Image: Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Displace Violently or Send Flying, 2009
‘The Crystal Forest’ quotes have come up various times in the Reading Club - the last time in our ‘Multinaturalism Narratives’ session. Now, also in the light of current political events in Brasil, we want to take the time reading together the full text by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits was first published in Inner Asia 9(2) in 2007. How do forests live and think according to alternate cosmovisions and what can we learn from the Yanomami world's structure?
[…] a sizeable slice of Amazonian mythology deals with the causes and consequences of the species-specific embodiment of different agents, all of them conceived to have originally partaken of a generalized unstable condition in which human and non.human features are indiscernibly mixed. All the beings peopling mythology display this ontological entanglement of cross-specific ambiguity, and this is precisely what makes them akin to shamans (and to spirits)
Viveiros de Castro, The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits
In ‘Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club’ we read together texts related to natural sciences, art, anthropology, postcolonialism, and (post)anthropocene, chosen from a female perspective looking beyond disciplines.
PLEASE NOTE: IN TERMS OF SUSTAINABILITY WE WILL NOT PRINT OUT THE TEXT.
BRING YOUR COPY ON A DIGITAL DEVICE OF YOUR CHOICE OR PRINTED OUT! :-)
What: The Reading Club is in English language
Where: Manteuffelstr. 73, 10999 Berlin, Zabriskie Buchladen für Kultur und Natur
When: Wednesday 21th of November 2018, 19.30 (sharp!)
Who: small group of lovely people who would like to meet you (rsvp only, not suitable for children)
Note: Bring your copy of the text as print out or on a digital device
Hosts: Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, artist, and Sina Ribak, environmental & cultural manager, host the reading club - to be inspired and “reminded of nature’s ability to hold us in the moment to force us to inhabit the present.”[1]
[1] Katharine Norbury, “Ground Work: Writings on Places and People by Tim Dee – review”, The Guardian, 2018
Image: Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Displace Violently or Send Flying, 2009