understood as a fable
about such mediations. Initially the documentation of a Nambikwara celebration (made at the request
of indigenous leaders), the making of this video contributed to a cultural revival. Upon viewing their
image, the Nambikwara reflected about their performance and were moved to perform again. They
performed so that their image could be recorded. In turn, the act of viewing the recorded images
inspired further performances of indigeneity—which culminated in the reinstating of Nambikwara
traditions that had been abandoned, such as the lip and nose piercing ceremony. Does this video
document only the Nambikwara’s lively response to video technology? To what extent does it reflect
and address the anxieties of indigenists regarding intercultural contact and the crisis of ethnographic
representation? What is in fact repaired here? Departing from a critical examination of this inaugural
video, this paper discusses several recent VNA documentaries that were made with the increased
collaboration and control of indigenous filmmakers. Revisiting, developing, and critiquing the hope of
reparative mediation at the heart of the 1987 work, these recent videos advance nuanced views about
the relation between living indigeneity and video-making as well as about the future of the
ethnographic audiovisual archive.
Reception
5:00-6:00
This colloquium co-sponsored by History of Art and Architecture, Brazil Initiative, Center for Latin American and
Caribbean Studies, Hispanic Studies, Comparative Literature, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Humanities Initiative,
Arts Initiative, Watson Collaboration Grant, Anthropology, CV Starr Foundation Lectureship,
Science and Technology Studies, Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Cogut Center for the Humanities.