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The paper interweaves the concepts of two contemporary thinkers in order to describe the ongoing socio-environmental crisis. Based on the books Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital by Jason W. Moore (2015) and The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013, 2015), I identify the common, or at least approximate, meanings between these two works. To do this, I have structured the article based on the discursive textual analysis. The first section analyzes the concepts of "oikeios" by Moore (2015) and "urihi a" by Kopenawa and Albert (2013, 2015). The second section interprets the descriptions of the processes of disorganization of nature. In the concluding section, the main results and future directions are outlined. The article demonstrates the possibility of building a confluent perspective between divergent ones.
Abstract
The paper interweaves the concepts of two contemporary thinkers in order to describe the ongoing socio-environmental crisis. Based on the books Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital by Jason W. Moore (2015) and The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013, 2015), I identify the common, or at least approximate, meanings between these two works. To do this, I have structured the article based on the discursive textual analysis. The first section analyzes the concepts of "oikeios" by Moore (2015) and "urihi a" by Kopenawa and Albert (2013, 2015). The second section interprets the descriptions of the processes of disorganization of nature. In the concluding section, the main results and future directions are outlined. The article demonstrates the possibility of building a confluent perspective between divergent ones.
Keywords: World-Ecology, Shamanic Thought, Capitalocene, The Falling Sky
1 The Portuguese version of this article can be found at DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2025.1330
2 The comments and suggestions of Professor Victor Coutinho Lage were essential for refining the discussion presented here. Nonetheless, all remaining errors or inaccuracies are the sole responsibility of the author.
3 Sonia Guajajara is an indigenous activist from the Guajajara/Tentehar people, an international award-winner, t first indigenous person to run for the Brazilian executive office (2018) and Brazil's first indigenous Minister. She co-founder of the National Coordination of Ancestral Warrior Indigenous Women (ANMIGA) and a member of t Committee of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), the largest coalition of indigeno organizations in Brazil (Cravo 2022).
Identifying the complexities of the contemporary climate crisis is an intricate and challenging comprehension exercise. This process can take on nihilistic, troubled, and out-of-order contours. An example of this is the imaginary of a self-destructive future prevalent in cultural production, political discourse, and academic formulations (Zizek 2022). In the tangle of theoretical formulations that permeate this apocalyptic scenario, two approaches stand out as particularly noteworthy due to their potential to influence both political practices, and theoretical-conceptual debate.
In 2010, the book The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) was published in French, translated into English in 2013, and into Portuguese in 2015. In it, Davi Kopenawa narrates the story of his life and that of his people to French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Through his own ontology, the shaman offers us various concepts and points of view for thinking about the planet and its acute climate crisis. His perspective soon became the basis for the production of research, especially in anthropology and philosophy (Tible 2013; Costa 2021; Valentim 2021). In addition, the participation of the indigenous worldview in Brazilian politics is growing, whether in the National Congress or in other spaces of political struggle, such as the Ministry of Indigenous People lead by Sonia Guajajara3. Yanomami thought, and that of other indigenous peoples, are also used to think about international relations, a necessary theoretical point that was previously ignored by traditional theories (Inoue and Moreira 2018).
In 2015, Jason W. Moore published the book Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. This book presents us with a cross-section of Marxist and Wallersteinian thinking in relation to long-term structures that modify, through their spatio-temporal juxtaposition, the exploitation of nature guided by political, economic, and social divisions based on the Human/Nature dichotomy. The discussions proposed by Moore (2017 2022) have been taken up by various thinkers, showing its relevance to contemporary issues. One of his conceptual propositions, the Capitalocene, has become a source for explaining the origins of the current destructive processes, bringing into contention the concept of the Anthropocene. For Moore (2015, 2017, 2022) we are in the geological age of Capital and not of Man as propose in the Anthropocene literature.
At first glance, these two authors, with such different trajectories and presuppositions, would be incapable of an epistemological rapprochement. However, this article goes in the opposite direction, asking the following question: what are the connections between shamanic thinking and world-ecology, specifically between Moore and Kopenawa? The research is provoked by Haraway (2015) and Tsing (2019) in relation to the creation of theories/narratives large enough and openenough for the formation of alliances of alter identities. With this, the paper aims to break down some obstructive walls and, from their cracks, think about a process of convergence.
