Kinship and the Collapse of Civilisation: Bodies and Skins from the Forest - by Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino

In search for alternatives for a fractured present, progressively marked by the failure of the project of the Modern white man, North American thinker Donna Haraway proposed kinship as a possible strategy. Make kin, not babies! is the slogan she proposed for an era in which the challenge would be “to make-with – become-with, compose-with – the earth-bound” (2015: 161), rather than replicating the same forms of descent that characterise the heteronormative capitalist family. The issue is to propose an alternative multi-species kinship, which overcomes the limits imposed by the anthropocentric politics and relations, and their defence of the traditional family, order and hierarchy. Haraway’s proposal, however, doesn’t seem to mistake this for a rejection of the offspring. Beforehand, she indicates alternative possibilities for relationships and reproduction that may even be able to offer the babies broader horizons for existence than the references of the biological traditional family, tedious and materialy unsustainable. The idea is to turn trouble into an ally: “staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings" (2016: 1).

Turning trouble into an ally, as Haraway intends, appears close to the defence of maintaining unease as a form of creation potential, recently proposed by Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik. Writing about her work, Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado explains that Rolnik is interested in thinking about the “collective and creative management of unease so as to allow for the germination of other worlds” (2018: 17). The task is to enact an inversion of the capitalist and pharmacological management of anguish, and of the production of a cloistered and self-referential subject. Considering the capacity of unease to destabilise implies beginning a slow (and urgent) task of opening the subject, its dynamics of entrapment, its constant reproduction of micro-fascist dispositives. With the image of the ruins of capitalism discussed by anthropologist Anna Tsing (XXX) in mind, the only possible horizon for this task would be to create heterodox networks that begin with the unfinished, the out-of-date and the fragmentary. The impossibility to recover a glorious (and dangerously totalitarian) past, and the uncertainty of a homogeneous future actually lead to an overlapping of times and modes of being that are alternative to the human. These modes may function as material from which to establish new forms of kinship and alliance, as well as an escape for the self-referential subject that is incapable of reinventing itself. Several questions still remain, which derive from the discomfort caused by the increasingly urgent dislocation of references: how to construct those new forms of kinship? What would the production of relations in a multi-species horizon exactly imply? Is it a peaceful dynamic, some sort of new age global friendship without conflicts or challenges, a generic connection to nature, suitable for the illusion of the middle classes of Westernised urban centres? The proposal actually seems to oppose attempts to construct rushed and consumption-based relations with other modes of existence, such as those from non-Western societies or with the “outside”, that is, what the modern identify as nature and environment.

One of the biggest challenges for establishing such a process seems to be the perception that all positions are partial; partially capable to connect at best, as Marilyn Strathern said, or permanently divorced by the non-negotiable barriers of fascism. In other words, it is about going beyond the acknowledgement (itself essential) that white or Western perspectives or positions from which to speak imply the impossibility of a privileged point of view for the production of narratives or power relations. Even though it is not yet exhausted, such acknowledgment is today challenged by the collapse of civilisation brought over by the Anthropocene/Capitalocene, by the ruins and extinctions it announces. And through this route we return to the questions that were posed earlier: how to construct new forms of kinship? What exactly are multi-species connections? If the modern no longer offer “a substance from which a society might be built”, as T.J. Clark states (2013: 54), who is to offer it? Transforming non-Western societies into new utopias would be a viable solution? Even more, would it be viable to imagine that such societies are protected from contemporary fractures, and from the remains of slavery and colonialism, as if they were paradise islands in the midst of the current crisis of civilisation? A partial answer to those questions would point at a much more complex picture, far from such utopic projections, mostly drawn by a Western subject in permanent crisis that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, a handful of complexities result from the networks established with non-Western societies, or with other possibilities of perception that the modern usually refer to as “nature”, the ontological land that is supposed to exist beyond the human.

