Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas (Aug 2012)
Nature and culture in Amazonian landscape: a photographic experience echoing Amerindian cosmology and historical ecology
Abstract
As an artistic experience, the photographic research "Arborescence - plant physiognomy in Amazonian landscape" conduces the author to discover landscape as an interpenetration of Nature and Culture (man's indirect presence; being face to face with vegetable subjects); continuity, undifferentiation and equivalence between the 'natural' (heterogeneous, spontaneous, native, rural) and the 'cultural' (homogeneous, cultivated, exotic, urban) in the experience of landscape; arborescence as a "cosmic image" (Gaston Bachelard), where the high (sky, light, branches, sky water) and the low (earth, shade, roots, land water) are equivalent and reversible poles. Such experience echoes the eco-cosmology of forest societies in Amazonia. The Amerindian cosmology is a "symbolic ecology" (Philippe Descola), that is, "a complex dynamics of social intercourse and transformations between humans and non-humans, visible and invisible subjects" (Bruce Albert); the Amerindian ecology is "a cosmology put into practice" (Kaj Århem), wherein hunted animals and cultivated plants are 'relatives' to be seduced or coerced. Such model appears to be a form of "socialization of nature" (Descola), "humanization of the forest" (Evaristo Eduardo de Miranda) and "indirect anthropization" of Amazonian ecosystems (Descola) which produces "cultural forests" (William Balée).
