The Brazilian anthropologist advocates a new relationship with the Aboriginal peoples of Amazon, involving a mutual understanding. Otherwise ? This is what it stages in a great novel, “the bird attract”.
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In June, the disappearance of journalist Dom Phillips and researcher Bruno Pereira in the Javari valley made the “one” of the Brazilian media, and beyond. In this difficult region of access lives in isolated peoples, under the constant threat of gold areas, hunters and illegal fishermen. Their territory is ravages of deforestation, drug trafficking and crime. Pedro Cesarino knows this area of lawless people on the borders of the Amazon, where he made his first trip in 2004 and which inspired the frame of his first novel, the bird attract, today translated.
The 27 -year -old writer has just abandoned philosophy studies at the University of Sao Paulo to devote himself to anthropology. His research focuses on shamanism and the great oral texts he translates, as well as on the cosmology and mythology of the Marubo people. “I have always been interested in the non -Western conception of the world and of the language, in particular of the Amerindians and Africans. These two traditions are at the source of Brazil, but philosophy ignored them. For a Brazilian, it is paradoxical: can -We give all his intellectual life for a partial and hegemonic thought, who colonized the world? “, Note, in French, the anthropologist and writer, during a distance interview with” Le Monde of books “.
embark for the Javari valley, on the Itaquai river
The thought of Pedro Cesarino was forged in the intellectual environment where he grew up, between an anthropologist and a psychiatrist father, both involved in the foundation of the Brazilian left at the end of the dictatorship, in the years in the years 1980. His grandfather, Antonio Cesarino Jr, was the first black professor at the Faculty of Law of Sao Paulo, in the same university where it teaches him indigenous anthropology, art and literature today.
In 2004, Pedro Cesarino is still a young researcher. He embarks for the Javari valley, on the Itaquai river. Suddenly, he has the feeling of “switching to another plane of existence”. “In the Amazon, the weather flows differently from our domesticated time, settled for the flow of capitalism,” he recalls. In the city where he stays at the edge of the deep forest, he sees both the solution and the end of the world: there are the possibility of living without destroying the nature and the stigma of mining. He also sees the brutal relationships that white Brazilians maintain with the Amerindians.
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