Brazilian indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak has proposed an interesting term to reflect on such relations: affective alliances. The notion of affective alliances, he explains, “means continuing with the possibility of a transit amid other cultural or political communities, within which you may offer something of yourself that may have exchange value. And such exchange value means a continuity of relations. It means constructing the idea that your neighbour is forever” (2016: 170). By affirming the possibility of alliances among communities through exchange and, consequently, the production of affective alliances, Krenak imagines the chance of offering alternatives to the worlds curtailed by capital and the frontiers of intolerance. Still, alliance doesn’t mean absence of unease or conflict: on the contrary, it considers that relationships among neighbours are necessarily marked by the destabilisation of assumptions and comfort zones, specially those that relate to positions inherited from modern conceptions of the human and its forms of relation (kinship among them).

But what does exchange actually mean? Certainly not the acquisition of goods, which neutralises the relationship with the subject that offered them from the beginning; it means, on the contrary, maintaining the other as a point of view that exists permanently. Exchange relations are destabilising or are mistaken by monetary relations, which are capable of neutralising the unease and naturalising positions of power. If we think through the proposal of constructing kinship on the basis of the notion of exchange, that is, as the production of a multiplicity of subjectivities connected by relations of difference, which are necessarily conflictive but not policial as happens in fascist dispositives; if we think that kinship implies an effective opening to other possible worlds from a deep revision of pre-established orders, then it might be possible to imagine the size of the task that we face.

Let’s use the skin as an example: for Amazonian peoples such as the Shipibo-Conibo (Gebhart-Sayer, 1986), truly human skin is formed by a mesh of drawings that is made visible by wise women who are able to draw them with fine lines of jenipapo and urucum. Skin covered by such mesh of drawings is, therefore, the skin of a person that is recognised as such by other gazes: not just by the gaze of her human relatives, but specially by many other seemingly invisible people with whom she might (must) establish relations of kinship, such as the spirits of specific animals and plants. An ailing person is a person whose invisible network of drawings is troubled by the effect of a dangerous spirit, to the point it has become ugly and threatening. It is therefore necessary for the shaman, with the skilful help of spirits such as the hummingbird, to reestablish the original balance of the drawings, so that the person may be recognised again as a true, and therefore healthy, body.

Such balance, which indicates at the same time a connection with other extra-human bodies, is the key condition for the production of kinship. This is especially clear among the Marubo (Cesarino, 2014), an Amazonian peoples from the same linguistic family as the Shipibo-Conibo. For them, a person actually becomes mature from an intellectual and shamanic perspective when their skin is covered with the designs that are traced by their aunt-spirits. In fact, the designs are made on the skin of the person’s double, and not on the body visible in this dimension. Once she is completely designed, a person becomes recognisable to a myriad of subject-others such as the spirits of the anaconda, of the electric fish and of some birds, with whom she will establish relations of kinship. Here reside her intellectual and creative capacities, because kinship, as a fundamental exchange mode, leads to the circulation of knowledges between species that are conceived under a similar condition of humanity. Songs, names, drawings, remedies and other knowledges are passed on under the condition there is an ongoing relationship that, if suspended, leads to oblivion and potentially aggressive retaliation. In order to establish such forms of kinship, Marubo shamans, like those from the Shipibo-Conibo and other Amazonian peoples, need to progressively destroy their bodies and conventional kinship relations, through diverse techniques that include fasting, the ingestion of entheogenic substances, and lengthy periods of reclusion. It is a slow and hard learning process of modulation of the body, in order for it to be able to effectively produce the multi-specific connections from which knowledge derives, as well as the maintenance of the order of the world and of the good living. The process is very well described by the Yanomami shaman and thinker Davi Kopenawa in his book La chute du ciel (2010), which is also a powerful reflection on the contemporary impasses derived from the conflict between shamanic knowledge and the destructive greed of mining.

Practised for thousands of years, such forms of production of kinship must function as a parameter for the understanding of the connections claimed by Western intellectuals such as Donna Haraway and others. Presented as ‘novelty’, these connections were always part of the forms of knowledge of other regimes of existence, such as those of indigenous peoples. Still, their premises remain marginalised or misunderstood by contemporary thinking, despite the increasing reputation that anthropology has in fields such as the visual arts, in large part due to the dissemination of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s work. When proposing the concept of ‘feral proliferations’ to think about the landscapes of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing, for example, refers to the transposition of the limits of human and more-than-human bodies, increasingly engaged in connections that are no longer thinkable through the distinctions between nature and culture and its derivations. "Ontological anarchy is therefore not exterior to systems-thinking. It is the ghost that stirs within and between systems (...)”, says the anthropologist (2019: S191), lucidly pointing out that contemporary complexities derive from interconnections between worlds of reference that are illusorily set apart as autonomous. Plants, animals, spirits, deities, transitional bodies, bacteria and viruses, ‘together’, adds Tsing, “they create a queer more-than-human kinship that challenges agricultural simpifications, offering alternatives” (idem: S191).

