Amazonian cosmologies, plant–human relations and the colonial entanglements of Indigenous artifacts

This article examines the deep entanglement of Amazonian artifacts housed in European museums, colonial science, and Indigenous cosmologies. By situating specific collection- and curation processes within their historical contexts, it reveals how scientific practices were intricately tied to colonial expansion, functioning as tools to legitimize and sustain European hegemony. Analysis of Amerindian masks and botanical specimens from the Amazon Basin – two distinct yet interrelated sets of Amazonian artifacts currently held in European institutions – highlights how colonial extractive practices, often reliant on Indigenous slave labor, and geopolitical dynamics shaped the acquisition, interpretation, and display of Indigenous materials. The article also critiques how European scholars and political regimes have treated regions such as the Amazon and Africa as interchangeable, enforcing a reductive, hierarchical view of non-European cultures and reducing the diversity of Indigenous societies to objects of control and categorization. By interweaving insights and critiques by Indigenous and Amazonian intellectuals, particularly Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, and drawing on cosmologies of the Rio Negro region, in the Amazon, this study calls for a fundamental reassessment of knowledge-production frameworks shaped by colonialism and scientific exploration. It underscores the inadequacies of Eurocentric approaches and advocates for the transformative potential of Indigenous epistemologies – not as peripheral perspectives, but as foundational contributions that challenge, reshape, and enrich global histories of science.