Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Indigenous Narratives of Creation and Origin in Embrace of the Serpent, by Ciro Guerra

Indigenous Narratives of Creation and Origin in Embrace of the Serpent, by Ciro Guerra In Ciro Guerra’s film Embrace of the Serpent (2015), cultural exchanges between the central characters reveal the origin narratives and the curative power of plants valued by Indigenous cultures of the Amazon. This article analyzes how Embrace of the Serpent expresses Indigenous rationality in the origin narratives as the shaman Karamakate confronts Western travelers and scientists. For these Indigenous cultures, knowledge and its reproduction are equivalent to ancestral songs and rituals such as the ceremony of the Ayahuasca. This article supports these ideas not in a filmic analysis but by exploring central aspects and scenes in the film associated with intercultural exchanges and the ritual of Ayahuasca. Finally, Embrace of the Serpent highlights the difficulty of distinguishing between the rationality of orality and writing with which Native cultures of the Americas understand the world that surrounds them. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png English Language Notes Duke University Press

Indigenous Narratives of Creation and Origin in Embrace of the Serpent, by Ciro Guerra

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/indigenous-narratives-of-creation-and-origin-in-embrace-of-the-serpent-0JwSCwYl8O

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Regents of the University of Colorado
ISSN
0013-8282
eISSN
2573-3575
DOI
10.1215/00138282-8237520
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In Ciro Guerra’s film Embrace of the Serpent (2015), cultural exchanges between the central characters reveal the origin narratives and the curative power of plants valued by Indigenous cultures of the Amazon. This article analyzes how Embrace of the Serpent expresses Indigenous rationality in the origin narratives as the shaman Karamakate confronts Western travelers and scientists. For these Indigenous cultures, knowledge and its reproduction are equivalent to ancestral songs and rituals such as the ceremony of the Ayahuasca. This article supports these ideas not in a filmic analysis but by exploring central aspects and scenes in the film associated with intercultural exchanges and the ritual of Ayahuasca. Finally, Embrace of the Serpent highlights the difficulty of distinguishing between the rationality of orality and writing with which Native cultures of the Americas understand the world that surrounds them.

Journal

English Language NotesDuke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2020

References