Luck, money, love...: what can the ‘animals’ of the Amazon do for us ‘humans’?

Abstract

This article presents the results of an ethnographic study of the symbolic universe that permeates the relationship between humans and animals in the Mapuá Extractive Reserve on Marajó Island in Pará, Brazil. The objective was to describe the knowledge and relationships that emerged from the cosmological apprehensions attached to the animals in the Conservation Unit. Active observation and semi-structured interviews were the main tools used. The research demonstrated a typically Amazonian worldview that appears indistinctly between the domains of nature and culture, pointing out the inexistence of this duality or some other understanding of these divisions. The study reveals a rich biocultural heritage involving social life, the natural world, and cosmological life governed by the same categories.

Keywords
Human and animal (or nonhuman) relations; Cosmology; Nature and culture; Amazon; Marajó Island