Article:

Wahrnehmungshygiene und Baumpuderrausch. Kleine amazonische Sinneslehre (Lévi-Strauss, Restany, Viveiros de Castro, Kohn, Oloixarac)

Traditionally, the Amazon rainforest appears to be the natural habitat of illusions and hallucinations. As the fundamental “other” it provides the rare experience for modern human beings to feel outnumbered when faced with the abundance of “nature”, or “Umwelt”. This paper examines two paradigms of amazonian perception, their theorization and literary reflection. While serving as refuge for the last remains of “integral naturalness” (Pierre Restany) or as the vanishing home for the “chronically homeless” European (Lévi-Strauss, Frans Krajcberg) in 20th century, it gives lessons on the necessary modes of perception for the 21th century and its entanglements of humans, animals, plants and technologies in the Anthropocene (Eduardo Kohn, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro). A novel by Argentinian contemporary writer Pola Oloixarac, CONSTELACIONES OSCURAS (2015; engl. DARK CONSTELLATIONS, 2019), draws attention to the different functionalizations and imaginations of Amazon forests. Moreover, the novel seizes on indigenous ontologies, reverses positive and negative forms and completes approaches of modern Amazonian anthropology and their notions of multinaturalism, shamanism and perspectivism. The text ultimately does not recoil from the idea of an “anthropology beyond the human” and its consequences: the human as an externally controlled host in a symbiotic existence. On the basis of Oloixarac’s novel this paper sketches a theory of perception for the entanglements of the Anthropocene.