On the modes of existence and resistance: how Brazilian indigenous-inspired thinking can forge a communication by equivocation

Résumé

The disrespect for Brazilian indigenous peoples during the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro shows an ethnocentric look and reinforces the history of a country in which resist not only epistemologies, but a diversity of disputing ontologies. Here lies matrices of thought that enable the imagination of other possible worlds, both in the proposal of the Manifesto Antropófago, by the poet Oswald de Andrade, and in the work of the writer João Guimarães Rosa. What we propose is no longer to take the thoughts of original peoples as metaphors, but as analogues of concepts, taking seriously the possibility of building a translation of worlds inspired by the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, who alerts us, in his book-report, about the imminent fall of the sky, and the translation work of the indigenous Aílton Krenak, and his ideias to postpone the end of the world. It is from these points that we propose an approach that takes the process of mediation of the translation of shamanic worlds as a model for thinking about what we call communication by equivocation.