Paper short abstract:

Through records of oral life stories, biographies or mythologies, the vivid homologous relationship between the aquatic Serpent, the body and the social environment is explained, so that if one is transgressed, the other two are affected in parallel (Héritier, 1995).

Paper long abstract:

Since September 2017, the Peruvian State is led the project Hidrovía Amazónica whose objective is to improve connectivity to the main Peruvian Amazon rivers to boost and/or achieve the development of the Amazon region, one of the poorest in Peru. Which implies dredging certain shallow beds of the Amazon, Marañón, Huallaga and Ucayali rivers. In this Project, two cosmologies proposed by Descola (2005) are contrasted. One, the official view of the naturalistic occidental science of the rivers offered by the Peruvian State, where the rivers and their ecosystems to intervene are presented as objects that can be manipulated without or with few negative consequences to both the aquatic environment and human beings. And, the other unofficial perspective of the fluvial environment, the animist cosmology of the natives or riverside mestizos. In this, the aquatic Snake, symbol of the river's ecosystem and emblem of the ancestral territory, is mother, owner or spirit of water; whose body fertilizes, (re) generates, (re) produces and nourishes aquatic life and the adjacent forest. Through records of oral life stories, biographies or mythologies, the vivid homologous relationship between the aquatic Serpent, the body and the social environment is explained, so that if one is transgressed, the other two are affected in parallel (Héritier, 1995). This systemic relationship, as part of the intangible heritage of the indigenous people, punctuates the ecological pedagogical patterns of their behavior with the aquatic environment.