By EDUARDO VIVEIROS DE CASTRO*

Excerpt from newly released book

No people is an island

A few months ago, the Sentinelese, inhabitants of the eponymous island (North Sentinel Island) of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, killed an American missionary disguised as a tourist who was trying to make contact with them. This act of self-defense brought to the world headlines the current relevance of a question that concerns the very idea of ​​“currentness”: what is the future of the so-called primitive peoples – in other words, supposedly “non-current” – who live isolated in places that are difficult to access, rejecting any communication with other peoples as long as they can?

According to the organization Survival International, the Brazilian Amazon is the region on the planet with the largest number of native communities classified as isolated. In Brazil today, as in other countries in the Amazon region, there is a growing proliferation of reports and images that report indigenous peoples in a situation similar to that of the Sentinelese. The National Indian Foundation counts 114 records, 28 of which have already been confirmed; the majority are concentrated in regions bordering other Amazonian countries. Practically all of these peoples are in what is officially called “voluntary isolation”: far from ignoring the existence of other societies, they refuse any substantial interaction with them, especially with “whites”, a word used by both indigenous and white people in Brazil to designate the direct or indirect representatives of this nation-state that exercises sovereignty over indigenous territories.

The isolation of the Sentinelese on their island can be seen as a reduced model of another group of islands, far away from the Indian Ocean; an archipelago no longer geographical, but anthropological, formed by human islands. The reader can thus imagine pre-Columbian America as an immense, diverse and complex multi-ethnic continent that was suddenly invaded by the European ocean. The modern expansion of Europe would be the analogue, in terms of the history of civilizations, of the rise in the level of the planet's oceans that threatens us today.

After five centuries of ever-increasing submersion of the ancient anthropological continent, only a few islands of aboriginal humanity remain above the surface. These surviving peoples have come to form a true Polynesia, in the etymological sense of the term: a mass of scattered ethnic islands, separated from each other by vast expanses of an ocean that is quite homogeneous in its political, economic and cultural composition (nation state, capitalism and Christianity). All these islands have suffered violent processes of erosion over the centuries, losing many of the conditions conducive to a full cultural life.

And now all the islands are shrinking, as the sea level is rising ever more rapidly… In the Amazon, where the “white” ocean was still relatively shallow, we are now witnessing a devastating tsunami. Even the rare large islands – the Rio Negro indigenous lands, the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, and the Xingu Indigenous Park – are under threat of flooding.

The image of the archipelago suggests that all the indigenous peoples of America should be considered “isolated.” Isolated from one another, of course; but also isolated or separated from themselves, insofar as the vast majority of them have lost their political autonomy and have had the cosmological foundations of their economy severely shaken. These peoples therefore find themselves in a situation of “involuntary isolation,” even where, which is far from exceptional, their initial contact with whites was more or less voluntary.

For it was the foreign occupation and depopulation of indigenous America that created the archipelago: by opening up vast demographic deserts (epidemics, massacres, enslavement), which tore apart the pre-existing interethnic networks to an almost complete rupture, isolating their components; and by kidnapping the multiple nodes of these networks and confining them in missionary villages, later in “protected” territories, that is, surrounded and harassed by whites on all sides.

The European invasion thus interrupted a highly relativistic indigenous dynamic – characterized by “chromatic” permeability and the lability of collective identities –, freezing historically contingent states of the continental sociopolitical flow through the territorial fixation and ethnonymic essentialization of the surviving collectives, transformed, from then on – from the point of view of the invading States – into entities of a rigidly “diatonic” administrative ontology.

Peoples in voluntary isolation are those who have chosen, as far as history allows, objective isolation rather than subjective isolation, which is the separation from oneself created by contact and the consequent need to politically compose with another form of civilization, organized according to principles incompatible with those governing native civilizations. That said, the voluntary nature of isolation has little to do with spontaneity. As the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization document on the subject points out, “[I]t is obvious that, in the vast majority of cases, this is not truly ‘voluntary’ isolation, considering the extreme vulnerability of these populations surrounded by natural resource exploiters, which makes their ‘voluntary isolation’ a survival strategy.”

Reciprocally, as we have already mentioned, the groups that came into contact with the world of white people often did so on their own initiative, driven either by the desire to obtain tools and other goods, or by the need to protect themselves from enemy attacks, or, more generally, by a characteristic “anthropophagic” impulse of symbolic capture of otherness – an impulse that aims, at the same time, at a transformation of oneself through this otherness (since it is incorporated as such).

Managing and controlling such a transformation, when the otherness that was intended to be captured turns out to be endowed with formidable powers of counter-capture of a completely different nature (since powers of abolishing otherness), this is the problem that will affect the future of the native peoples of the continent. That this is a complex problem, and in short, a dangerous one, is demonstrated better than the ever-imminent possibility of overdetermination of the original impulse to capture otherness by the asymmetric powers of counter-capture of identification. This is something that can be witnessed, for example, among the Waiwai of the Guianas region, who, after being converted by Protestant missionaries from the United States, began to undertake catechetical expeditions in search of groups in voluntary isolation, redefining and re-founding themselves as a people based on the conversion of these groups.

With the assault of predatory capitalism on the most remote areas of the Amazon (and elsewhere on the planet), the number of “new” peoples continues to increase. This growing emergence of isolated groups – with their consequent and always traumatic rupture of isolation, euphemistically called “contact” – is due to the intense pressure that national governments and transnational corporations have been exerting on their territories, in the form of mega-infrastructure projects (which encourage land grabbing, extensive livestock farming and industrial monoculture, and illegal logging) and large extractive enterprises (oil and mining).

The present decade marks what appears to be the closing of the siege on the indigenous peoples of the world's largest tropical forest, now transformed into the “last frontier” of primitive capital accumulation and hot spot environmental devastation. All the more so since, after a relatively long period in which indigenous policies in several Amazonian countries – in contradiction with other public policies in these same countries – were guided by respect for groups in voluntary isolation, the threats to all indigenous peoples (isolated or not) created by “development” are now being consolidated in openly ethnocidal state initiatives.

This is especially the case in Brazil, where the far-right government that has just taken power wasted no time in beginning to dismantle the legislative and administrative machinery aimed at protecting the environment and defending traditional populations, annulling, among other violations of the rights of these populations, the policy of no contact with isolated peoples (remote monitoring, demarcation of protected territories), in force since 1987. The new government is entirely (this adverb distinguishes it from previous governments) at the service of the interests of big financial, extractive and agro-industrial capital, on the one hand, and of strong LOBBY fundamentalist evangelical, on the other; together, these interests – that of economic neoliberalism and that of ideological obscurantism – control parliament and occupy key positions in the executive branch.

Big capital covets indigenous lands, aiming at the expansion of mining extraction and agribusiness, in a context of increasing privatization of public lands. LOBBY Evangelicals covet indigenous souls, aiming to destroy the relationship of immanence between humans and non-humans, people and territory – an immanence that constitutes indigenous forms of life – in order to universalize the heteronomous figure of a “Brazilian” citizen-consumer, docile to the State and subservient to capital. This spiritual colonialism is an accessory to the process of territorial expropriation, but it is above all a strategic weapon in the war waged by the State against every “free form” of life.

*Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is professor of anthropology at the National Museum of UFRJ. Author, among other books, of Inconstancies of the wild soul (Ubu).

Reference

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The Crystal Forest: Essays in Anthropology. São Paulo, n-1 editions, 2025, 360 pages. [https://amzn.to/3FA4j2m]

The launch in São Paulo will be this Saturday, March 15th at 03 pm, in the Conservatory Room at Praça das Artes – Av. São João 14.

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