(Un)worlding with Karipuna’s Shadowy Alliances: the Miranga and the Isolados

This ethnographically inspired article investigates the ways in which the Karipuna Indigenous people in Rondônia defend their land in the Western Brazilian Amazon against forces of deforestation and dispossession. I focus on the Karipuna’s plurivalent and collective forest spirits called the mirangã, through life experience accounts of two survivors from the “pre-contact” era who embody the Karipuna-mirangã connection. Through an analysis of the onto-epistemological entanglements in which the mirangã and my interlocutors are situated, I articulate another front of the Karipuna’s multi-faceted resistance: the struggle of worlding vis-à-vis the non-indigenous world. This process also reveals the association (from the Karipuna’s point of view) between the mirangã and isolated Indigenous people (os isolados) in the Karipuna Land, whose existence has been questioned for decades. This connection-in-the-making, deployed by “shamanism without shaman”, is viewed as a form of cosmopolitical approach. By combining ethnographic inquiry with close examination of personal documents, I illustrate how the Karipuna’s dynamic world-making process (in which I partially participated and became affected) allows for multiplication by populating their world with their significant Others.