Nature as a Political Subject: Between Modern Fable and Yanomami Cosmology

The earth is no longer a backdrop. Neither a reservoir of resources nor a canvas for human affairs. It acts, responds, demands. Two voices—one from European social sciences, the other from the Amazonian forests—each articulate this in their own way. Without knowing one another, without citing each other, they sketch the outlines of the same shift: the one that moves nature from the status of object to that of political subject. But their paths diverge before converging. Distinguishing them first allows us to better hear what unites them.

Nature as a Fiction to Dismantle

Bruno Latour offers a diagnosis: modernity was built upon a fictitious separation between humans and non-humans. Today, this boundary is crumbling. Ecological crises reveal that non-humans—climates, soils, viruses—are not passive elements but full-fledged actors in the collective. Their presence demands a rethinking of political categories.

what becomes clearly detectable far beyond the stratigraphic boundary is that the name of this geohistorical period may become the most relevant philosophical, religious, anthropological—and, as we shall soon see, political—concept for finally turning away from the notions of the “Modern.”

What Latour calls “Gaia” is not a metaphysical entity but a thought operator. A tool for reimagining the political by integrating those who, until now, have been excluded: non-humans. Nature is no longer a given but a set of relations to negotiate. It becomes a subject of rights, a partner in the composition of the common world.

Spirits as Living Partners

Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami shaman, speaks from another place. For him, the forest is not an assemblage of physical forces but a fabric of relations with the xapiri, spirits who watch over the earth’s balance. The Whites, he says, do not see these invisible partners. They ignore them, destroy them, and thus break the alliance that keeps the world alive.

Yanomami

English

The system of attributing illness and death constitutes the privileged idiom of Yanomami intercommunal political relations, their ascription to the forest’s malevolent beings thus representing its “ground zero.”

Among the Yanomami, illness is not merely a biological dysfunction. It is a political sign. An imbalance in relations with the spirits, a rupture of the pact binding humans to the forest. The xapiri are not metaphors but concrete actors in collective life. Their anger or benevolence determines the group’s health. To refuse to see them is to blind oneself to the very conditions of survival.

Two Languages for a Single Entanglement

Latour and Kopenawa do not speak the same language. One mobilizes the tools of Western political philosophy, the other those of an Amerindian cosmology. Yet their propositions converge toward the same intuition: the world is not a backdrop that humans traverse but a network of relations where every element matters.

For Latour, nature becomes a political actor when it manifests through its effects—droughts, pandemics, collapses. For Kopenawa, it always has been, through the spirits that inhabit it. In both cases, the point is to recognize that humans are not alone. They share the stage with other beings, visible or invisible, who demand to be taken into account.

The difference lies perhaps in how these actors are named. Latour speaks of “non-humans,” a category encompassing everything that is not human: animals, plants, minerals, climatic phenomena. Kopenawa, on the other hand, speaks of spirits, of xapiri, beings endowed with intention and speech. But in both cases, the aim is to move beyond a vision in which the human would be the sole legitimate subject.

An Expanded Collective

Their shared proposition, if it exists, lies in this: the political can no longer be conceived without including those who, until now, have been excluded. Whether we call these excluded “non-humans” or “spirits,” the stakes are the same: to widen the circle of those with whom we compose the world.

Latour suggests that this inclusion requires a reworking of institutions, laws, and modes of representation. Kopenawa, for his part, shows that this inclusion is already a lived reality, a daily practice in which spirits are consulted, appeased, listened to. In both cases, it is not a matter of choice but of necessity.

One question remains, open: how to translate these intuitions into political forms that are neither the forced Westernization of Amerindian cosmologies nor the folklorization of modern concepts? Perhaps the answer lies less in words than in gestures. In the way we inhabit the world, recognizing that we are never alone.