The proposal is methodologically based on the understanding that the texts define the phenomenon in different ways, but that they are capable of approximations depending on the tensions of the investigation (Kincheloe and Berry 2004). This is obviously surrounded by the necessary academic specificities such as research methods connected to the proposed objectives. This approximation exercise is also inspired by the research methods found in Discursive Textual Analysis, which consists of cycles of textual analysis, starting from its deconstruction (categorization of concepts) to subsequent communication (text produced by the researcher) (Moraes 2003). The chosen method has an important pre-textual part, in which it is necessary to read and reread the chosen texts carefully in order to build up a database that can later be interconnected in the final text. The data was separated into "meaning boxes," which consist of looking for concepts and explanations with comparable meanings.
As a result, we found the following concepts/meanings: "oikeios" by Moore (2015) and "urihi a" by Kopenawa and Albert (2015), considering them as multidimensional spaces in which complex human and extra-human relationships unfold. In the first section, we shall see the interaction between these two central concepts. Based on these two concepts, the second section is constructed as an analytical broadening found in Moore and Kopenawa's theoretical explanations of the disorganization of nature. In this sense, the method is the backbone of the article, producing its form and content.
It is imperative to reiterate that the main objective is to identify the shared, or at least approximate, meanings between Moore (2015) and Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015). This places a clear limit on our analysis, that is, it is not a literature review paper, nor a discussion of schools of thought. On the contrary, it is a textual analysis article that proposes, quasi essayistically, a combination of perspectives to analyze a well-defined object. My ambitions are simple, but that does not mean my path is effortless. I hope that the destructive economic and political processes that threaten the current planetary configuration can be understood from a plural perspective without overlap between different conceptual frameworks. In short, I present an epistemological and ontological discussion capable of broadening the flow between different perspectives, which is necessary for the antisystemic movements of the capitalist world-economy, as well as for the production of independent knowledge.
From Oikeios to Urihi a: Spaces of Human and Extra-Human Relations
The 1972 photograph of planet Earth, known as "The Blue Marble," made it possible to understand a global collectivity in the common sense. But like any photograph, it failed to show the movements taking place within this sphere. The image itself was a product of the Soviet-American dispute over new extra-terrestrial spaces, as the large sphere was already too small. In 1973, the resources of the photographed planet, especially oil, led to an international dispute that caused one of the most disruptive economic crises in history. In addition, food production was undergoing abiotechnological revolution that modified the entire production chain through mechanized tools, chemicals, and genetic modifications, which increased human interference with the soil, and reordered food geopolitics (Patel 2013).
From this moment of political inflection questions about the time and space over which life takes place, and what we do with it were reinforced by academic, political, and artistic movements. Among them, the thoughts of Rachel Carson ([1962] 1994) and James Lovelock ([1979] 2000) placed the Earth as well as humans in a life system of multispecies connections. Carson made a case study of changes in the presence of birds in American cities as an indirect result of the use of pesticides, a response of animals to human actions. Lovelock, meanwhile, created a new hypothesis in the natural sciences: nature as Gaia, a regulator of life that responded to human actions.
The Earth has become a political actor. This perception of the Earth, according to Maniglier (2019), generates new ways of perceiving human and extra-human beings. For him, a radical ontological pluralism is needed, in which comparisons should not be guided by cultures but by the ontologies that already express their meanings of culture and nature. This ontological turn proposed by Maniglier (2019) does not stop at the conception of ideas, but at the construction of interconnections in real space. In this sense, it is necessary to enable ontological encounters that do not replicate colonialism-in other words, that make it easier for the language of others to have the same weight as our own. In the words of Maniglier (2019: 9): "The Earth is not a transcendent identity; it is the dynamic of the diverging versions of itself."
For our purposes here, I have brought together two divergent versions of the Earth: oikeios and urihi a. This exercise is not about recovering the formation of these concepts, which would take a lifetime, nor is it about hierarchizing knowledge due to the methodologies used. I have a much more modest aim: proposing an approximation of the concepts. Of course, care must be taken when moving specific concepts from their original texts so as not to disfigure the meanings that the authors have forged. What I want to show is the existence of possibilities for building conceptual and political alliances in the gaps in the formation of scientific knowledge. For example, Moore (2015) starts from a deductive process of constructing the concept of oikeios through preconceived concepts about the planet and the social relations that its inhabitants perform. Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) induces the concept of urihi a from his personal experience and the meanings passed down through generations of Yanomami Shamans. Does the encounter between these concepts enable a renewed understanding of the space of human and extra-human relations? To answer this, we should look at what the authors have indicated.
