The Nambikwara Case

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 JÖRN ETZOLD The Nambikwara Case The article interprets the anthropo-scene – the stage on which the anthropos appears – as constituted by law, specifically by European law grounded in the rights that humans can claim. This modern notion of rights is fuelled by what Christoph Menke calls the “juridification” of nature. However, ‘nature’ as the source of rights is not a given; it is also a European concept, as Philippe Descola demonstrates, among others. The case of the Nambikwara before the Fourth Russell Tribunal in 1980 challenges the European notion of rights. Its reconsideration is accompanied by a critical reading of Jacques Derrida’s analysis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of his time spent with the Nambikwara. Critique of the Anthropocene Anthropo(s)cene Legal Criticism Cosmology Ontology Human Rights Activism Forest Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 Staging the Anthropos The title of this volume, Transforming Anthropo(s)cene, evokes two transformations: the geological epoch of the Anthropocene, which itself must be transformed, and the scene of the ánthrōpos, as indicated by the ‘s’ in parentheses. This suggests that the Anthropocene, as an epoch of our planet, is related to a scene, a stage, or a theatre on which the ánthrōpos – a certain genre of human beings – appears and becomes visible. Regarding the Anthropocene as an epoch of the Earth, the relevant boards – the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) – recently denied its existence, declaring that we still live in the Holocene – a contested decision. In a 2015 overview article, Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin present several proposals about when the Anthropocene began.1 They ultimately favour two possibilities. The first is the genocide in Abya Yala, or the Americas, in the early 17th century, which caused the Indigenous population to drop from around 60 million to approximately six million. This led to a large-scale regeneration of flora and a significant decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as evidenced by glacier ice. The second possibility is a series of atomic bomb detonations from 1945 to the present, which left radionuclides in tree rings, peaking in 1964. The authors dismiss another proposal: the dawn of industrialization, with flying ash from coal burning detectable in lake sediments, peaking around 1900. In any case, the earliest possible beginning of this geological era would be the bloody conquest of the Americas. Bartolomé de las Casas’s estimate, that between 12 and 15 million Indigenous people were murdered by Europeans shortly after Christopher Columbus arrived,2 has often been dismissed as an exaggeration in the context of the Leyenda Negra – the defamation of the Catholic colonial power Spain by its Northern European and often Protestant rivals, who emphasised its violent acts above all else. However, in the eyes of the geologists Lewis and Maslin quote, this figure seems far too modest. As for the scene of the ánthrōpos, defining its opening is equally difficult. Who is the ánthrōpos? When do they appear? On which stage and in which scene? I will argue that the scene of the ánthrōpos as ‘man’ (using ‘man’ as the figure which was historically imaged as male) is intrinsically linked to the stage or theatre of law – more precisely, a European understanding of law rooted in Roman law that transformed into a system of civil and human rights around 1800. But I also want to understand this anthropo-scene as a theatrical scene: it is, very simply put, a scene where the ánthrōpos steps out of manifold relations – all alone, opposing nature, claiming rights, exercising reason. In this sense, I will first examine the notion of ‘man’ in European thought – ‘man’ as the figure that stepped out of ‘nature’ and claimed ‘natural’ rights. Next, I will turn to a scene in which this idea of ‘man’ and their ‘rights’ is challenged and Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 scrutinised: The Fourth Russell Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, and more specifically, the hearing concerning the plans to build a road through the territory of the Nambikwara people. This case is of particular interest to my argument, since the Nambikwara people have played – unwillingly – an important role in European thought. What is the anthropo-scene, then? One of the first appearances of the ánthrōpos on stage is in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos. Siegfried Melchinger suggests that the reforms of the Dionysus theatre under Aeschylus, as well as the increase in the number of protagonists to three, and chorus singers to fifteen – thereby creating unequal numbers – enabled a vertical