The Shamanic Gaze: Creating Diverse Tomorrows By Experiencing The World Otherwise

By drawing on shamanic dreaming, this article approaches the conceptualisations of Indigenous thinkers, such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Ailton Krenak, who envision a future of interdependence and care between human beings and all matter on Earth, increasingly harmed by predatory capitalism. It specifically explores the visuality of the Yanomami cosmology and Ailton Krenak’s concept of “ancestral future” by adopting sensory studies as a framework, which privileges the body – instead of an abstract mind – as central to knowledge production. As Kopenawa narrates in The Falling Sky, shamanic dreaming is a form of visual contact with the ancestors and an embodied process of knowing the material and ancestral world. From these two iterations, it is possible to perceive, through a series of shamanic visions, a cosmology that radically attributes ontologies to nonhuman agents such as animals, plants, and rivers, on which human beings depend. This article investigates how the Krenak and Yanomami ideas invite consumer societies to view the world through a shamanic gaze and dream about forms of interaction crucial to the survival of the planet in the face of a mortgaged present, a notion that demands the deadly devastation of individual and collective bodies for the sake of progress.