Forests as subject and terricídio

an epistemological semiology from the amerindian thought

Abstract

The main argument consists in the acceptance of a non-anthropocentric Amerindian cosmological imperative that forest can be understood by the Human Sciences as an active historical subject, producer of knowledge, meanings and communications, even if it is not symbolic or humanly linguistic. For this purpose, we are going to realize a theoretical and anthropological discussion of ethnographic writings in the sense of supporting the possibility of understanding as epistemologically valid the existence of a semiotic, which grounds the recognition and intercommunication between animals-humans, animals non-humans and other kingdoms in forest cohabitation, understanding forest itself as a subjectively constituted and self-determined entity. To achieve that understanding we are going to divide our writing into two parts. First, we are going to study the anthropology of Eduardo Kohn about a semiotics of forests, which confers them an active subject status, as producers of knowledge and languages. In the second part of our paper, we are going to address the concept of terricídio, as thought by the leaders of the Movimiento de Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir nation in the claim for legal recognition of the murder of forests as a heinous crime. Such process is established precisely by recognizing the sacred, individual, communicational, cognitive and thinking character of forests and their complex interrelational network of coexisting inhabitants.