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Politics of the Forest

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski

The End as a Beginning: Worlds That Are to Come

Debate

Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and philosopher Déborah Danowski discuss contemporary narratives of collapse and emphasise the richness of Indigenous cosmologies and cultures for thinking about the world that is to come.

Evidence of the climate crisis and destruction of the planet have given rise to today’s proliferation of apocalyptic stories of collapse in which many people see the possibility of a world without humans or humans without a world. Anxiety and distress, mixed with a certain nihilism, permeating films, literature, and philosophy, are now questioning the lineal idea of progress, which western culture has been propagating for centuries. Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and philosopher Déborah Danowski present an alternative to these narratives, namely the perspective of Amerindian peoples who have experienced (and survived) the experience of the end. For Viveiros and Danowski, Indigenous cultures are a mirror in which to observe ourselves and rethink our way of contemplating and living in the world, a way to move away from our anthropocentric gaze and construct new relationships with the other beings with which we coexist. The systemic crisis we have caused also represents the possibility of transforming the end into a new beginning, and to construct the new worlds that are to come.

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Politics of the Forest

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