Ethnopoetics, Cosmopoetics

Adugo Biri: The Legible Jaguar is the title of a short and strange work written by the recently passed English researcher Gordon Botherson (1939-2023), which inspired a series of virtual books that I coordinate and that is kept at UNAM’s National Laboratory of Oral Materials: Adugo Biri: Ethnopoetics (https://lanmo.unam.mx/adugobiri/libros.php). A hermetic essay addressing rigorously and lyrically, as if it was a sort of palimpsest, the Amazonian Bororo jaguar’s skin, from the perspective of risk (beyond his encyclopaedic master piece Indigenous America in Its Literature: The Books of the Fourth World, 1997), a Mesoamerican political-ritual symbolism and a short story by Jorge Luis Borges (The Writing of the God), impregnated, like the skin itself, by the written synthesis and some kind of obsession or “return of the repressed”, inscribed in its origin.

The other inspiration was undoubtedly the astounding invention of American poet Jerome Rothenberg with ethnologist Dennis Tedlock and other experts (indigenous or exogenous): linguists, translators, or native interpreters, beginning with the great Alcheringa magazine from the 1970s and with Rothemberg’s anthology (2017 [1968)] of “tribal poetries” of the world (or as anyone would prefer to name them: primitive, indigenous, etcetera), Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. Either way, it is an universal projection, and the poetic that generalizes (or “extends”, in postmodern terms) has nothing to do with the traditional (traditionalist) indigenist poetics; instead it connects formally and politically with the so-called historical avant-gardes, by the way, in contradictory and conflictive ways. Octavio Paz’s work is kind of an avatar of this matters. There are other connections or projections that, in the light of a journey back in time, such as the one we point out here, were defining: among them there is a fundamental one, the Brazilian anthropophagy (and Haroldo de Campos’ concretism, it’s heir) [see box]. Or with the action-poetry by Toulouse poet and anarchist Serge Pey, translucinator of stories and songs from the Huichol people (Nierika. Songs of Vision from the Countermountain, 2012).

Adugo Biri: Ethnopoetics, a transdisciplinary research, translation, and publishing project Involves undergraduate and graduate students in research, writing, translation, editorial preparation and design, as well as researchers, translators, and poets from Mexico, North and South America, and Europe. This project ends with the publication of virtual books, free to read and download, organized in an open, free, heterogeneous way, with additional sound and visual materials (songs, images, videos), always going through rigorous academic evaluations. It focuses on studying, translating, and critically and creatively editing works related to ethnopoetics, ritual or ceremonial poetics, shamanic and healing (therapeutic) poetics, as well as cosmopoetics of indigenous peoples from Mexico and the world, startingfrom an extended, generalized, and expanded notion of poetics, connected to anthropology, psychology, and history of art and film, and often linked to research and practices of the artistic avant-gardes of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Finally, materials from such heterogeneous origins as the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic regions, the Araucanía and Tierra del Fuego, the Mazatecan Sierra and the northwestern Pacific coast, the Tortuga Island or the Lacandon jungle, Russia and Peru, the Maghreb and Persia—materials that are the work of artists and researchers who connect with them, as Wolfgang Paalen or Antonin Artaud, Serge Pey, Viveiros de Castro, Gamaliel Churata or Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman.

Sometimes institutionally and sometimes through other ways, our research networks expand across several countries, in each case as a result of an interest or a desire to internationally project not a personal work but research, a creation whose images and concepts are irreductible (or invisible) to the circuits of mass information. And it is not about contacts in the so-called social networks, but about personal relationships, about friendships about workers who believe in marginal creation, collectivity, anti-capitalist invention, alterworldism, mutual support, and anarchy.

The project is an enriched continuation, always updating several previous projects: Adugo Biri: Ethnopoetics; Primitivism and Madness: Poetics of the avant-gardes, and Ritual Poetics: Song and Healing. The drifts of the project and the time we live, have led us to define another instance or moment of our research, even more universal, corresponding to the hazards and the vanishing and projection lines that have emerged in the course of our work, in three main areas: poetical research emanating from the Amazonian and Lacandon jungles; the discussions on orality and writing and the book in the horizon of indigenous universes, and what might be called counter-analysis of the conquest and colonization from the point of view of Amerindian perspectivism and from the stagings of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.

The contributions to this project are multiple, from its form of production with students (scholarship holders or not, graduate or not) in a publication format that is free in its form and content, or by collaborators from countries as different as Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Hungary, Iran, Japan, Morocco, Peru, United States.

