The Stool: A Place for Listening to Ancestral Knowledge

This article addresses the stool of thought from the perspective of a researcher from the Bará people of the Upper Negro River, an Eastern Tukanoan people situated in Northwestern Amazonia. Bará children are offered the stool, a being consisting of a man and a woman, in order to sit upon to listen and appropriate the concepts constructed by experts in order to become cosmopolitical managers in their territories. The stool is a place of experiencing knowledge formation and production. From the time when a child is in the maternal womb, our experts - also called shamans - prepare them whilst parents encourage their children to sit on the stool amongst the elders to maintain the patrilineage and matrilineage. The stool forms a means for knowledge transmission, an ancient method of listening. In Northwestern Amazonia, (un)relating and (un)learning with more-than-humans during ethnographic practice by listening to the ancestral knowledge of other humans is an Indigenous science, which also results in the wellbeing of the entire universe.