Oikeios appears several times as an alternative hypothesis for understanding relationships within what Moore (2015) calls the "web of life." Moore's (2015) initial proposition aims to break with the Nature/Society dichotomy which, according to him, makes it impossible to perceive the complexity of social configurations. For the author, this dichotomy is complicit in the violence of modernity and,
...just as we have been learning to move beyond the dualisms of race, gender, sexuality, and Eurocentrism over the past four decades, it is now time to deal withthe source of them all: the Nature/Society binary. For this dualism drips with blood and dirt, from its sixteenth-century origins to capitalism in its twilight. (Moore 2015: 16)
The main characteristic of the concept is the co-production of the subject and the environment in a dialectical movement, in which human actions are wrapped up in extra-human actions which, when connected, result in the sociability of beings. Human relationships are products and producers of the oikeios. This can be seen in the main conceptualization made by Moore (2015: 46, italics in original):
The oikeios is a multi-layered dialectic, comprising flora and fauna, but also our planet's manifold geological and biospheric configurations, cycles, and movements. Through the oikeios form and re-form the relations and conditions that create and destroy humanity's mosaic of cooperation and conflict: what is typically called "social" organization. Nature-as-oikeios is, then, not offered as an additional factor, to be placed alongside culture or society or economy. Nature, instead, becomes the matrix within which human activity unfolds, and the field upon which historical agency operates. From such a vantage point, the problems of food, water, oil (and so much more!) become relational problems first, and object problems second; through the relations of specific civilizations, food, water, and oil become real historical actors.
According to Moore (2015), the concept of oikeios is derived from the thought of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, who related the word to a favorable place for the life of a certain plant. Moore (2015), on the other hand, socializes this understanding with the Marxian understanding of ways of life from an ecological perspective. For him, by naming the human and extra-human relationship that makes life possible as oikeios, the analysis is directed towards the configurations of acting units and acted objects. In other words, questions turn to how the social configuration (acting) produced the socio-environmental crisis (acted) and no longer why we are in it (Moore 2015). This has a number of analytical advantages, especially when it comes to building strategies to deconstruct the dominant production model.
As well as the ecology of Theophrastus, Marx, and Wallerstein, it is important to highlight the presence of Donna Haraway's (1991, 2023) thinking in the construction of Moore's (2015) proposition, specifically in the Capitalocene concept. Marxists who were previously close to Moore criticized the author, mainly doubting his analytical capacity in line with historical materialism for using Haraway's work to amplify his theoretical background and "usefulness" of analytical concepts as oikeios to understand asymmetries in the capitalism (Hornborg 2020). This is not the place to defend or accuse the parties, but it is interesting to note that sometimes academic perspectives become true dogmas. This is unproductive for critical thinking about contemporary issues that have not been analyzed by the canons.
Since the 1990s, Haraway has problematized the concepts of the natural and social sciences in order to understand the relations of domination of one over the other in capitalism, especially in the production of knowledge. This is done through a post-humanist anthropological perspective or, as Haraway (1991, 2023) prefers, compositional gaze. Moore (2015), on the other hand, uses
Marxist concepts to answer how we are affected by these oppressions following the capitalist circuit of production. If we keep these perspectives isolated, looking for a methodologically rigorous science, we will never achieve a new sociability beyond capitalism. In short, we need cooperation that broadens reified understandings (Haraway 1991, 2023).