Researchers, translators, editors, poets who have crossed the digital borders to translate, share, and transfer their work through the roads of the Internet. Politically significant work that constitutes a technical innovation and a dimension of interdisciplinarity and intermediality with theoretical contributions related to indigenism and the avant-gardes, the oral and the written: perspectivism and anthropophagy.

To summarize, this is innovative research from many points of view: theoretical creativity and transdisciplinary vocation; students’ learning and participation; political and social involvement specifically with the struggles for autonomy, particularly indigenous; intersections of writing and translation, publishing, film, and plastic arts; anthropology and psychoanalysis.

Our strongest connections are with France (Toulouse), Chile (Valparaíso), Brazil (Acre, Minas Gerais, Pará); with groups of Peruvian or Argentinean poets and translators, and generally with experts dedicated to ritual or indogenous poetics, experts that can come from the academic or the ritual realms; linguists, ethnologists, philologists, or shamans.

Our current project, Cosmopoetics: Jungle Writings and Theaters of Cruelty, grows from several disruptive hypotheses. In the first place, the revindication of the so-called “indigenous” poetics, which in a global context can be defined as universal, multiversal or (in the framework of the perspectivist theories by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s, author of Canibalistic Metaphysics, 2011, heir of Brazilian anthropophagy’s radicalism) leading to cosmopolitics which, from our point of view, drifts od extremes itself—in the horizon of immanence—as a cosmopetic. Following romantic writers and surrealist poet Paul Éluard. we need to repeat: “There are other worlds, but you are in this one.”

The project splits opening another perspective, the question about book and writing in Amerindian cultures. We have made great progress on this topic, starting with Brotherston’s contributions, and moving on to more recent work that began to be translated in the previous stage of our project, mainly thanks to the collaboration of our Brazilian partners in the states of Acre and Minas Gerais.

Other possible collaborations travel deep inside the Lacandon jungle and even in the Solitudes by Luis de Góngora, considered from the point of view of the Baroque silva or selva (jungle), ecopoetics and animism. About the Theatres of Cruelty inspired by Antonin Artaud’s work, we will project the opposite image: the conquest, the transformation into an spectacle of the battle of Tenochtitlan and Moctezuma’s dead in Artaud’s “the first show of the Theatre of Cruelty,” (The Conquest of Mexico, 2005) and the desperate and anarchic Journey of Omagua and Dorado—and the chronicles of “the marañones”—by Lope de Aguirre, involving the defeat of the conquistador before the jungle while searching for El Dorado, and the mtephysical ambition of defeating Nature and betraying God to become a “cosmic tirant”.

Our project searches to distance itself from any orthodoxy or dogmatism. So we allude to the very concepts that define it, beginning with the idea of ethnopoetics, whose plural was set from the beginning but which we had to review in the light of well-founded criticisms that, however, have limits (the particle ethno and its link with a false otherness or alterity established by colonialism and Eurocentrism, without considering precisely another non-projective alterity, we no longer know whether interior or exterior, from inside or outside, from Rimbaud’s phrase “I is other”: an schizoid otherness. Other concepts equally and universally rejected today, like primitivism and madness, which we abandon or betray just as the first one, holding to critical reasons, but secretly maintaining them as a sing of the complexity—“primitive means complex, wrote Jerome Rothemberg, creator of ethnopoetics, which finally he substituted with “human poetics”,—an expression of a reason or a delusion immanent ti human experience in a cosmopolitical sense and at the same time cosmopoetic of this ontological notion, animist and shamanist, pluralist and perspectivist, ritualist and perceptive. Hence the recourse to supplementary concepts, really accurate as those of ritual poetics or ancestral poetics or generalized poetics as a formula—this last one—that restores all its potential to those “primitive” poetics.

Cosmopolitics, cosmopoetics… Irruption of hallucinating or hallucinatory subjects. Submissive subjects versus subjects without subjection, without subject. Irruption of conceptions of a real world: experimental, empirical, intelligible, imaginary, aesthetic, sensual. Insufficient human aspects because the night (as perceived by Sor Juana) invaded and overflowed the sublunar universe, human but also animal, vegetable, or inanimate. The animate and the inanimate as forms of life and forms of creation and regeneration. The human and the non-human, the animate and the non-animate, animal, vegetable, mineral.

