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Accepted Paper:

"The World's End: Climate Change and the Disruption of Interspecific Communication among the Urarina of the Peruvian Amazon"  
Emanuele Fabiano (Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES), Universidade de Coimbra)

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to provide ethnographic analysis of how Urarina of the Peruvian Amazon recognize a correlation between the gradual impairment of the dialogic relationship between human and non-human and the effects of climate change.

Paper long abstract:

In shamanic discourse of Urarina people (Peruvian Amazon) the notion of "end of the world" doesn't describe as much an eschatological perspective in the apocalyptic sense, as rather the possibility of interruption - always reversible - of a complex communicative field based on a fragile balance defined by the constant dialogue between human and non-human.

The interruption of community activities, of social reproduction processes and, above all, violation of ritual prescriptions or abandonment of shamanic practice, make it impossible to «bring food on earth», and in humans induces the loss of the ability to learn the language by which it is possible to communicate with non-human entities. The change in the seasonal cycle of rainfall and weather events associated with it, along with changes in behaviour patterns of many animal species, are to be interpreted as unequivocal signs which attest to a fracture of the dialogue between humans and non-humans, which fertilizes the soil and makes possible the cynegetic activities. These changes, together with a new phase of oil exploitation in the region, have also led to the emergence of evil spirits frequently associated with contagious diseases and new forms of witchcraft which, unlike existing ones, find their contacts and privileged interlocutors not with the Urarina, but among the city people, engineers and bureaucrats, that is the owners of "other words"

Panel P49
Ecology of relations in a changing climate
  Session 1