CONVERSA NA REDE - Partículas particulares - Ailton Krenak e Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

An idea that's been plaguing me, a wish I had for this conversation on the hammock, was to talk to you about that wonderful phrase, which starts one of the chapters of a little book of mine that you prefaced, called "Encontros", which is wonderful. I often say that the book was a little rocket, and it became a missile when you prefaced it. It spreads embers everywhere, and it's very nice.

It was a very important text for conveying the idea of the indigenous movement, and your statement says that the rattle, the <i>maracá,</i> is a particle accelerator. HAMMOCK TALKS PARTICULAR PARTICLES And I've never stopped referring to this idea of the rattle as a particle accelerator, because it is related to the acceleration of time. A decade goes by and it's mind-blowing what happens in such a short period.

Time is ticking, time is running out, we don't have time anymore. Every day we see the news of climate change in the press, we ask ourselves: In how many years will the Earth's average temperature rise another two or four degrees? In another time it was 100 years from now, now it's 30, 20 years from now.

. . It's like time is running out.

The deadline for human beings to stop destroying the planet is running out. So, time is indeed accelerating, the clock is ticking faster and faster, and time is running out. This sentence about the particle accelerator came like this: If you look at a shaman's rattle, you will see that inside it there are small stones, shells, or beads.

There are a lot of them. And when the shaman shakes the rattle, he's accelerating those particles. He's hitting it and it's spinning, And the harder he hits the rattle, the more he calls the spirits.

So the shaman's particle accelerator is a kind of microphone through which he speaks to the spirits, but also a tool for bringing the spirits to talk to humans on Earth, to be able to negotiate issues with human beings and so on. Just as the particle accelerator in white people's physics seeks to discover the secrets of matter, the rattle is a particle accelerator that seeks to discover the secrets of the spirit, in a certain way. Not of the matter, but of the spirit.

The rattle brings the spirits. The Arawetés' rattle is a different kind of rattle. It's not a gourd stuck inside a piece of wood, but it's braided, like a basket, except it's a cone, it's cone-shaped like this, but all braided with <i>arumã</i> straw.

They put tiny pieces of <i>aruá</i> shells —a snail that lives in the bush—in it. A bunch of bits of <i>aruá</i> shell inside this rattle, which is a straw rattle all wrapped in cotton thread, and at the tip they put a wad of loose cotton and some red macaw feathers, so it looks like an Olympic torch when you hold it, with that fire, as if it were something on fire. And when they hit it, they say that there's a spirit inside.

The <i>maï,</i> the celestial spirits, they go into the rattle. And with it they also catch the souls of people whose souls have been taken by a river or forest spirit. They bring the soul back, inside the rattle.

So the rattle is something that explores the secrets of the spirits, while the particle accelerator of white people's physics explores the secrets of matter. So each one has their domain of the Cosmos. Could it be that the activation that one and the other are doing now, at this end of the world, is somehow finding a corresponding parabola?

Because when physics understands that besides the discovery of the atom, then of the nucleus, we have other particles that are even more particular and that this is an acceleration that puts us in the same place of knowing the secret of the spirit and matter, they end up finding themselves in the same microcosm that some. . .

Kopenawa Yanomami, for example, says that the Xapiri makes this transit between the Earth—this wonderful blue planet—and the Cosmos. For example, in the galaxy we're in, he even establishes a kinship with the Sun, because there would be a nephew or a son-in-law of Omama. .

. A son-in-law of Omama, I think. .

. . who lives inside the Sun.

That is, in cosmopolitics, the Xapiri can ask the son-in-law from the Sun himself to solve some cosmic issues. And I think this is wonderful because physics, science, which has thus far been quite confused in getting to the 21st century, managing to keep up with the spirit, is in a way pursuing a point of convergence with what the <i>pajés</i> have always done, always said. And people like you, who have spent their tired retinas, as Drmmond says, to see what they were putting inside that rattle.

Little stones. There were little stones inside the rattle. There isn't a stone in the way, but there is a rattle inside Observing little stones inside the rattle, it seems to me that people like you manage to make a transit through scientific hermeticism, which loves to hide everything.

And then we thought, when they're talking about making a reactor over there, putting something over there in Europe, a time tunnel, where they're going to accelerate particles, they're doing the same thing as the shamans when they make a crack in the sky and makes a silver ray fall in the middle of the yard. Just like Kopenawa did with us during Demeni. We went on the 30th anniversary of the demarcation of Yanomami land, I saw, with a sky as blue as this sky: Kopenawa and the other shamans were preparing a big <i>Shabori.