In the midst of building these alliances, similar meanings can have other names, requiring translations. This is the case with oikeios, which from the perspective of Kopenawa and Albert (2015) can be understood as similar to urihi a (land-forest). In the Yanomami conception of social space, there is another layer than in conventional thinking, such as Moore's (2015). There is a spiritual space that relates to the physical space spectrally, so the interference of the spirits makes it possible to see clearly what beings, the environment, and their interconnections are. The relationship with these spirits is intermediated by sacred substances that transform the shaman into another being endowed with enough flexibility and lightness to fly over their individual assumptions. This process is summarized in the passage in which Davi Kopenawa generates meaning for urihi a:
I do not have the wisdom of the elders. Yet since childhood I have always wanted to understand things. Finally, once I became an adult, the spirits' words made me wiser and supported my thought. I know now that our ancestors inhabited this forest from the beginning of time and that they left it for us to live in after them. They never mistreated it. Its trees are beautiful and its soil fertile. The wind and the rain keep it cool. We eat its game, its fish, the fruit of its trees, and its wild honeys. We drink the water of its rivers. Its humidity makes the banana plants, the manioc, the sugarcane, and everything we plant in our gardens grow. We travel through it to go to the reahu feasts we are invited to. We lead our hunting and gathering expeditions along its many trails. The spirits live in it and play all around us. Omama created this land and brought us to existence here. He planted the mountains to hold the ground in place and turned them into the houses of the xapiri, whom he left to take care of us. It is our land and these are true words. (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 258, italics in original).
This description shows that the space escapes the utilitarian perception of nature. The presence of spirits throughout the space transforms objects into subjects, with the spirits themselves being supernatural agents in the construction of beings (Valentim 2019). To denote something as a subject is to understand that it has agency capable of modifying the actions of others, it is to enable a political relationship. According to Viveiros de Castro (2015), shamanism seeks exactly this personification in order to understand who is to be known. In the search for this other, everyone gains similar agencies for the continuity of sociability between humans and extra-humans, as can be seen in Davi Kopenawa's conceptualization of ecology:
In the forest, we human beings are the "ecology." But it is equally the xapiri, the game, the trees, the rivers, the fish, the sky, the rain, the wind, and the sun! It is everything that came into being in the forest, far from the white people: everything that isn't surrounded by fences yet. (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 393)
Moore (2015) is very close to Kopenawa's (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) perception of human and extra-human relations, because for him "...humanity has always been unified with therest of nature in a flow of flows. What changes are the ways in which specific aspects of humanity, such as civilizations, 'fit' within nature" (Moore 2015: 22). Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) also comes close to the criticisms made by Moore (2015) in relation to arithmetic environmental thinking, which equates nature + society = environmental crisis/environmental studies. According to the Yanomami Shaman,
When they speak about the forest, these white people often use another word: they call it "environment." This word is also not ours, and until recently we did not know it either. For us, what the white people refer to in this way is what remains of the forest and land that were hurt by their machines. It is what remains of everything they have destroyed so far. I don't like this word. The earth cannot be split apart as if the forest were just a leftover part. (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 397)
Moore states that "'the economy' and 'the environment' are not independent of each other. Capitalism is not an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature" (Moore 2015: 14).
With this approximation, it is possible to identify that neither Moore nor Kopenawa give equality of action to human and extra-human beings. For Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015), the white man has actions capable of breaking the whole into pieces. For Moore (2015), human organization has the capacity for objectification. Extra-human agents, on the other hand, react to the objectifying projects of humans that show the weaknesses of human exceptionalism on Earth. This strengthens our understanding of the multidimensionality of space and the beings that inhabit it. Another important approximation, which will be explored in more detail in the next section, is the historical weight in the formulation of the meanings of the two perspectives analyzed. Divergences are also essential for building alliances. Notably, Moore's (2015) unperceived supernatural agency shows that his perspective has physical space as its main concern; that is to say, it is materialist, but that ideas and concepts are constructed in constant relation to it. For Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015), on the other hand, physical space has a spiritual dimension as part of the explanation for its configuration.
This divergence strengthens intermediate thinking, in which shamanic assumptions are central to analyzing the existence of indigenous peoples in the oikeios. This exercise has an implicit provocation about totalizing conceptual systems that do not understand subjective differences at the end of the world. To paraphrase Maniglier (2019), the end is unique, but not the same. This is why, in the next section, we interweave the descriptions of the end found in Moore (2015) and Kopenawa and Albert (2015). The aim is to deconstruct universalizing perspectives that insist on an abstract "we" in order to build common perspectives of divergent subjects.
Interweaving Descriptions of the (Dis)Organization of Nature
There is an extensive and intense literature to understand the destructive processes in favor of "civilizational modernization." In at least the last two decades, universalizing concepts such as the Anthropocene and Capitalocene have emerged to try to name the social tangle that accompaniesthe end of the world. It is important to summarize these two ways of thinking before we pass to Moore-Kopenawa connections.
