Waman Poma, a 17th-century Indigenous Author

questioning Anthropocentrism in the Colonialcene

Abstract

This article presents partial results of the current cycle of the Community Project “ReCânone, Translation, Subtitling and Interpretation Workshop of Indigenous, Afro-Portuguese and Latinx materials” from the Federal University of Rio Grande do
Norte/Brazil. This initiative aims to work with culturally situated translations of records produced in present-day Peru by the indigenous chronicler Waman Poma de Ayala’s “New Cronicle and Good Governance” [Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno] between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Based on a critical and reflexive reading of some images and the written texts that accompany them, the authors offer an initial proposal of Waman Poma’s work as an “Opera Aperta”. The visual and written texts presented here are in the process of being translated according to the principles of intercultural translation since we understand them initially as written-visual semantic fields that stimulate us to weave a story against the backdrop of colonial impositions. Thus, we take advantage of materials elaborated by the chronicler to explore the status of anthropocentrism and its environmental, ontological, and epistemological implications. To this end, we draw on the conceptual approach of the Colonialocene, which draws attention to the observation of the fabric of life constituted by more-than-human realities in contexts of colonial otherness. To open the reflection to a Waman Poma whose work reveals the possibility of inhabiting non-Cartesian, cyclical, and dense worlds, we call for intercultural analysis as a source for a sensibility that inspires contemporary movements toward a decolonization of the academy. The conclusion highlights the relevance of broadening the epistemic basis of scientific discussion, stretching the canon of contemporary scientific discourses and including these references in the curricula, seminars and events related to science production in Brazil, Abya Yala and the Global South.