Before today’s academic conditions, our project proposes several actions of expansion or transformation that include, in a certain way, the Zapatista utopian conception of the intergalactic, but also, as we have said, of the Amazonian cosmopolitics, or more generally, of the indigenous cosmopolitanism of Gamaliel Churata and, above all, of the great cosmos of the Fourth World, micro and macrocosm: oral, written, visual, performative, or tactile—written in the skin and on the skin. Cosmopolitics that are, certainly, expressed in other geographies and anatomies of the American world, in its bodies and its territories, in systems and writing articulated as ritual performances or therapeutic devices: maps, contact zones of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the underworld and the sky, the imaginary and the real, the psyche and the body, the past and the future, the dreams and the “real”—singing and destruction accompanying the unnameable and the innumerable as methods of dreaming and writing.

For Brotherston, as for us (and Borges), history is a book, chronology is a book, time is multidimensional, space expands in multiple directions, cyclical, synchronous, and linear, at the same time, successive, spiral, simultaneous, alternative, or hallucinatory directions, in the frame of spaces at a time multidimensional, cosmic and ritual, corporeal and astronomical, macro and microcosmic, diurnal and oneiric, anatomical and shamanic, characteristic of a “body without organs” like the one hallucinated by Artaud. And even if Artaud’s imaginary was wrong, it incised—as the sacrificial knife penetrated, as he says, in the skin and in the flesh of the sacrificed— the skin and the imaginary of the peoples. The person is skin, the world is skin. The sensitive, the intelligible, the thinkable is skin.

Skin in the Americas: a reason to migrate. Skin and migration should be etymologically and imaginatively related words. But times change: today skin and migration are signs of planetary complexity, vindicative, stranger to identities—trans-identitarian in the sense of becoming—nomadic. As in their origins: anarchic, acratic or stateless.

Without skin, without State: without identity or without that outer coil built as a delicate, subtle, scratched fortress, over which one writes or feels, smells or hears. In another forthcoming book, I talk about that poetic and ethnological, philosophical and musical (baroque in the deepest and most extensive sense of the term) fold, not only counterconqueror as Lezama Lima’s islander baroque, or the neo-baroque or the trans-baroque or the ethnobaroque, dissolvent and heretical. Universalists by nature, inclined to the discovery of other worlds or to the self-discovery of unknown universes inside ourselves and in the other worlds that wrap us up. We feel animated by internationalism in these infamous times of brutal individualism, leave apart nationalisms; by the federalist spirit of anarchism; by communism and socialism; by animism, shamanism, archaic utopia.

Also science working in connection with poetry, as in the times of Goethe and Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt. Today, Philippe Descola and Viveiros de Castro. It is not the romantic cosmos anymore—unjustly vilified as such—but other worlds in communication with ours, enchanted but also open and inspired by the sciences and the horizons opened by the European expansion. An expansion that was accompanied and supported, it is true, by the extractive projects that paradoxically the wise Alexander von Humboldt analysed and fought against more than anyone else, while extracting a lot from native languages.

Time moves forward, cyclical. It proceeds and recedes: it is present. Space expands in a complex and imaginary way, subject to multiple irreducible contemplations, in connection with other times and spaces at once successive, alternative, and simultaneous—disorganized or multiple, from the perspective of the “empire of capital”—impossible to reconstruct from anywhere. Time moves forward. The planet’s destruction moves forward. Capitalism moves forward.

A few months ago, artist Ursula Biemann inaugurated in the MUAC an exhibition that underlines our concerns about the planet. There we recovered a series of video essays about conflicts over territory: rights of the “living jungle” and rights of the “juridical jungle.” At the bottom lies a poetic (an ethnopoetic) that enunciates, also from the jungle: “The living jungle is living being’s jungle, human and non-human,” a place where “micro and macro-organisms connect with us,” a complex cosmological architecture that shelters all kinds of beings, in mutual aid: humans and nonhumans intertwined, mutually interdependent, in the process of trial or experiment, like a test for “engendering futures.” Cosmopoetics: ear, silence, world, performativity, rituality, art, history, politics, psyche, ecology, end of world: an endless Apocalypse.

Forest Mind: jungle intelligence. “Nature’s intelligence?” “Do jungles have a cognitive dimension?” “Do they have consciousness?” The vegetal and the mineral, the “non-molecular”, are active agents of history and politics, like listening and feeling. The forest listens, feels and thinks. It has consciousness, although we are not aware of it. It sings, sings through many voices—choruses, soliloquies, roars, silent bellows, thoughts.

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