The first, which originated in the natural sciences (Crutzen 2000), has been put under pressure by the social sciences in order to understand humanity's multiple interferences with nature. The principal proposition of Crutzen (2002) to overcome the Anthropocene is that scientists and engineers could undertake projects capable of optimizing nature in order to guarantee a sustainable future for the planet. From a sociological perspective, Chakrabarty (2018) critiques the limitations of the Anthropocene as understood by the natural sciences, emphasizing the need for a broader interpretation that incorporates the meanings derived from the humanities. By translating the force generated by biophysical humans into the power of the social sciences, Chakrabarty (2018) suggests a more nuanced and holistic understanding of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, Chakrabarty (2018) is skeptical of the use of abstract concepts such as capitalism to explain the origins and maintenance of the climate crisis. He recognizes that all analyses are influenced by human action, including the accumulation of capital.
In essence, the anthropogenic strand of social science, to which Chakrabarty belongs, endeavors to grasp the environmental crisis through a multitude of analyses of human agency on Earth. In a manner of speaking, this perspective accentuates the Human/Nature dichotomy, which can obscure some of the intersections that emerge from the political processes analyzed. European colonization provides an illustrative example of this phenomenon. Subjugated humans and non-humans underwent a process of modification and destruction of their ways of life in favor of a colonial dwelling that hierarchizes subjectivities vertically under a large-scale economy (Ferdinand 2022). In this manner, colonial hierarchy results in a dual fracture (environmental and colonial) that separates humans from nature yet leads to the same exploitation (Ferdinand 2022).
The second aims to problematize human universality based on the class divisions of capitalism (Moore 2022). In the same period of departure, namely the European expansion of the sixteenth century, Moore (2015) developed the concept of Capitalocene to comprehend the consequences of the processes of capital accumulation in the production of inexpensive nature between and within species. As a counterpoint to the Anthropocene, Moore (2022) asserts that the dominant force of natural change on the planet is capital, not humans. In other words, the socio-environmental crisis is capitalogenic. He asserts that the abstract concepts of theories that employ the Anthropocene evade real history and fail to elucidate the necessary political processes, particularly the one associated with the crystallization of dichotomous Cartesian mind/body knowledge (Moore 2022).
Looking at this hierarchical maze, Armiero and DeAngelis (2017) state that it is not possible to standardize the behavior of the subjects impacted by these socio-environmental dynamics, since the destructive processes are felt in different ways. The problem increases when analyses seek to universalize political dynamics through top-down concepts. For them, centralizing analyses on subaltern groups is a way of "unearth the alternative processes of knowledge production that not only question the capitalistic system rather than try to fix it but also defend or build alternatives" (Armiero and DeAngelis 2017: 347). With this in mind, we intertwine two perspectives as we didin the first section in order to create an ontological and epistemological parity (Inoue and Moreira 2016) to understand the end of the world.
Moore (2015) and Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) describe socio-environmental destruction based on the processes of capital accumulation through the mass production of commodities. For Moore (2015), there is a law of value that can be translated as the law of cheap nature, in which "...every great wave of accumulation turns on Cheap Nature, understood as use-values produced with a below-average value composition" (Moore 2015: 62). The production of Cheap Nature has four main products: labor power, food, energy, and raw materials. These products are taken from subjugated humans and extra-humans through the Nature/Culture hierarchy. For the author, these four products,
The Four Cheaps are at the core of such Cheap Natures, reproduced cyclically across the history of capitalism.... The bourgeois vision supposes that the web of life can be fragmented, that its moments can be valued through calculations of price and value. (Moore, 2015:62-63)
Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) perceives this law of Cheap Nature in the direct contrast between the thinking of the white people and that of the Yanomami. In the shaman's view, the whites differ from the indigenous people because nothing that is invented is enough for their needs. The whites, in this view, have commodities at the center of their lives, making them a "people of Merchandise." According to Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 338), the thinking of the whites
...remains constantly attached to their merchandise. They make it relentlessly and always desire new goods. But they are probably not as wise as they think they are. I fear that this euphoria of merchandise will have no end and that they will entangle themselves with it to the point of chaos.
