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World conservation discourse concentrates on forests of high naturalness, which are variously termed intact forest landscapes, primary forests, pristine forests, and wilderness. In this essay, we bring Amazonian Indigenous perspectives to this discussion, both because Amazonian Indigenous Peoples have the right to be in the discussion and because they have a lot to teach us about naturalness. It is essential to understand that Indigenous ontologies do not distinguish culture from nature, since all beings, humans and non-humans, are part of a network of social-ecological interactions. Hence, forests are not natural, but the domus of different beings who inhabit, care for and cultivate them. Each part of the forest mosaic in different stages of social-ecological succession has different owners: when people open swiddens, they must respect other – non-human – forest residents to do so, and when they fallow their swiddens, these other forest residents reassume their original roles as managers and conservers of that part of the mosaic. Each stage of the succession also contains cultivated and domesticated plant populations, so we can think of a different kind of conservation: that of genetic resources. From this perspective, swidden-fallow represents on farm conservation, while less anthropogenic parts of the forest mosaic represent in situ conservation. We believe that reframing forest conservation and learning from Indigenous People can inspire innovative conservation science and policies.

This article focuses on the nature-culture dimension in the Amazonian territory as an ontological question. It is argued that international law, as a product of modern Western societies, reflects and reproduces particular ideas about what the environment is. These ideas in turn reflect specific nature-culture relations that are not necessarily present in other societies. This is especially evident in contexts such as the Amazon, where the basic assumptions that modern Western society takes for granted cannot be extrapolated. The argument is illustrated through the Amazonian Kukama-Kukamiria people’s conception of the river, which was put on the ropes by the implementation of a development project. It is proposed that rethinking international law along with the Amazon means situating oneself in not only a geographically but also ontologically different place.

Metamorphosis is central to Indigenous Amazonian cosmologies, which often posit a period in the past when transformations from one being into another proliferated. This time gave way to the relative stability of the present that always runs the risk of going back to an ongoing process of transmutation. In this article, I highlight the significance of plants in Amerindian ontologies of becoming as catalysts of metamorphic movements through their entheogenic effects, through their curative properties and as the ancestors and teachers of humans. Beyond being the facilitators of other entities’ transformations and the virtual grandparents of all beings, plants are also masters of metamorphosis, displaying much more plasticity in adapting to their surroundings than animals. I argue that contemporary Amazonian women’s poetry translates the multiple transformations of vegetal life into literary form. In many Amazonian Indigenous communities, women have traditionally been the ones responsible for plant cultivation, while, in Western societies, women are often associated to certain parts of plants, such as flowers, and to nature as a whole. In the article, I analyze the poetry of Colombian author Anastasia Candre Yamacuri (1962–2014) and Peruvian writer Ana Varela Tafur (1963-), who emphasize the metamorphic potential of plants and the ontology of becoming at play in Amazonia. I contend that women’s writing on plants reflects evolving views on both plants’ and women’s roles in Amazonian societies, marked by rapid social transformation and environmental destruction.

The Amazon forest and savanna became central for the realization of Brazilian modernity in the 1940s when aviation networks were created by a government expedition to open up the western territories. Indigenous peoples played a number of roles in this state project. Through a focus on the autobiographical account of an indigenous shaman working as a team member and the memoirs of the expedition leaders, I contrast how indigenous peoples were scripted as the antithesis of the “modern,” how their labor made them the means of the realization of this sort of modernity, and how some came to share, in part, the goals of this “modern” project. The juxtaposition of non-indigenous with indigenous accounts of this project allows for a reevaluation of the terms popular in the “ontological turn”—namely, “Amerindian” and “modern” thought—and calls for moving from these categories to examining the historically specific contexts in which people engage with each other in joint projects.

El siguiente artículo ofrece un estudio comparativo sobre las formas de concebir las lógicas visuales y ontologías entre el mundo amerindio y el europeo, cuyo encuentro genera aún hoy discusiones sobre cómo interpretar o qué elementos considerar a la hora de abordar los estudios entorno a la estética en Latinoamérica. El estudio parte con el análisis de dos pares de ejemplos visuales relacionados con la América Tropical: confrontaremos dos grabados europeos, que retratan un particular imaginario acerca de los habitantes de América, con dos estatuillas de cerámica procedentes del mundo precolombino que guardan una sorprendente relación formal con las anteriores figuras. Por un lado, recapitularemos a partir de la literatura preexistente en qué medida los europeos se encontraron en América con un mundo repleto de seres fantásticos que reconocían a partir del imaginario clásico-medieval, pero que a su vez intentaban explicar a partir de una lógica racionalista y naturalista, producto de una incipiente modernidad. Sin embargo, por otro lado estudiaremos dichos imaginarios con lo que hoy en día conocemos acerca de las lógicas visuales del mundo amerindio, a partir de los enfoques antropológicos que estudian las ontologías amerindias y que teorizan acerca del perspectivismo amazónico. Observaremos por tanto bajo qué perspectiva pudieron haber sido concebidos estos seres “fantásticos” desde la lógica y las cosmovisiones amerindias frente a la mirada europea, para reconocer así ciertos puntos de concomitancia, así como de distancia, entre ambos mundos.