</i> There were 30 shamans there working. They started doing their <i>Shabori</i> early on and at some point the skirt of the <i>maloca,</i> all that straw started to sway. It looked like the top of the entire <i>shabono</i> was going to fly off.

Wind, wind, wind, and the sky as blue as that. Then Davi invited the guys to go to that <i>shabono,</i> where there was some kind of assembly of shamans. When we got there in the middle of the yard, Davi grabbed me and said: Let's gather the people here in the yard, on the patio.

I said, "Let's. " He said, "It's beautiful, isn't it? " Then I said, "It's beautiful.

" At that moment, a silver lightning came down from the sky and hit the middle of the <i>maloca's</i> yard. A ray that came down from the Sun. Silver lightning came down from the blue sky and hit the village ground.

Just as the silver lightning struck, rain poured down, while the skies were blue and all. And then there was a rainbow, which made the headlines. There was a photo of the rainbow, where I am under the rainbow and he is pointing to the sky and saying, "Look there the rainbow.

" And the sky was that blue. So, when you get inside this spectacular, transcendental ship, and you see that the shamans aren't joking, because a guy who makes a silver lightning fall in the middle of a village, under blue skies, then orders it to rain and even puts rainbows in the sky, he's not a fool, and he's not a conjurer either, he's not Mister X, he's not this Western claptrap that science validates while mocking savage thinking. Today, scientific knowledge is unable to translate itself into political action.

Everyone knows that the temperature is rising and that it will rise, and everyone knows what they would need to do to stop it, but no one knows how. Or rather, we know why we are not able to do so: because there are so many interests that prevent you from doing what is needed so that the temperature stops rising and species stop dying and disappearing. Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, says something that I think is interesting.

. . At the beginning of history, many centuries ago, science and myth separated, but we are realizing that in the future they will converge again.

So it's that idea that science concerns to the abstract quality of things, while wild thought is marked by a concern with the sensible world, and with the concrete qualities of the world. At the same time, science moved away from the sensible world and focused on the mathematical and abstract properties of the world. Then Lévi-Strauss says, "Science is going back to the sensible, it's paying attention to the sensible world again, so it's going to end up meeting the myth again.

" The idea of wild thought is interesting, because Lévi-Strauss says that wild thought is not the thought of savages, of primitive peoples, but rather thought in a wild state, thought that hasn't been domesticated to yield a profit. So it's a way of thinking that hasn't been tied down, organized, managed, and domesticated to generate profit or produce income. It's a way of thinking that is more related to aesthetic properties of the sensitive world.

It's an attention to detail, to difference, to the particular, a great attention to detail, an ability to see things that people brought up in the modern Western world, where science is the queen, can only see with the help of instruments. On the other hand, people brought up in this sensible world, paying attention to the sensitive and concrete qualities of reality as part of life, education, and Creation, then they can see naturally. To know that something has passed through there.

. . This kind of thing you see in films and also in indigenous folklore "On such and such a day, an animal passed through here" It's true, it does happen.

This is so brilliant! Let's say that we can now, after this glossary, refer to it as wild thought: being able to grasp things like a spell. You mess with something stabilized in the ground and it becomes a disease.

You change the temperature of the planet and it becomes hell. That's the wild thought. When you say that science is prevented from making a gesture beyond that, because it would be political, then would what the wild thought exercises be a cosmopolitics?

Yes, exactly. Our modern world, created in the 17th Century, with Descartes, Newton, Galileo, and so on, is a world that radically separates the world of science from the world of politics, as if they were two different things. And what happens is that, by not mixing them you don't realize that the relationships that humans have with the rest of the world —nature and living beings— are also political relationships.

In what sense are they political relations? In the sense that you negotiate. .

. First of all, these other beings also have intelligence and intentions. Secondly, when you act on nature, it reacts, so action and reaction is a political relationship.

If you provoke an animal population too much, they will react. They'll flee or they'll leave or they'll kill us or they'll die out and we will starve. The idea that the human species can do anything because it alone is political, it alone has a mind, a soul, intelligence, culture.

. . It has various names for the same thing: the immortal soul that comes from the history of Christianity.

It alone is that, so it thinks it has the right to do whatever it wants, because so-called nature is dead, it's inert. It's not that it's dead, it's inert, it has no voice, it has no political representation, it doesn't exist politically. Politics is a people-to-people thing.

