Description
In this paper, I analyse the de/territorialisation practices of the political and economic processes embedded in the capitalist expansion in the Yanomami indigenous land territory (Brazil). There is a growing body of literature on International Relations that engages with Indigenous people and knowledge (Shaw, 2002; Sampson, 2002; Beier, 2002; Shapiro, 2004b; Picq, 2013; Urt, 2016; Delgado, 2021; de Leon, 2022). However, with few exceptions (Gonçalves, 2014; Kumarakulasingam; Ngcoya, 2016), there is a lack of interventions that take Indigenous conceptual elaborations as the referent through which to question the international and its multiple forms of operation. Given this, the paper is divided into three parts. First, I briefly outline the process of invading the Yanomami’s liveable space throughout the 20th century, focusing specifically on the expansion of gold mining (garimpo) (Le Tourneau, 2012; Ramos, 1993). Second, I analyse how the Brazilian military played a role in diffusing capitalist-colonial relations by facilitating the spread of gold mining activities in Indigenous territory via military infrastructures. In this regard, by drawing on the literature on logistics and infrastructures (Chua, Danyluk, Cowen, Khalili, 2018; Khalili, 2017; Rodgers, O’Neill, 2012; Larkin, 2013), I establish an association between military and capitalist expansion. Lastly, I engage with the thought of Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman and spokesperson, in his book The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Kopenawa; Albert, 2013) as a counter-anthropology/reverse anthropology of the white-capitalist-colonial world (Viveiros de Castro, 2015) and a shamanic critique of the “political economy of nature” (Albert, 1995, p. 23). This aims to understand how Kopenawa comprehends the processes of the materialisation of capitalism (Tible, 2019) and war (Fausto, 1999; Viveiros de Castro, 2002), developing a comprehension of the entanglements of capitalist and colonial warfare through alternative conceptual elaborations based on Indigenous knowledge.
