Francisco Quinteiro Pires

My upcoming article in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, “The Shamanic Gaze: Creating Diverse Tomorrows by Experiencing the World Otherwise,” argues that indigenous cosmologies provide both ecological warnings and ways to imagine new futures. Drawing on the ideas of Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Ailton Krenak, the article contends that shamanic dreaming is a unique way of seeing that brings together the material and ancestral worlds. When challenging the capitalist idea that nature is merely a resource to be used, Kopenawa and Krenak imagine a future based on interdependence, in which people recognize their dependence on rivers, forests, animals, and other beings that sustain life on Earth.

A key focus of my research is shamanic visuality, especially how the Yanomami understand the xapiri, the images of ancestors seen by shamans during trance. These visions are not strange hallucinations; they represent a way of knowing that is experienced through the body. I use sensory studies to demonstrate that knowledge comes from bodily experience, not just abstract thought. This approach challenges the Western idea that the senses are ranked and that objectivity comes from distance. The shaman’s gaze, which is involved rather than removed, displays a world where many ways of being exist and where all beings, human and non-human, have their own perspectives.

This approach positions indigenous thought as a direct challenge to the extractive logic of capitalism. In Krenak’s concept of the “ancestral future,” the future is not an empty horizon to be conquered but a temporal fold in which the past remains materially present. My article contrasts this notion with what it terms the “mortgaged present”—a temporal regime that sacrifices bodies, ecosystems, and entire worlds for the illusion of perpetual economic growth. By invoking the ancestors and insisting on the continued vitality of rivers and forests, the shamanic worldview offers an anticapitalist ethic rooted in care, relationality, and planetary survival.

My article suggests that the shamanic gaze functions as both critique and proposition. It exposes the violence concealed within developmentalist narratives and invites industrial societies to inhabit the world otherwise. In doing so, it gestures toward a world composed of many worlds, a pluriverse in which diverse cosmologies coexist without being assimilated into a single model of progress. At a moment of accelerating ecological devastation, the visions articulated by the Yanomami and Krenak serve as urgent philosophical interventions that ask whether humanity can still learn to see, and therefore to live, differently.