middle axis.3 Oedipus steps out of the palace through the central door and addresses the audience directly. But before entering the stage, Oedipus has already defined the ánthrōpos. After visiting the oracle and killing an old man at the junction of three paths, he was confronted by the Sphinx, who asked him a riddle: “What is the being that has four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” The Sphinx, being neither human nor animal, speaks of a being that transforms, changing its entire form and its manner of movement as the day passes. However, Oedipus’s answer gives this being a name that transcends time and forms a stable unity: ‘man’ – ánthrōpos. The human being crawls on hands and feet as a toddler, then rises and walks on two legs, but when advanced in years, they need support from a crutch. But at every moment, this being is an ánthrōpos. Later, in Oedipus at Colonus, however, when he is no longer the king of Thebes but rather the most depraved of all – a blind, errant hiketés, a suppliant abandoned by the gods – Oedipus uses another term to describe his younger self: anēr, meaning a man in his prime, a word that is “defined with respect to the very temporal change that Oedipus’s response to the Sphinx sought to subsume.”4 Oedipus thus realises his own transformation. As Friedrich Hölderlin observes of the course of the tragedy: “in what follows, he cannot at all match what was there in the beginning.”5 Although Oedipus solves the Sphinx’s riddle, he clearly does not fit into any of its categories of human development. In the middle of his life he walks on two legs, but in an unstable manner. His heels were punctured as a baby by his father, Laios, who then commanded that he be abandoned in the barren land between Thebes and Corinth. As a result, one of his legs is hurt, as his name signifies, which can also mean “swollen foot”. He limps, just as his father and grandfather did before him. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the reason is that Oedipus’s family, the Labdacides, has an unclear lineage. They are partly progeny of the Spartoi, who grew out of the teeth of the dragon killed by Cadmus; they are autochthonous, but they also have a mother and father. As Lévi-Strauss notes, “In mythology it is a universal character of men born from the earth that at the moment they emerge from the depth, they either cannot walk or do it clumsily.”6 Therefore, according to Lévi-Strauss, the myth of Oedipus addresses a question encountered in the thought of several Indigenous peoples of the Americas: “How is it that we have a mother and a Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 father, rather than just one procreator?”7 He compares Oedipus to myths of the Pueblo peoples that explore whether humans are the children of the Earth or their parents. However, classical philologists have contested the plausibility of Lévi-Strauss’s thesis concerning ancient Greece. Yet this Earth may function ambiguously, not just as ‘one procreator’ in opposition to two parents, as LéviStrauss suggests. Ulrike Haß argues that this human being with both a mother and a father emerged from a “rhizome” of manifold relations, which she associates with the chorus in Greek tragedy.8 In Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the theory of the rhizome is, of course, also fuelled by the anthropological research the two absorbed.9 According to Haß, the question is not whether humans have one progenitor (the Earth) or two (a mother and a father), but rather whether they have only two or multiple.10 In Oedipus Tyrannus, there is the chorus of the people of Thebes, as well as other characters such as Tiresias – who has been transformed from a man to a woman and back and who interprets the will of the gods through birdsongs and sacrificial fires – and the shepherds. These characters live in different relations from those Oedipus himself envisions. At the beginning of the play, when Oedipus – this ánthrōpos who transcends time – steps out of his palace, it is because the city he has taken over is tormented by the plague. He calms the crowd by telling them that he has already sent his brother-in-law, Creon, to the oracle. Creon returns and reports the oracle’s words in an unusual way, in indirect speech. In Notes to Oedipus, Friedrich Hölderlin first reproduces his own translation of the lines: “Phoebus has bidden us, the King has, clearly, | We must hunt down the shame our country’s ground | Has nourished, not nurture the incurable.”11 To this, he concludes: “It was possible that meant: ‘Judge, in a general way, with strict and pure judgements, keep good civic order.’ But Oedipus at once responds to it in priestly language: ‘Through what cleansing etc | And goes into the particular, | Which is the man he means who had this fate?’”12 The oracle speaks of a contamination or pollution of the ground (miasma chōras), and, according to Hölderlin, the reaction could be a change in behaviour “in a general way”, including the way courts sit in judgment, and perform what Cornelia Vismann describes with a neologism as the “nurturing of things” (Dinghegung).13 However, Oedipus, the ánthrōpos, wants to single out one wrongdoer and expel him from the country. As both Michel Foucault and Christoph Menke argue, Oedipus establishes a courtroom scene here.14 However, according to Menke, Oedipus succumbs to the logic of fate that human law attempts to overcome. Furthermore, as both Foucault and Hölderlin point out, Oedipus is ultimately vanquished by the shepherds who have been present the entire time, tending to their sheep in the chōra surrounding the city. Oedipus’s attempt to judge the ánthrōpos as ánthrōpos in a trial results in his own damnation. Hölderlin translated Sophocles after abandoning his own Trauerspiel about Empedocles, and the translation was published in 1806. The Notes to Oedipus Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 that accompany the translation are primarily a discussion of Immanuel Kant’s theory of apperception. However, they can also be read as an analysis of ‘man’ or ánthrōpos. After overcoming the Sphinx, ánthrōpos enters the scene and wishes to judge the wrongdoer and expel all evil; he speaks “in priestly language”. Hölderlin confronts this notion of law with the idea of judging that might emanate from the saying of the oracle: a judging which is “strict and pure” only “in a general way” and related to a certain way of life in the community. For Hölderlin, this conviviality did not only concern ‘men’; his later poems articulate other relations between ‘man’ and ‘nature’, including animals, plants, and clouds. These poems, known as ‘chants’, wonder about the migratory birds’ cognition and the opaque actions of rivers.15 Jürgen Link very convincingly suggests that Hölderlin is highly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about equality, other ways of living together, and different relationships towards ‘nature’.16 But where did Rousseau get his ideas? In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau responds to a question posed by the Academy of Dijon – a group of conservative white men – who asked: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?”17 David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that what is remarkable is not Rousseau’s answer, but that the Academy asked the question at all. They suggest that “American intellectuals – we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas – actually played a role in this conceptual revolution.”18 They particularly examine the influence of Kandiaronk, an intellectual and negotiator from the Huron-Wendat people, based in what is now the Great Lakes region of North America. For Graeber and Wengrow, abstaining from a romanticisation of the ‘noble savage’, the idea of equality spread to Europe during the 18th century through interactions with American intellectuals. These influences, however, can be traced back to much earlier texts, such as Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, otherwise Called America and Michel de Montaigne’s On Cannibals from the 16th century. In the 18th century, however, they found a receptive audience in the rising bourgeoisie. In the bourgeoisie’s hands, however, the idea of equality transformed into a legal concept. Equality, as well as freedom and property, became rights that humans could claim, as Christoph Menke argues in his Critique of Rights.19 Around 15 years before Hölderlin wrote his Notes to Oedipus, the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen established the rights of ‘man’ and citizen. But who is this ‘man’? According to Oedipus, this ‘man’ does not transform over time. In other words, this being is able to form notions that remain the same, even if the beings they designate undergo alterations (e.g., the animal with several legs). ‘Man’ stays ‘man’ and ‘man’ claims human rights. But since this ‘man’ is a concept of the rising bourgeoisie, what is called the ‘rights of men’ are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society. This is the thesis of Karl Marx in his close reading of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, as well as the American Declaration of Independence, in his essay “On Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 the Jewish Question”, a review of Bruno Bauer’s eponymous and infamous book.20 Marx states that the state, or more precisely the nation-state, consists of citizens. Citizens are granted civic rights, such as the right to vote, as well as the rights to freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly, as stated in the German Grundgesetz. Note that these rights are not granted to everyone, but only to citizens. Civil society, instead, consists of ‘men’– and these ‘men’ claim human rights: “Who is the homme who differs from the citizen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society called ‘man’, man pure and simple, and why are his rights called human rights? How are we to explain this fact? From the relationship of the political state to civil society, from the nature of political emancipation.”21 What the civil society promises to ‘men’ is security as granted by the police. The anthropo-scene is where humans as ‘men’ step out of the cosmos and myriad relations to claim their individual rights. