Amerindians and Europeans in the New World

the nature-culture duality in colonial Brazil

Abstract

This work analyzes conceptions of nature and culture in the New World – actors and phenomena, mentalities and consciences - that constitute and enable the emergence and production of hybrid knowledge in the colonial world. To this end, we will consider the perspective of Bruno Latour and his Actor-Network Theory, seeking to understand the contexts and agents that raise, determine and systematize a complex and intricate network of information and relations of influence and power. We will see that, Amerindians and Europeans, guided by the guiding threads in a web of relationships – which defined them as actants and subjects, vectors and products of an unstable and multifaceted reality – could, at the intersections between their respective nature and culture, affect each other, synthesizing them over time into something more complex. In this sense and paradoxically, within an effervescent horizon of socio-political events and the formation of historical consciences, we will also perceive a series of mestizo and paradigmatic knowledge as results of the attempt to remove and distinguish nature and culture; the fight against primitivism in the face of the expansion of Western civilization.