Renata: When considering how the Dâw traditional culture could fit within the edge of contemporary culture (that i have been calling nowdernity), what are its contrasts, oppositions and points of contact?

Fabiola: A possible point of contact is education that leads to self-awareness, of learning how to deal with questions that come from one’s own self. what we’re talking about here is establishing the very conditions that enable the existence of “doubt”, of an attitude of questioning. do indigenous people allow themselves to doubt their own cosmological constructions as we westerners often choose to do? joining a christian religion affirms this attitude of questioning or does it represent an alignment that is more political than religious? such oppositions are explicit and are found in any layer of comparison. one must bear in mind that the civilizing project based on the idea of “progress” was painstakingly constructed in absolute opposition to our primitive past, that, paradoxically, today we wish to “save”. european gardeners shaped plants as a way of affirming the undoubted power of man over nature. this practice remains even in the streets of sao gabriel da cachoeira, the closest city to the native ethnic tribes from the rio negro Amazonian region, which I think I can call one of the most desolate places in the world if we take into account their physical isolation from the urban centers of western “knowledge”. another possible threshold in the conservationist perspective in our current relationship with nature (and the imagination of natives as being part of “nature”) might lead to situations in which the amazon could become a sort of “biodiversity model zoo”, in which natives and ethnic tribes are there to be seen by tourists or examined as scientific “specimens”, in both cases exotic “creatures” inhabiting a controlled environment.

complete interview :  http://sundayed.com/2010/07/10/technology-and-gender-in-the-heart-of-the-amazon-an-interview/