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, beginning with Hölderlin’s roommate, Friedrich Schelling, Oedipus made a career in German philosophy as the dialectic ‘figure’ of the modern ‘man’.22 “The aim of every political association”, the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen reads in Article Two, “is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, safety, and resistance to oppression.”23 These rights are natural, or, as Christoph Menke argues in Critique of Rights, they perform a “juridification” [Verrechtlichung] of nature.24 Menke also departs from “Marx's riddle” as elaborated on in “On the Jewish Question”: Why does the political emancipation of man in the Enlightenment (a movement toward equality) come to a standstill in an apolitical order of law, with ‘man’ claiming unchangeable, individual, and natural ‘rights’? Menke emphasises that rights should not be confused with equality. “Equality does not mean rights. Instead, equality of rights is a specific formal determination of equality. The decisive act of bourgeois revolutions is therefore not the decision in favor of equality. Rather, it is the decision to give equality the form of rights.”25 However, Menke is not satisfied with Marx’s response to the riddle. For Marx, the rights of individuals are merely the rights of the “egoistic”26 members of civil society. Extending this critique, Werner Hamacher views human rights as merely the right to private property.27 Menke, by contrast, aims to analyse the “modern form of rights”, arguing that “law becomes the process of juridification: rights are the mechanisms of an incessant legalization of the natural.”28 Unlike the Greek and Roman understanding of law, the modern concept is based on the idea that nature is somewhat at its borders. The concept of human rights posits that the urge to survive is natural and innate and thus beyond sovereign control. However, nature enters law when humans, as living beings, assert their right to self-preservation. Thus, nature is transformed into law: “The modern form of rights inscribes the natural and thereby the pre-juridical into law.”29 Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 The Ontology of Nature I therefore propose describing the anthropo-scene as the scene in which humans enter the stage as unchangeable beings and claim their rights, which are given to them by nature. In this way, nature becomes subject to a “juridification” to borrow Menke’s term. But what is nature then? Is it something given? Is it, like ‘man’, an unchangeable resource from which men can extract commodities – their water, fruit, meat, and rights? This question leads us to another scene of ‘man’s’ appearance. In his seminal work from 1966, The Order of Things, Michel Foucault dates the appearance of ‘man’ on the historical stage to around 1800, when “human rights” were declared for the first time. He famously states that the episteme of “analogy” was followed by “representation” in the mid-17th century.30 Around 1800, this was followed by ‘man’: l’homme. With this ‘man’, a new theory of the sign emerges, as do new sciences such as economics and philology. In his later lectures, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault analyses the episteme of ‘men’ in a new way, regarding civil society [société civile or bürgerliche Gesellschaft], but he is suspiciously silent about Karl Marx.31 But Foucault’s work also influenced a prominent position in current anthropology: Philippe Descola’s distinction of four “ontologies”.32 The main endeavour of Descola’s work is to scrutinise the European notion of ‘nature’, which, like our notions of laws and rights, is derived from Latin and the Roman Empire. Like his friend and rival, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Descola conducted his ‘fieldwork’, as anthropologists call it, in the Amazon, living with the warlike Achuar in Peru for a time. For both scholars, the work of LéviStrauss remains the main reference; Lévi-Strauss supervised Descola’s PhD thesis. Both anthropologists use the insights provided by the communities they spent