From paradigm to paradox – contemporary mainstream theoretical reflections for fieldwork in lowland South America

Abstract

This essay intends to address perspectives and reflections on nature and culture in the contemporary anthropological literature . Dialogically engaging with Ingold, Wag- ner, Viveiros de Castro, Descola and Strathern, I aim to demonstrate the implications of understanding culture as an axiomatic point of differentiation of human nature, or as re-elaboration of materiality through human action . This reflection calls us to rethink the Western scientific epistemology, along with its presupposed ontological order . Such questioning unfolds in the elaboration of the ethnographic text, which in turn is the result of a dialectical process that speaks not only of one culture, but of two, and especially of our gaze on the Other . In the ethnographic text, an anthropologist and a native are the potential locus of reproduction of their culture . Through this approach we extend the implications of epistemological concerns to fieldwork practices and to the art of under- standing other knowledge systems .