Still, how can we understand and effectively construct such alternatives, already practised for ages by the non-modern? The possible Amazonic worlds, among others that don’t fit within the capitalist and modern project, must surely be considered contemporary, even though there is nothing trivial to that. They belong to another conception of temporality, which is juxtaposed to our shared present even though it doesn’t coincide with the time of the fluxes of capital and its production of subjectivity. The temporality of the peoples of the forest is therefore marked by the establishment of relational dynamics with the extra-human, in permanent relationships that are subjected to the negotiations and instabilities resulting from that exchange. Not by chance those instabilities become increasingly decisive for a world divided and unpredictable, incoherent and threatening as today’s, when, as Tsing says, we witness “a return to a world of unseen forces that might just possibly also include spirits: a return to the doubt that lingers in witchcraft as much as in climate science, and a return to the unpredictability of a world that was not modern after all” (idem: S191).

That is why the contemporaneity of peoples such as those from the Amazonian forest seems to be defined by the strategic position they occupy, in the sense that they become once more capable of pointing at the failures that result from the collapse of capitalism: “The person who truly belongs to her time, who is truly contemporary, is the person who doesn’t match seamlessly with this one or fits within its pretensions, and is in this sense untimely, out-of-time; but, precisely because of that, through this dislocation and anachronism, she is capable, more than others, of perceiving her time”, Giorgio Agamben wrote (2012: 58). Not by chance Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro finish their recent essay on the challenges of the Anthropocene and the contemporary crisis with these words: “Amerindian collectives, with their comparatively modest populations, their relatively simple technologies, which are open to syncretic agencies of high intensity, are the ‘figuration of the future’ [Krøijer, 2010], not a survival from the past. Masters of techno-primitivist bricolage and political-metaphysical metamorphosis, they are in fact one of the possible chances for the subsistence of the future” (2014: 158-159). It is important to remember that societies such Amerindian peoples’ are not the only ones that offer the possibility of subsistence, and could be associated with many other collectives that are by nature incompatible with the control mechanisms of state and capital. In any case, those collectives from the forest seem to show us that their forms of connection are independent from the production of large-scale material and institutional apparatuses, and from the huge expenditure and waste of energy that characterises capitalism. Their bodies are able to produce kinship and inter-species connections without threatening our own possibility of existence.

We may still reflect for a moment on the image of the return proposed earlier by Tsing. To what extent is that return in fact perceived or seen as such by other contemporaries, including the shamans of the forest? Which are the consequences of the temporality presupposed by this narrative construction? It wouldn’t make sense to consider it a return to primitive animisms, as that would be no more than a colonial temporal fiction about which Anna Tsing might have some critical awareness. Maybe it would be better to simply abandon the idea of a return to some lost time, as Haraway already asked, and instead try to better understand how collectives such as Amerindian peoples understand time and the connections of kinship created through the body. Once more Ailton Krenak offers our final step. Reflecting in front of a non-indigenous audience at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo in 2016, he discussed what we call ‘myth’ in the following terms: “a passage of time in which the angst of certainty didn’t exist” (Krenak; Cesarino 2016: 178). It is important to underline the reach of such a definition: in the first place, it simultaneously refutes and complexifies the generic and ethnocentric meaning of the category ‘myth’. In so doing, it also offers a precise reflection on the modern, who would be subsumed within the opposite of the proposition: modern are those who have the angst of certainty, and who today encounter its unavoidable collapse. And last, Krenak’s sentence points towards another possible mode of existence: that of times when bodies and species interpenetrated each other, when the limit of the skin, as Paul Valèry said, was actually deep and vertiginous, in which the transitions didn’t cause anguish or control, but rather fascination for the flares and multiplicities. Who knows if this image may not be able to suggest a time of unpredictability that might also be a time of invention for other (and better) possible states of being.