But when you go to a world where there are more people than us people, other beings are also people, and you are in an entirely political world. As you can see, the way the Yanomami relate to their world spontaneously solves all the problems that we can only solve by doing a tremendous technical study of the sustainability of that region. They know how it is because they have been there for hundreds of years.

They know perfectly well how what they do will affect the other inhabitants of that environment. We don't know this. Specifically in Brazil, all knowledge was imported from Europe.

It took time for us to start to understand how the tropical nature of Brazil and the indigenous American works. Because all the scientific models, was developed in another kind of ecological environment, another kind of climate and so on. Answering to a kind of desire, of priority, that was other than to inhabit the world.

Moreover, all people are feeling what is happening with the planet. Greeks and Trojans. You go to an island in the Pacific, they know something wrong is going on because the water level is rising and destroying their island.

If you go to an indigenous area, for example, the indigenous people from the Vaupés region are saying, "Everything here is falling off the axis, time is off the axis. " In the past, we knew when it was time to plant because the river was at such a level, hitting that rock, that tree over there would blossom at the same time and that animal would start nesting, that bird would nest at that time. Now the tree blossoms in another period, the river has another size, another water level, the bird is no longer nesting at that time.

The calendar no longer works, everything is out of place. So, they know something is going on. There is less fish, it's raining out of season, it's drying out of season, everyone knows what is happening, including us.

I know that this is happening because of fossil fuel burning. Okay, so let's stop burning fossil fuels? Let's stop using gas.

Let's stop using coal, and oil. "Oh, it's difficult. " Because all of the economy is fossil fuel-based.

Trucks, transportation, airplanes, everything relies on fossil fuel. "But we are going to do the energy transition, we are going to install wind turbines and solar panels. " Then you say, "Oh, cool.

So are you going to stop oil production to make this transition? " "No, we are going to add to it". So rather than stop producing oil, you are going to increase the different sources of energy, that's what is happening all over the world.

The oil companies are not stopping oil production at all. They're also financing wind towers, solar panels, teaming up with the firms that do it, but they carry on. In other words, knowing the reason for the problem doesn't give us any special ability to solve the problem.

Then you go to an indigenous area, to traditional regions, they know what is going on and they know they are not the ones doing it: they walk, they canoe. And they know what's going on around them. They know the problem is caused by white people, as most indigenous people call the dominant population.

And even if they are not all white, they are called white people or enemies. In Yanomami and Kayapó language, this is the word for white people, because they are called enemies by them. All the people of the world are feeling the catastrophe, and they all know where this catastrophe is coming from.

It comes from the dominant culture, which is capitalism, techno-capitalism, founded on fossil fuels, on the absurd use of commodities pulled out of the ground. Without the metals pulled out of the ground, at the cost of a lot of suffering and enslavement of people, nobody would be using a computer or cell phone. As capitalism depends on continuous innovation, you always have to invent a new device, a new technology, an improvement on existing technology, so you end up dependent on it.

Capitalism is like a shark. If a shark stops swimming it sinks and dies, so it has to keep moving. Capitalism is like a shark: if it doesn't produce something new to sell, it stops.

What does it produce? It produces the idea that the past was horrible. Let's say, until the '90s—I don't remember when cell phone use became popular— nobody had cell phones.

Were people more unhappy because they didn't have cell phones? Were people miserable because they didn't have a cell phone? No.

They didn't know that they needed a cell phone. Until the need was created. When you create the need, it becomes indispensable.

When it becomes indispensable, you look back and the past becomes miserable. So indigenous peoples are miserable. Look, they didn't have a cell phone, gas, cars, airplanes.

. . What a horrible life!

For example, there's the "Human Development Index (HDI)", in which you can check the cities in Brazil that have the worst HDI. How is HDI measured? To do this, take into account whether the city has a sewage system, school, electricity, etc.

A small town, a suburb, has a very low HDI index because it doesn't have a lot of these things. You go to an indigenous area, they don't have any of these things. Is their HDI index low?

Not at all. Are they unhappy because they don't have running water? They have a river on their doorstep.

Are they unhappy because they don't have a supermarket in their territory? They have the forest, they have their fields. The HDI measures the degree of misery of those who have already been captured by the capitalist system, by the existing economic system.

