The clash of cosmographies: indigenous societies and project collaboration - three ethnographic cases (Kaingang, Sateré-Mawé, Baniwa)

Abstract

Departing from three ethnographic cases the article discusses impacts and native responses to developmentalist cosmography in the presence of market-oriented projects of "sustainability" (as among the Baniwa and Sateré-Mawé) or in the absence of it (as among the Kaingang). The legitimation of anthropological discourse within construction of alterity and (des)exotization of indigenous societies and of the environment they live in is discussed as a privileged field of mediation and encounter of different actors and proposals of projects. Among the cultural pre-conditions that steer these encounters there are religious pluralism and the inherent pragmatics of indigenous conversion, which are responsible for ruptures and continuities of indigenous cosmovisions and - practices and man-nature-relations. They act upon aesthetics, social morphology, distribution of power and local economics. Although these encounters are prone to generate internal conflicts they are perceived as promoters of indigenous well-being through processes of naturalization sustained by occidental regimes of alterity that legitimate their presence.