Endless Stories: Perspectivism and Narrative Form in Native Amazonian Literature

Abstract

In this article, Sá explores “ethnological” storytelling as a way of linking the human-nature-animal relations into a continuum where one does not make sense without the other. Borrowing from the often times cited notion of perspectivism —popularized by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s but originally part of Amazonian indigenous sense-making— according to which the common denominator among living things is not animality but gentitude (peopleness), Sá’s article exhibits the inner mechanisms by which the ethics and aesthetics of Amazonian storytelling produces plant-animal-human relations at the same time erasing the distinctions between them. According to her, stories of plant domestication and inter-tribal marriage are explained together in historias that have a community-making ethos both as ritualistic practice and as entertainment, merging humor and literary potency. These are stories that tell of how communities come about and how they mutate, resist, adapt and turn anew in the face of diverse challenges. In that sense, Amazonian storytelling is a community-making practice that resists the urge to make landscape into something singular and concrete, a place that is possible to turn into property.