A mitologia do ornamento e a “lição” do animal: Humboldt nas cataratas do Orenoco

Sumario: The present text consists of an adapted version of the presentation I made during the Seminar Monstruosas Organizações in 2017, in which I analyze again the americanist Alexander von Humboldt. There are passages from his Views of Nature in which layers of an anthropological discourse are found, when the ornament of the Indian funerary urns is seen in favor of a focus on the contact lines of nature and culture, to become the orchestration of a mythology internal to the human fantasy. However, beyond the humboldtian excavation of a “savage thought” through the symbolic conditions of ornament, there is a muffled layer in its anthropological perspective that marks the colonial space an ambivalence. Thanks to the parrot that Humboldt encounters in the Orinoco Falls, the language of the extinct Aturius Indians gains a contour, constituting the chords of what might be called the lesson of the animal, thus opening the beginning for a diverse mythological economy. —DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1212