Progress as our downfall

In both the text by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing come back to Amerindian cosmogonies and how humans relate themselves to nature in the coming-into-existence of life as we know it. Lets start with the text ““Is There Any World to Come?” by Danowski and Viveiros de Castro. They discuss the, very anthropocentric, idea that humankind is actually at the very foundation of the creation and development of the world. And how our collective memory and viewpoint could play a vital part in our further existence and that of the world. Imagine humankind existing before there was even a world, and being the “primal substance” to give birth to Everything with a capital E. This could change the way we look at the place and environment we life in/on. Instead of being placed, being separate from earth, we are its mother and responsible for what it is now. Progress happened in the past and brought us all the riches we have now. Thus we should not focus on concerning ourselves with how to “get” even more from this spacerock. Do not drain but sustain, focus on all we have now and stabilization. This will result in progress when we look back. What we could call the natural world, or “world” for short, is for Amazonian peoples a multiplicity of intricately connected multiplicities. (p. 5) However the interpretation of the word people is different for the Amerindians. All is people as the world can be seen as a political entity or a society of societies, and one can only be a person within a society. We are all made of the same, yet in different forms. Making us all oriented toward the same goal of survival. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing takes on roughly the same ideas of the Amerindians as the previous text in “’ the Mushroom at the End of the World”. She also argues the idea of humankind being promised stabilization through progress in the shape of mass production, modernization, globalization etc. Us humans are made by development. But she argues that we are contaminated, we are not yet stabilized and may never be. But this does not only have to mean negativity. Like the mushroom we have to look for signs of positive sprouts through the rubble. A change in perspective could show you possibility through disaster. Like evolution, divergence can cause chaos but can also provide survival. This shift would then, in turn, result in a larger focus on the present. The Primitive is our origin, not something to be looked down upon. This text does remind me of the text by Robert Esposito and its argument that contamination is unescapable and vital to societies. Like immunity, we have to embrace that what threatens us to immobilize it and use it.