Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to analyse the relation between deforestation and epidemics, looking at the indigenous peoples of the Xingu Indigenous Land (TIX), Brazilian Amazon, within the scope of the research project “PARI: Platform of Anthropological and Rapid Indigenous Responses” (supported by UKRI).

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to analyse the relation between deforestation and epidemics, looking at the indigenous peoples of the Xingu Indigenous Land (TIX), Brazilian Amazon, within the scope of the research project “PARI: Platform of Anthropological and Rapid Indigenous Responses” (supported by UKRI). While the anthropocentric premises that rule the Western world, its health and politics, continue to release human beings from responsibility for managing Earth’s resources (in name of the fable of progress), indigenous peoples keep patiently trying to show us how it is all connected. For the sixteen peoples who live at TIX, it is consensual that the worlds (plural) are populated by humans and other-than-humans, such as the spirits/owners, who share daily events, and keep avoiding, or maintaining close interspecies relations. For many of these peoples, everything, or almost everything has an owner: plants, paintings, rituals, and therefore every action carries consequences. A Yawalapití leader once affirmed that Covid-19 epidemic is a response from the owners, from the spirits. One cannot burn forests and open roads and get rid of Other’s reactions. Recent Ecology studies show a scenario that matches, at least partially, this holistic indigenous understanding, showing a relation between the increase of deforestation and the increase of the eminence of new pathologies and epidemics. It is clear that there’s an urgency to hold human beings responsible for the devastation of this shared world, instead of pigs, cows, bats. In this way, this communication pursues the responsibilities framed in these pathogenic multispecies entanglements.