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Abstract

According to both indigenous knowledge-holders and scientists, the Amazon is the territory of diversity. This dissertation begins with an ethnography of collaborative projects between indigenous organizations and communities and partners from dedicated nongovernmental organizations in the Northwest Amazon. It then expands its horizon, problematizing the fate of the Amazon in the Anthropocene and the place of indigenous peoples in this debate. The focus here is on how indigenous knowledge practices enter in territorial environmental governance, revealing a specific political efficacy. This political performance benefits from long-standing alliances and an effective agenda of collaboration that brings together distinct knowledge practices, making connections between local, community-based knowledge production and external techno-scientific networks. The assemblage of knowledge and political practices that results constitutes a cosmopolitics—not unlike the manejo do mundo (management of the world) of the Tukanoan peoples—and confronts centuries of predatory pressure imposed on the Amazon. Empowering such practices in the search for effective alternatives for the region favors both diversity and the sustainability of life cycles. Specifically, this dissertation emphasizes indigenous experience and knowledge-practices as embedded in multispecies collectivities and intersecting temporalities. The indigenous knowledge-holder is a healer of the world, enacting relationships between beings and maintaining the flow of time and seasons.

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