Crisis ambiental: pensamiento relacional como alternativa al pensamiento depredatorio

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to review and expose alternative visions to the dichotomy between culture and nature that sustains predatory thinking, which has been the cause of the current environmental crisis. In the first place, the proposals of the Swiss philosopher Josef Estermann based on the study of Native American thought have a path that shows a type of culture-nature relationship alternate to the capitalist system of domination of nature: extraction and accumulation. In his revisions of the Andean philosophy, Estermann points out the possible origin of the dichotomy between nature culture, and guides the proposal of the relationality of the whole (typical of Andean rationality) as a form of unification between culture and nature. On the other hand, with this exploratory exercise, we want to address other forms of rationality that lead to a resignification of nature, of the ecosystem and culture relationship, and of its forms of environmental transformation. In that sense, the studies and approaches of anthropologists such as Philippe Descola, who propose different ontological routes for the understanding of other ways of ordering reality and stopping in the understanding of the “Other” in anthropological research, are put on the discussion table. Where that "other" includes non-human beings of nature. Similarly, the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro, who through “Amerindian perspectivism” proposes to undermine the Eurocentric paradigms of Western philosophy, contributing, like Descola, to the revision and introduction of radical alterity in the studies of reality within the framework of social relations in the world, acting as translators of the thinking of other civilizations and knowing that they have behind all the baggage of social anthropology, they try to describe another type of rationality that identifies clues that help break the dichotomy between culture and nature Finally, an approach is made to the U´wa people from ethnographic and historical studies of the U´wa community, carried out by students of the tradition of symbolic anthropology such as Ann Osborn or Ana María Falchetti and taking as important sources spiritual leaders and U'wa activists, such as Berito Cobaría and Daris Cristancho - listening to their own voices and thoughts - are the foundations of U'wa thinking and some political positions, which would account for a rationality that contributes to overcoming the culture-nature dichotomy.