Embodying equivocations: Ecopolitical mimicries of climate science and shamanism

Abstract

This article proposes a non-recursive detour for the perspectival concept of ‘equivocation’ by applying it to an ongoing ecopolitical approximation. I will describe how a Brazilian climatologist and a Yanomami shaman translate their concerns about the Amazonian rainforest in order to reach each other’s audiences. Drawing on their public appearances and published texts, it will be argued that they mimetically rephrase their environmental thinking according to – what they assume to be – the conceptual imagination and the formats of communication of the Other. The shaman’s and the scientist’s connective gestures are thus taken as part of an exceptional form of public, ecopolitical dialogue, concerned with the future of the rainforest. Whereas the concept of ‘equivocation’ has proven useful to disclose the translational–ontological gap between the native’s and the ethnographer’s conceptual languages, this article aims at looking somewhere else than the recursive, ethnographic Self. In particular, the argument will pay attention to how equivocations and the so-called ‘ontological differences’ might be embodied by specific actors, in specific situations, inviting us to describe how these differences are de facto navigated and co-implicated by people other than anthropologists.