ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will discuss how Amazonian Indigenous peoples’ ecology of relations, in which different types of beings participate, is related to communal well-being and health. These relations include humans and non-humans, such as agencies of animals and plants, with whom health bodies are produced. Our research collaborators are two Indigenous peoples in southwestern Amazonia, representing the Arawak-speaking Apurinã in Brazil and Panoan-speaking Yaminawa in Peru, whose socio-cosmologies and histories, especially as it comes to their relations with non-Indians, are quite different. Despite the differences, the ethnographies show how social relations with non-humans in the tropical rainforest produce life, whereas a break in these relationships or their unbalance would cause lethal diseases. Thus, in Amazonian understanding, there is no external environment that would only improve health conditions. Towards the end of this chapter, we will also discuss how this view, drawing from communal human-environment embeddedness, differs in many ways from non-Indigenous ecologists’ views towards the Amazonian rainforest, which have established the actions for its protection.
