About what we don’t know well what it is: indeterminacy as power in afroindigenous worlds

Abstract

Starting with a comparison between forms of doing and thinking sorcery in an
Amerindian context and in some African matrix religious houses in Brazil, this article suggests a connection between what I define, for the argument’s purpose, as “axé worlds” and Amerindian “perspectivist worlds”. The hypothesis is that what can be compared between Amerindian universes and Afro-Brazilian religions is a conception of knowledge, rather than conceptions of the world. The aim is not to affirm a common nature for these collectivities, but to observe how it seems possible to speak of an afroindigenous thought in contrast to our own thought regime - as something that can only be common in opposition to a certain aspect of “us”.