Que monstro é esse? (De)colonialidade e a sabedoria da floresta

Abstract

This article investigates the construction of imaginaries of monsters and monstrosities attributed to Indigenous peoples in the context of the colonization of South America, as well as the implications of this construction for understanding colonial practice itself. In the first part, Todorov, Césaire, Certeau, and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha are brought into the discussion to demonstrate that Indigenous monstrosity was discursively constructed to legitimize domination.

In the second part, the article shifts the focus, arguing that the colonial process itself—with its extreme violence—constitutes the true monster: a system that, according to Aníbal Quijano, Mignolo, Arendt, and Haraway, represents the elaboration of an ethical banalization. It reveals how control and violence, driven by interests, subjugated Indigenous logic and ontology, thus constructing a monstrous figure of colonialism itself. An analysis of the historicity of the colonial period allows for the articulation of the tension between the imaginary of monstrosity and the praxis of power, contributing to the deconstruction of colonial discourses and to the advocacy for reoriented epistemologies. Finally, through the perspectives of Kopenawa, Albert, and Viveiros de Castro, an analysis of the Yanomami cosmogony is presented, in which the xapiri - beings of ambiguous appearance and action - demonstrate that monstrosity, from an Indigenous point of view, is an integral part of reality and the sacralized landscape, where some xapiri may bring healing, while others may bring death.