Indigenous cosmo-aesthetics and cosmo-politics: the Yanomami case

This presentation will propose some initial lines of thought on the possibility of thinking about an Indigenous “cosmo-aesthetics,” based on the words of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, who lives in an Amazonian village. 

The presentation is based on a remark by Brazilian thinker Darcy Ribeiro about the desire for beauty among Amerindians in their daily lives. For Davi Kopenawa, this preoccupation with beauty is based on what might be called an Indigenous cosmo-aesthetics, to be understood in two senses: 

1) a feeling that experiences the power (affects) of other beings in the forest; 

2) a daily practice of beauty that manifests itself in rituals, ornaments and songs, and that operates by imitating the powers that Yanomami try to  capture. 

This cosmo-aesthetics extends into a cosmo-politics understood, in this context, as the politics of defending the forest. To analyse this Indigenous cosmo-politics, it is necessary to study the politics of inter-ethnic alliances of the Amerindians with “city people,” in particular around ecology. 

The presentation will conclude with a discussion of whether or not this cosmo-aesthetics can be transposed to urbanised and industrialised societies, and will end with an eco-romantic, utopian proposal. 

Speaker

Julien Pallotta is agrégé and Doctor of Philosophy (from Toulouse 2 University), and translator. He teaches at the French Highschool Lycée Molière in Rio de Janeiro and is a research associate at the Contemporary Philosophy Laboratory of the IFCS/UFRJ. He specialises in social and political philosophy and translates Indigenous Brazilian authors such as Ailton Krenak and Davi Kopenawa into French. 

Image credit: Amazonian sky. Photograph by Julien Pallotta