It doesn't measure anything for those who are outside the system. It's incomparable. When I was a child, everyone believed in a better future that things were going to improve in some way.

Either capitalism was finally going to give us earthly paradise, or we were going to make a social revolution to end inequality in the world and the exploitation of man by man. It was the exploitation of women by men, and other men by men. At that time we believed the future would be better.

I doubt that young people today have an optimistic view of the future, knowing what they know, seeing what they see in the newspapers, and doing what they do. There has been a radical change. I remember back in the 70s, the motto of the punk movement was "no future".

There is no future. And we used to think "This is too radical, people are very depressed". But today no one believes in the future anymore.

Who believes that the future is going to be better? I mean the future of the world. .

. Maybe someone still believes in the future, but the general feeling is that we will have to live in a worse world. How are we going to manage to live in a worse world?

There's a book by Donna Haraway, a very important biologist, called "Staying with the Trouble", that says we have to learn to live in a world in ruins. We have to learn to live on this planet. I went to a meeting in 2013 where they were talking about this, about the end of the world issues in terms of the end of civilization and the issues of environmental degradation on the planet.

And I said, "Have you forgotten that for the indigenous peoples their world ended in 1492? " Their world has already ended and they survived. The world of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, their world ended when the Europeans arrived here.

Their way of life, their conditions for autonomy, their world ended and nevertheless, they didn't disappear. They were exterminated, they were decimated, which means "reduced to one-tenth". It means to decimate, to reduce from 100 to 10.

They were decimated, because they lost 95%, or 90% of their population. Despite this, they resisted, they managed to reinvent their world within this white people's world. And I said "Do you want to know what it's like for the world to end?

Ask the indigenous people, because they are experts in this. And how are you going to live in a worse world? Ask them because they know.

Their world today is much worse than their world before you got here. There's a phrase by an important Native American leader from the 80s, called Russell Means. He wrote an article in 1980, gave a speech and then it was transcribed.

In 1980, when people weren't talking about this yet: "Look, there's a big world catastrophe coming, "there's going to be an ecological catastrophe, "the planet is going to get much worse for the human species, "but it doesn't matter, because even if it is the end of everyone, "there's going to be a people left in the High Andes. "An indigenous people will be left in the High Andes "and they're going to resist, they're going to endure it. "And this is a revolution, we're going to survive.

You're going to end, but we're going to survive. " This idea that those who are going to… The traditional populations who have been living in a worse world for 500 years, worse than the one they had, and who are managing, and trying to survive. We say "Oh, but the indigenous people are dying out, Western civilization is taking over everything".

I visited the UN website and found out that according to the UN, there are 370 million indigenous people on the planet. So, it's not a few people, it's 370 million! Do you know what 370 million means?

That's more than the population of the USA, Canada, and Mexico together. That's all of North America put together… There are more indigenous people in the world than there are Americans, Mexicans and Canadians. It's not a few people.

They're scattered all over the planet, which is their weakness but also their strength, because if they were all together they would already have been bombed. So they are spread around the world. According to the UN, they make up 6% of the world's population.

So these 370 million indigenous people are 6% of the world's population and they speak 4,000 languages. The territory they occupy and inhabit precariously, which they are fighting to maintain, contains 80% of the biodiversity left on the planet. In other words, these 6% of human beings are responsible for 80% of what is left of biodiversity.

I mean, without this population of 6%, it would all have been over. In other words, these folks are the guardians. They're guarding what's left of Earth for the species.

Without them the species… The human species has already been attempting suicide for a long time. It is on the verge of extinction due to structural stupidity. There is the expression "structural racism" and there's also structural stupidity: we know that what we're doing is destroying the planet, but we don't know how to do it differently.

And each one of us can't do much either. Are you going to stop using a car? Then you're screwed, because everyone uses a car, how are you going to stop using a car?

Aren't you going to use your cell phone, computer, email? Everyone uses it. So you're trapped in a machine.

There's a famous phrase by an American critic, Fredric Jameson: "Nowadays it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism". How did the statement "the future is ancestral" sound to you? It's a bit like that, isn't it?

The future was in the past and the past, the ancestry, contained the seeds of possibilities for the future. The possible future is in the hands of those who still have the memory of their ancestry. I've been following how the word "ancestry" has recently appeared a lot in the indigenous movement, in the black movement.

The way this word appears deep down means something like "You white people don't have ancestors, you don't know where you came from. "You don't have a sense of place on Earth where you live, you don't know where you live. " The expression "falling sky".

