Overcoming Anthropocentrism. Dialogical Reflections With/From Amerindian Thought and The Anthropology of Life

Abstract

We aim to go beyond modern eurocentric anthropocentrism, assuming as a starting point the imperative need to break with the epistemological and at the same time ethical limitations that this concept has implied, which allows us to recover everything non-human (organic and inorganic) as a co-constitutive element of social life. We place our reflections within the so-called posthumanism, a term that designates a set of "new" theoretical and practical approaches to the social and human sciences which are oriented-adapted to the so-called post-human condition: awareness of belonging to the world and its profound degradation resulting from human action. We understand that this reflection is enriched dialogically with both Amerindian thought and the anthropology of life. Both proposals assume a conscious development of the impossibility of a "we without a world" (a humanity devoid of a world or environment) and coincide in rejecting the ontological framework of Western capitalist and anthropocentric civilization, allowing us to understand the concept of being human, but not in terms of its exceptionalism (in the Western metaphysical tradition Homo sapiens or Dasein) but as it is assembled with everything that surrounds it, that is, in creative co-evolution and not separated from other species or beings with which it shares and composes the world.