For Valentim (2021), Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) provides a shamanic critique of the commodity which in some respects is similar to Marx's critique of political economy, the basis of Moore's thinking. The shaman rejects the stacking of commodities and money because of his symbolic system anchored in the supernature of objects, a vertical and horizontal connection that is essential for the continuity of societies. Objects must be exchanged on the basis of alliances outside the circuit of capital, thus avoiding private property (Kopenawa and Albert 2015; Valentim 2021). However, as Valentim (2021) rightly points out, the similarities between shamanic and Marxist critiques end with the centrality of commodities. While Kopenawa evaluates the hyper-existence of commodities, in Marx this supernature is non-existent. In other words, "...on the one hand, we have the ontology of historical materialism-matter determines Spirit-on the other, the animist ontology of shamanism-matter is impregnated with spirits" (Valentim 2021: 279, my translation)4.
4 Original excerpt: "...de um lado, temos a ontologia do materialismo histórico - a matéria determina o Espírito -, de outro, a ontologia animista do xamanismo - a matéria é impregnada de espíritos" (Valentim 2021: 279).
In this point, Moore's (2015) and Kopenawa's (2013, 2015) thinking are therefore quite divergent. In any case, the limitations of Western knowledge do not preclude new connections, as demonstrated by Tible (2013) in his work to socialize Marx's thought in the Latin American indigenous cosmopolitics. The fact is, that in both Marxist and Yanomami thought there is a perception of the voracity of capital (Tible 2013; Valentim 2021). Moore (2015) describes this movement through commodity frontiers, which open up space for the production of new forms of cheap nature. However, while nature is finite, capital tends to be infinite (Moore 2015). Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) is very concerned about this, as his people are suffering from the advances of mining. In his theorizing, the whites pull a destructive metal out of the ground, which at first may be beautiful and valuable, but which destroys the sky with its epidemic smoke (xawara). The epidemic spirits (Xawarari) are cannibals, and are represented visually as white people. The representation of white individuals as cannibalistic spirits-an enduring and pervasive presence in the Amazon-has profoundly shaped the Yanomami imagination regarding interethnic encounters since their earliest historical memories. This figure has undergone multiple symbolic reinterpretations, varying in degrees of literalness, and is rooted in a traditional ontological framework of alterity and sociality, conceptualized through the dynamics of predatory relations (Albert, 2002). The shaman tells us that with the smoke from the ores and other harmful products, the whites will sicken the earth and the sky (Kopenawa and Albert 2015). This announced end is part of a cannibal productive and social system of the whites that Kopenawa describes as follows:
They cleared their entire forest to open bigger and bigger gardens. Omama had taught their fathers the use of a few iron tools. They were no longer satisfied with them. They started desiring the hardest and most cutting metal, which Omama had hidden under the ground and the waters. They began greedily tearing minerals out of the ground. They built factories to melt them and make great quantities of merchandise. Then their thoughts set on these trade goods, and they became as enamored with them as if they were beautiful women. They soon forgot the beauty of the forest. They told themselves: "Haixopë! Aren't our hands so skilled to craft these things? We are the only ones who are so clever! We truly are the people of merchandise! We will be able to become more and more numerous without ever lacking for anything! Let us also create paper skins so we can exchange them!" They made money proliferate everywhere, as well as metal pots and boxes, machetes and axes, knives and scissors, motors and radios, shotguns, clothes, and sheet metal. They also captured the light from the lightning that fell to the earth. They became very satisfied with themselves. By visiting each other from one city to the next, all the white people eventually imitated each other. So the words of merchandise and money spread everywhere on their land. This is what I think. By wanting to possess all this merchandise, they were seized by a limitless desire. Their thought was filled with smoke and invaded by night. It closed itself to other things. It was with these words of merchandise that the white people started cutting all the trees, mistreating the land, and soiling the watercourses. First they started all over their own forest. Now there are few trees left on their sick land, and they can no longer drink the water of their rivers. This is why they want to do the same thing again where we live. (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 327, my emphasis)
In this long quote, you can see the interconnections between Moore (2015) and Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015). Their thoughts meet in the description of the advance ofcapitalism over humans and extra-humans, in the centrality of history in the organization of nature, in the dialectic of relations. The essential point of these two descriptions is the notion that productive systems do not end in the final product but are constituted by power relations. As Moore (2015: 198) points out, they are "...processes through which states and capitalists map, identify, quantify, measure, and code human and extra-human natures in service to capital accumulation." Moore (2015: 198-199) also shows how the production of knowledge is essential for the continuity of capitalism and its appropriation devices:
In the modern world, science-like technology -is a "productive force." Yes, the ruling ideas of society are the ideas of the ruling classes. But this hardly clarifies matters. Ruling classes owe their rule to the production of surpluses, but this is never a simple economic process independent of social knowledge. The production of knowledge itself is constitutive of capitalist world-praxis and its trinity-abstract social labor, abstract social nature, primitive accumulation. Without this, the "triple helix" of commodification (labor, land, and the commodities produced) could not develop over large-space and long-time.