time with to scrutinise European notions of nature, as opposed to culture, as well as the notion of the human – or rather ‘man’ – in contrast to all other beings. Simply put, Viveiros de Castro contrasts European multiculturalism with Amazonian multinaturalism. For Europeans, there is only one nature, but there are many cultures. Every living being has a body, but not necessarily a soul; only humans have one. For Amerindians, however, there is only one culture, but many natures, depending on one’s perspective. Therefore, every being has a soul, but not necessarily a body.33 Descola expands on this dual opposition, describing four “ontologies” spread across the globe. He examines how subjects identify with the beings they encounter. As a Kantian philosopher, he states that their perception of their counterparts is guided by schemata,34 which Kant describes in his Critique of Pure Reason: “In fact, it is schemata, not images of objects, that lie at the basis of our pure sensible concepts.”35 According to Descola, the “ontologies” resulting from these schemata are animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism. Animism resembles what Viveiros de Castro calls “Amerindian” Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 ontologies or “perspectivism”, developed further in Cannibal Metaphysics.36 However, analogism is similar to what Foucault analysed in Europe before the advent of the episteme of representation: a conception of the world organised through balanced differences amongst billions of tiny elements, legible through similarities. However, Descola also finds this ontology elsewhere, for example, in West Africa, and he views the bloody hybridisation of Spanish Catholicism and Aztec cosmology during the Conquista as the result of their inherent resemblances. Totemism is a strict classification schema of humans and nonhumans. It is the ontology of Aboriginal Australians, among others, and here Descola draws extensively on the seminal work of Elizabeth A. Povinelli.37 Then there is naturalism. ‘Man’ opposes nature. In some ways, this is close to Viveiros de Castro’s concept of multiculturalism and Foucault’s episteme of ‘man’; however, I will not be able to work out the differences here. In this schema, ‘man’ is the one figure that steps out of a network of entangled relations and opposes a nature that is itself ruled by its own laws, as Bruno Latour might add.38 For Descola – or, perhaps, with Descola – one can see different scenes or stages of humans in all four ontologies: scenes of human subjects interacting with the world and other living beings, and matter. However, it is the ontology of naturalism and its inherent opposition of humans and nature that can be related to the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch. In this ontology alone, ‘nature’ becomes an extractable resource and subject to “juridification”. It can also be completely transformed into private property. Descola’s work is also of special interest in thinking about the anthropo-scene, since he reexamines the ontologies in his subsequent study, The Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration, using numerous examples.39 One example is a drawing by Taniki, a Yanomami shaman who, around 1980, was provided with Canson paper, felts and pastels by the anthropologist Bruce Albert and used them to draw a visionary scene. The drawing shows circles of beings in different constellations – a figuration of animism. Descola also presents examples of figurations of the ontology of naturalism, one of which is Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, painted around 1430/1435. This painting was created approximately 250 years before ‘man’, according to Foucault, finally entered the stage of history. However, unlike Foucault, Descola claims that art or aesthetics may have preceded thought for centuries. In the painting, the Chancellor and the Virgin are depicted, with an angel to their right, in front of an expansive landscape framed by two columns; a river, fields, streets, and mountains are rendered beautifully. The figures have clear contours and are singled out from their background. Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 FIG. 1 Jan van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin , c. 1430/1435, oil on wood panel, 66 x 62cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Describing this image as a scene links it to theatre. It would be worthwhile to compare Descola’s analysis with Ulrike Haß’s important study of the birth of the modern picture stage and its epistemes.40 Both Descola and Haß refer to Erwin Panofsky’s famous 1927 essay, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’” [Perspective as a Symbolic Form]. Descola elaborates on different concepts of perspective that differ from the central perspective which governs the picture stage. Haß precisely reconstructs how the picture stage developed in the Italian Renaissance as a visual apparatus, unlike the acoustic stage of Greek tragedy or the interrelated medieval stages in public places. Haß refers to Alexandre Koyré, stating that as early as the 17th century, two processes occurred simultaneously: “the geometrization of space and the destruction of the cosmos”.41 Following Descola, ‘man’ in van Eyck’s painting already is about to step out of the relations of the cosmos, a figure with clear contours in opposition to nature – nature as a landscape of extractable resources, as recently analysed by Jens Andermann.42 Nevertheless, humans remain natural in their desires, drives and interests. During the Enlightenment, when ‘man’ emerges according to Foucault, the picture stage changes its function. Machines and apparatuses that imitate nature become less important. The stage becomes a window to human nature and plays take place in interior spaces, showing nothing but human relations – this is drama. Therefore, the scene of the ánthrōpos can be understood as the scene of law. In its most influential articulation, rights are the ‘rights of men’. Therefore, I will address a tribunal scene, opening the question of who is ‘man’ and what are their ‘rights’. This will lead me to a brief enquiry into the timeliness of Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 16 determined by Lévi-Strauss as constraint and enslavement. Political power can only be the custodian of an unjust power. A classical and coherent thesis, but here advanced as self-evident, without opening the least bit of critical dialogue with the holders of the other thesis, according to which the generality of the law is on the contrary the condition of liberty in the city.”65 But what city? And who lives there? Who are the citizens? Someone called Karl Marx might want to add that the liberty in the city Derrida is talking about is the liberty of a member of civil society. Of ‘men’. The road helps the Nambikwara to become men as legal citizens within the framework of European law. And this is nothing new to them, since they already knew writing in some way – in keeping their proper names secret. But what is happening here in this tribunal scene, some 13 years after On Grammatology appeared? What are the advocates talking about? They talk about a road. If this road represents writing and “the violent spacing of nature”, then it implies that ‘nature’ exists and that this road is necessary to enable differences. Without this road, there would only be silva and hylé: forest outside civilization, pure, extractable matter. However, these Greek and Latin concepts are not the only way to describe the forest. Instead of being pure matter waiting to be differentiated by a road, the forest might also be a place full of beings and spirits of all kinds and genders. In any case, the road, this very road – the BR-346 – is, quite simply, an infrastructural tool for converting soil into capital and transforming myriad relations into extractable ‘landscapes’. It is a road to enable soybean farming and the drying out of Amazonia. In On Grammatology, Derrida says “adieu” to Lévi-Strauss in much the same way he later says “adieu” to Walter Benjamin – claiming that he is just another metaphysician, like Rousseau, like Marx. Like all of them. However, we may still learn something from Lévi-Strauss that Derrida wants us to forget, and this is the awareness of alternative ways of accessing the world. The Nambikwara are not concerned with what Western philosophy calls metaphysics, and even less about the metaphysics of presence. They have their own cosmology, the details of which are beyond the scope of this article. Other ways of constituting worlds do exist: this is the legacy Lévi-Strauss passes on to Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, and Tim Ingold. Therefore, the Nambikwara case at the Fourth Russell Tribunal poses one simple yet difficult question: What are the rights of those who do not wish to be part of civil society? Who neither seek to enter the anthropo-scene nor become citizens who enjoy “liberty in the city”? Do they have rights? Should they claim rights? The tribunal, of course, did not give an answer to these questions. Its main aim was to generate public attention for the Nambikwara and other Indigenous peoples under attack. Following its sessions, the World Bank issued several statements claiming that ‘development’ was imminent in Brazil, regardless of whether the World Bank itself would finance it. The road was thus paved, but the new trajectory has still not been established. Until today, Vila Bela da Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 17 Santíssima Trindade, or Vila Bela de Mato