Ciência da floresta: Por uma antropologia no plural, simétrica e cruzada

Abstract

Given that indigenous thought operates with principles and categories that are radically distinct from western technological and scientific thought, what do the"intellectuals of the forest" have to say to us about themes treated by Science, Christianity and the State? What do the native peoples think, based upon their own epistemological paradigms, about social facts in their own cultures and about those that concern our western society? In the pages that follow an attempt to observe this cross-cultural anthropology is presented, highlighting how our theories are captured and translated by the theories of those who were always observed by anthropologists. This text also serves as a basis for a program of encounters between indigenous intellectuals from various places and ethnographic contexts in Brazilian Amazonia to exchange native ideas, concepts, narratives and theories. We also present several ethnographic episodes that confirm indigenous anthropological action within conceptual parameters that are distinct from those practiced by western science, hopefully serving as a source and stimulus for the exploration of an"ethno-anthropology".