In this way, the concepts found in Moore (2015) and Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) are part of a counter-thought. In them, we find new understandings of the asphyxiating processes of capitalism. The oikeios finds in the urihi a (land-forest) a multidimensional space that shares all beings. However, spatial sharing is hierarchized by productive and political models that seek to unify time and, with it, the subjects themselves. In this quest, those who remain outside this modernizing clock are placed as part of nature. This makes it possible to exploit these beings, especially their energy, for the accumulation of other people's capital. The result of all this co-constitutive entanglement is the disorganization of nature, which in turn reacts defensively against human actions. Even though Moore (2015) talks about the possibility of escaping from this system with the end of Cheap Nature, Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) warns us about the losses that have already occurred among his people. No form of future recovery will be able to cover the value of these beings. The end of the world is functioning as a long-term system, it sustains itself through its numerous political and economic institutions that change according to cyclical needs. The end of the world is cannibalistic, and it is starving.
Final Remarks or an Outline to Begin
This paper has limited its focus to two works by two contemporary thinkers who are fundamental to understanding the socio-environmental crisis. These two works have not been exhaustively analyzed here; there is much more to be interpreted. However, this small selection has already shown their explanatory capacity. The entire theoretical structure that can be found in them is not closed; on the contrary, it enables connections with other perspectives that seek to understand similar problems. To illustrate the attempted alliance built up so far, Figure 1 shows the interweaving of the main concepts analyzed.
This outline was only possible because of other similar works, such as those by Tible (2013) and Valentim (2021). In addition, Haraway's (2015, 2023) provocations are at the heart of theproposition presented. This work also shows just the beginning of a larger project, which is not just my own, which aims to find gaps to analyze phenomena and deconstruct isolated knowledge systems. The results found here can be inserted into a cosmopolitical proposition, in which the divergences of multiple worlds are found in the process of constructing the common. Not one imagined as universal and perpetual, but a common built on the equality of differences (Stengers 2018). Furthermore, "words take on new meanings in the process of politics. Articulations change who we are. Words and concepts gain meanings through the struggles in which they are engaged- not transcendent underlying logics" (Tsing 2015: 10).
The struggle in which Moore (2015) is involved is different from the one Kopenawa (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 2015) is experiencing. That is why it is so important to understand that the words they construct are delimited in their theoretical fields. This limitation opens up the possibility of alliances. Yanomami spectrality expands the oikeios, a multispecies space similar to urihi a. This is a political space, where social relations between species are found. Capitalism as a way of organizing nature makes it the stage for a multiple and, at the same time, a unique war. Multiple because there are intra- and interspecies conflicts that lead to the annihilation of somehuman and extra-human beings. It is unique because the multiple conflicts originate in the expansive process of capital accumulation itself, which cuts up relationships, exploits those perceived as non-human, and disorganizes the sky and the earth through cannibalistic practices.
The questions that arise from this first step are related to the interpretative capacity that this alliance makes possible in practical matters. For example, the incessant illegal search for gold on Yanomami land, made possible by the fragility of state actions. Also, whether it is possible to transfer this conceptual apparatus to other locations around the world, given the use of local perspectives. In any case, the approach taken here has shown that a plural view of the same phenomena is possible. Now we just need to provoke our systems of meaning in order to build convergent worlds.
About the Author: Giacomo Otavio Tixiliski is a PhD Student in International Relations at the Federal University of Bahia (PPGRI/UFBA).
Acknowledgements: This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Brasil (CAPES).
Disclosure Statement: Any conflicts of interest are reported in the acknowledgments section of the article's text. Otherwise, authors have indicated that they have no conflict of interests upon submission of the article to the journal.
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