For someone like me who has research interest in myth and religion, Juan Alejandro Chindoy’s A Decolonial Philosophy of Indigenous Colombia contains wonderful analyses of the Kamëntšá people’s notions of storytelling as well as the spiritual rituals of the Yajé ceremony. Yajé is commonly known as Ayahuasca (a psychoactive brew).
The book offers to our understanding of aesthetics and political theory through an articulation of the Kamëntšá notion of beauty/aesthetic life. Chindoy chooses to analyze the festival of Bëtsknaté
or “the day of the dancing of forgiveness” to reveal this aesthetic dimension of his people’s thought. One of the most important arguments that Chindoy makes is that the dance should not be read purely for its religious significance. A member of the Kamëntšá, Chindoy and I have talked many times about how his people are framed in popular culture as if their entire lives are governed by religious consciousness. It’s as if they supposedly do nothing but pray and eat potatoes all the time. The scholarly analyses of Bëtsknaté are no exception. However, while Bëtsknaté has religious elements, particularly the aspects of the festival involving forgiveness, the primary purpose of the festival is to manifest aesthetic possibilities for creativity and transformation. It is, in Chindoy’s words, “an aesthetic celebration of life.”
To help make this distinction clear, Chindoy provides two concepts through which the Kamëntšá understand their relationship to land: fsants and Tsbatanamama. Fsants is land that is used to satisfy basic needs. While Tsbatanamama is the notion of land that we express through expressions such as, in English, “Mother Earth”; it is the unifying force of all living things.
I would say that fsants is the concept of aspect that John Locke emphasizes when he argues that land can become property. For Locke, one of the essential questions is how does the natural bounty of the land, which is the manifested through Divine Providence, and accessible to everyone equally, become something by which one person can justify excluding others? His answer is through labor. It is through infusing land with our labor that it becomes disconnected from the bounty of nature as it is given, and is transformed into something that one has exclusive rights to utilize at the exclusion of others.
I highlight Locke’s view not to say that the concept is the same but, instead, to highlight the ways that it is different. During the Bëtsknaté, both fsants and Tsbatsanamama are celebrated as two parts of the same whole. While Tsbatsanamama is the source of fsants, it is because of fsants that the Kamëntšá are able to take so much time to deeply and joyful commune with and celebrate Tsbatanamama. In other words, the ultimate value of our capacity to labor on land is to increase our capacity and opportunity to enjoy existence. Through the dance, the Kamëntšá realize, remember and rejoice in the fact that they are connected to all living things. This is the reason why Chindoy rejects interpreting Bëtsknaté in terms of purely religious significance. If this awareness is viewed in purely religious terms, one misses that the Kamëntšá are not worshiping Nature, but are instead participating in nature as family. In a way the Bëtsknaté can be understood as a massive family reunion with mother nature.
I will end with a quote from Chindoy that beautifully expresses the aesthetic dimensions of Bëtsknaté:
Bëtsknaté is a celebration of being, as it fundamentally appears to Kamëntšás. Through generations, the members of this culture have noticed that all existing things come to be, flourish, and eventually die. Human condition, they claim, follows a similar path. “We are today here, dancing, but we might not be able to dance next year,” express the dancers. And, while dancing, they continue, saying, “Our ancestors danced here, in our land, their positive and negative energies remain with us, but not all of them can sing with us, and there might come a day when one of us might not be remembered.” Instead of taking a pessimistic stance to life, the dancers celebrate life as it comes; we assume that there is no other option other than to celebrate existence as it comes, with pain, suffering, hope, and tragedy.
Darian Spearman
Darian Spearman is a Doctoral Student at the University of Connecticut. His research interest are philosophy of religion, philosophy of myth, aesthetics and philosophy of education.
