Nature Fictions: Scientists, Indians, and Activists

https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n29.10

Carlos Diz
Universidade da Coruña, España
carlos.diz@udc.es

Eleder Piñeiro Aguiar
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile
elederpa1983@gmail.com

Abstract:

This work focuses in what we have called “Nature fictions”, that is, the set of devices, practices, techniques, and narratives through which Nature is constructed, embodied, reclaimed, and imagined. Through successive processes of assemblage and re-assemblage of those compounds Nature acquires its political, fictional, and performative dimension, thus becoming a rhetoric, mythological, and epistemic resource with which we bargain with the world. Beginning with the choice of three paradigmatic figures (scientists, Indians, and activists), we intend to explain those fictions through a qualitative methodology, based on bibliographical revision and theoretical discussion. By combining historiographic and anthropological analysis, we will explain how fiction penetrates and nourishes the field of science, we will attend to the processes of naturalization of the indigenous, and will track Nature poetics and politics in contemporary activism.

Keywords: activism, science, fiction, nature, North-South thinking, originary peoples.