Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to describe the Aikewara's (Indigenous people from Lowland Amazonia) analytical thinking, specially, what we would call "mythical translation process".

Paper long abstract:

What is a myth? As Lévi-Strauss once said, this is not a simple question. For the Aikewara (Indigenous people from Lowland Amazonia), every existing thing - the sky, the society, the animals, their own bodies, etc. - has its own myth. The thing-in-itself and its se'eng-kwera (the native word for myth) have a complex relationship: as the Aikewara shaman teachs us, the myth is more than an origin - in a "historical" sense, it is something like an original experience: here, everything happens as if nothing had ever happened and everything is still to come. Thus, this kind of narrative is not a story, nor History, but a genuine philosophical effort to tease out the living world from an Outside (sensu Blanchot). Taking this as a hinterland, this paper seeks to describe the Aikewara's analytical thinking, specially, what we would call "mythical translation process". If the main subject here is Translation and Myth, the narrative focus is on the relationship between these people and the non-indigenous population, namely, with their (our) science - a central theme in their mythology. In other words, this presentation is about a mythical translation of our own Science - Anthropology included.