Grosso, hopes for direct access to Bolivia. Some years after the Fourth Tribunal, the 1988 Brazilian Constitution declared the Indigenous peoples’ right to use their land, but it was dependent on the marco temporal (time stamp): they could only claim this right if they had an intense connection to the land at the moment the constitution was declared. The Nambikwara population has grown modestly since the 1980s. Vincent Carrelli, one of their advocates at the tribunal, once visited them with video equipment, which sparked his ongoing project Vídeo nas Aldeias (since 1986). He and his peers provide Indigenous peoples with cameras and skills to document their lives independently and to show other ways of caring for the world.66 Please cite as follows: Jörn Etzold: “The Nambikwara Case.” In: INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries, no. 8, Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17771772. This contribution is licensed under the CC-BY-NC-ND License 4.0 International (Creative Commons, Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives). The reuse of material from other sources may require further authorizations for use by the respective copyright holders. NOTES 1 Lewis and Maslin 2015. I thank Ruth Schmidt for the reference. 2 Las Casas 1992, p. 12. 3 Melchinger 1990, p. 55. 4 Weber 2004, p. 145. 5 Hölderlin 2018, p. 317. 6 Lévi-Strauss 1979, p. 190. 7 Ibid., p. 177. 8 Haß 2020, pp. 31–35. 9 Deleuze/Guattari 1987. 10 Haß 2020, pp. 31–35. 11 Hölderlin 2018, p. 313. 12 Ibid., pp. 313–314. 13 Vismann 2011, p. 19 et passim, trans. by Jörn Etzold. 14 Foucault 2003; Menke 2009. 15 Cf. Etzold 2019. 16 Link 1999. 17 Rousseau 1992, p. 17. 18 Graeber/Wengrow 2022, p. 35. 19 Menke 2020. 20 Marx 1994. 21 Ibid., p. 44. 22 Lacoue-Labarthe 1986. 23 Declaration 1789. 24 Menke 2020. 25 Menke 2020, p. 1. 26 Marx 1994, p. 44. 27 Hamacher 2014. 28 Menke 2020, p. 8. 29 Ibid., p. 36. 30 Foucault 2002. 31 Cf. Foucault 2009; 2010. 32 Descola 2013. 33 Cf. Viveiros de Castro 2014. 34 Descola 2013, pp. 101–107. 35 Kant 1996, p. 213. 36 Viveiros de Castro 2014. 37 Cf. Povinelli, 1993. 38 “Solidly grounded in the transcendental certainty of nature's laws, the modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, denounce and express indignation at irrational beliefs and unjustified dominations”. Latour 1993, p. 36. 39 Descola 2025. 40 Haß 2005. 41 Ibid., p. 293, trans. by Jörn Etzold. Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 18 42 Andermann 2023. 43 References here draw from the English translation: Lévi-Strauss 1992. The original French edition was published in 1955. 44 Derrida 1997. 45 Spivak 1988, p. 295. 46 Weil 1949, p. 9. 47 Cf. Menke 2020, p. 10. 48 This distinction is proper to the English language, whereas the discrimination between Recht/Gesetz, droit/loi and direito/lei is different. 49 Harris 1993. 50 Pistor 2019. 51 Illich 2013; 1971. 52 When I tried to type this word, my program, also called Word, transformed the (c) into a ©: private property is everywhere. 53 Cf. Etzold 2025. 54 For a preview, see Etzold 2024. 55 Sartre 2004, p. 181. 56 Cf. Miller 2008. 57 Campe 2008. 58 Reesink 2010, p. 379. 59 Hensel 1982, p. 290, trans. by Jörn Etzold. 60 Caldeira 2000. 61 Lévi-Strauss 1992, p. 289. 62 Ibid., p. 292. 63 Derrida 1997, p. 108. 64 Ibid., pp. 107–108. 65 Ibid., p. 131. 66 See for Indigenous cinema: Gil Mariño 2024. BIBLIOGRAPHY Jens Andermann: Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape . Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2023. Rüdiger Campe: “An Outline for a Critical History of Fürsprache: Synegoria and Advocacy.” In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte , vol. 82, no. 3, 2008, pp. 355–381. Teresa Caldeira: City of Walls. Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Bartolomé de las Casas: Kurzgefaßter Bericht von der Verwüstung der Westindischen Länder . 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AUTHOR Jörn Etzold has been Professor of Theatre Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum since 2017. He is the spokesperson of the interdisciplinary research unit Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply, funded by the German Research Foundation DFG. In 2023, Etzold was Senior Fellow of the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality–Inequality in Latin America (Mecila) in São Paulo. He has conducted research and taught at the universities of Giessen, Erfurt, Weimar and Frankfurt am Main, as well as Northwestern University. He is currently researching infrastructure and aesthetics, theatre and performance in postindustrial environments and theatre and legal criticism. He has also been active as a theatre Jörn Etzold The Nambikwara Case INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 20 maker and translator.