. . What are the scientists saying about the accumulation of greenhouse effect gases in the atmosphere?

That the sky is falling. Once, back in the 80s, people said to me, "But the Yanomamis won't survive all the contamination "due to the opening of the Perimetral Norte highway. Maybe only a few will remain".

Then I said, "What's the problem? "If one of their <i>maloca</i> remains, they're the Yanomamis. "They're different from what you think the population of our country is, "that if 90% die, the country ends.

"These people won't end. "Even if 90% disappear, the sample that remains contains everything it needs to continue existing. " That brings me back to the particle accelerator.

If we follow up with this idea, it's a production of worlds: each particle can transform into trillions of new particles and trillions of worlds, that is, these worlds never end. At the same time, we can say that indigenous people are experts in the end of the world, we can also say that they are experts in creating worlds. And unlike white people, they don't stay at the end of the world, they create new ones.

I was faced with the idea of assimilation, we, the Borum-Krenak, were 63 people. We could have ended up. If you think of the growth of that collective, which is estimated at 600 individuals today, instead of disappearing we have multiplied by 10.

Exactly. Do you know of any other community that has done this? That went from 6 to 60, or 60 to 600, or 600 to 6,000?

What we would like to imagine about these particles is whether they are already expanding, producing themselves, or whether they are going to accompany the scheduling of the end of this world, which we are eating like a panettone. If they're going to wait for the world to end for others to emerge. I have been wondering about this.

Do you know what I think, Eduardo? White people are interested in the accounting of the world, in how much of the world has for them to eat, while indigenous peoples are interested in how many worlds they can create. I mean, we are unable to want the same thing.

That's why capitalism won't come to an end but the material world will come to an end. One question I ask myself is the possibility of a world with this ecology needed by the human species to exist because they're conditioned, they only know how to live in this world. Wild thought works to produce new worlds, in which there's no materiality.

A world that is not for eating. It's not a world for eating, it's a world for fruition, it's a world where you can experience existence without a body. It's an immaterial world.

I often say that we need to expand our subjectivity to the point where we can inhabit these worlds from which we can jump with colorful parachutes. So it's an invitation to expand the material idea of life as well. Emanuele Coccia, who sat in one of these hammocks with me, agreed to a conversation about the idea that life is not contained in the human cocoon.

This could have been the lyrics to a Moraes Moreira song: life is not contained in the human cocoon. So, if life is not contained in the human cocoon, why does the human think he can be the end of life? If all humans disappear today at noon, life goes on.

The Huni-Kuin-Kaxinawá have an expression called <i>Shuku Shukuwe. </i> Do you know what this incredible word means? <i>Shuku Shukuwe</i> means "life forever", which can also be understood as "life is".

Life is. It never was, it won't be, it is. Life is.

<i>Shuku Shukuwe. </i> It's wonderful because it's what Emanuele Coccia says about the caterpillar. It does not know it is going to be a butterfly, the butterfly does not remember it was a caterpillar, but the life of the caterpillar and the butterfly is the same cosmic transcendence.

In other words, life crosses planet Earth, it crosses this wonderful, leafy tree in front of me… A mango tree. Life is in the mango tree, in the basil, in the stone on the ground, in the grass. .

. Life is in everything. Sometimes I feel an uncontrollable desire to make this human disappear from the landscape so that life can continue.

<i>Shuku Shukuwe. </i> Thank you. Thank you.

So, what about your particle accelerator? Well, maybe I'm a word accelerator. I want to ask you if the making of this artifact is spirit-filled, different from making a hammock or a straw basket.

Yes, yes. There is a relationship between the rattle and sex. The rattle has a very defined phallic shape, but at the same time it has something inside it.

So it is a womb, because it hides and keeps the particles but at the same time it has a phallic shape. So it's both male and female as an object, it's a bi-sexual, androgynous object. So it has its strong symbolism, this characteristic of bringing something inside, like a woman brings a child, and at the same time look like a male sexual organ.

It's quite a strong object symbolically for the Arawetés. It has a relationship with sex, of one not being allowed to have sex while manufacturing the rattle. There's confinement, a diet.

There's probably also the uttering of magical formulas while picking and weaving the straw, because that's what's going to give that object its power. It already has power. Its power isn't because someone plays it, it's its own power.

And it grants access to some people. People usually dream about it before it exists, and then they decorate it. In retribution, it works for the person.