Artículo

Scales of cosmos and politics in transforming amazonian landscapes

This paper presents the different scales and registers in which an Amazonian people construe a novel cosmopolitical agency in times of critical socio-environmental and political transformation. Based on extended ethnographic research among the Yanomami of the Venezuelan Upper Orinoco region, it explores how new strategies for the management of transforming ecological, domestic, and political contexts both reproduce and threaten secular forms of dealing with alterities from within and without. The making of the forest-world through foraging, the convivial shaping of the domestic sphere and the shamanic management of outside relations are scalar dimensions of Yanomami society challenged by unprecedented ongoing transformations. These are spurred by a shift from the environmentalist consensus of the pre-Chavez democracy to the following neo-extractivist governmentality, materialized in the current crisis of paralegal mining plunder in the Amazon region of the country. Ambivalent government interventions, as freezing territorial demarcation, new healthcare programs and tolerating wildcat mining, trigger indigenous mobilizations ranging from militant opposition to participation. Key mythemes of Yanomami cosmopolitics -as the connection between warfare and the fertilization of the forest and the capture of global environmentalism through the myth of the fall of the sky-, are interrogated in this novel context. In a cosmos conceived as chronically unstable, the cosmopolitical management of threatening alterities and their incorporation remains an axiological mechanism of definition and redefinition of the Yanomami lived world, but the scale and ambivalence of current interventions threaten the capacity of the system to elaborate change. 

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