Photo by Pablo Bayley Angeleri.
There is a persistent geography to the production of scientific knowledge. Across different disciplines and historical periods, territories in the Global South have supplied specimens, data, field sites, labor, and local expertise, while institutions elsewhere have disproportionately retained the authority to formulate research questions, establish categories, interpret results, and produce general theories.
This is not simply a legacy of colonial science. Recent studies of biodiversity research, ecology, and paleontology describe versions of the same asymmetry in contemporary scientific practice. Researchers in the Global South remain disproportionately associated with fieldwork, data collection, and place-based expertise, while institutions in the Global North exercise greater control over research agendas, interpretation, theory-building, and scientific recognition.[1] ‘Parachute or ‘helicopter’ science is therefore not only about who travels and who collects. It concerns the unequal distribution of epistemic authority: who provides the material from which knowledge is made, and who acquires the authority to make that knowledge general.
The Amazon has long been embedded in this global geography.
For centuries, the region has been imagined as a reservoir of plants, animals, minerals, artifacts, and knowledge about nature. Colonial expeditions moved through its rivers and forests collecting materials that would eventually populate European museums, botanical gardens, laboratories, archives, and scientific texts.
But the Amazon did not only supply raw materials. It also supplied knowledge. Indigenous pilots navigated rivers; collectors located plants and animals; ecological expertise made possible the identification, preparation, and circulation of natural-history specimens. Yet these contributions were routinely obscured once materials entered metropolitan scientific institutions.
The Amazonian case was not exceptional. It formed part of a wider political economy of knowledge connecting colonial and postcolonial territories to scientific centers elsewhere.[2] Nor does this geography map neatly onto a simple opposition between Europe or North America and the rest of the world. Such hierarchies can be reproduced within the Global South itself. In Brazil, asymmetries separate institutions in the Amazon from better-funded scientific centers in the South and Southeast; another hierarchy emerges when universities, including those located within the Amazon, treat Indigenous peoples and traditional communities primarily as sources of data, access, or ‘traditional knowledge’, rather than as participants in the formulation of concepts and research questions.
The geography of extraction is therefore also a geography of epistemic authority. Knowledge has travelled extensively. Indigenous names, observations, practices, specimens, and ecological expertise have entered global scientific networks for centuries. What has travelled less easily is the authority to determine what these materials mean and what concepts should organize their interpretation.
Materials travelled. Specimens travelled. Knowledge travelled. Epistemic authority did not travel with them.
What would happen if we reversed this movement? What if the Amazon were approached not primarily as a source of raw materials for theory, but as a place from which theory itself could emerge?
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Extracting relations
I come to this question not only as a historian of science but as someone born and raised in the Brazilian Amazon. I grew up in Mãe do Rio and Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River, and much of my research has involved following Amazonian plants and artifacts from the region into European museums, archives, and botanical collections, a history I have also explored through film. This positionality also shaped my encounter with Amazonian collections in European museums, where objects from the region can appear radically detached from the historical and cosmological worlds from which they came. Among these materials are Indigenous masks now held at the Science Museum of the University of Coimbra and plant specimens collected in the Rio Negro by the nineteenth-century British botanist Richard Spruce and preserved at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
These collections belong to different empires and historical moments. Yet they reveal a common operation. Things were not simply extracted from the Amazon. They were extracted from relations.
The botanist Spruce arrived in the Amazon in 1849 and spent fifteen years travelling through Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador. His journeys coincided with Britain’s expanding economic presence in Latin America and Kew’s growing role as an imperial center for the collection and circulation of economically useful plants. His expeditions relied heavily on Indigenous guides and collectors, whose intergenerational knowledge enabled him to navigate rivers, locate plants, and prepare specimens, even as their contribution largely disappeared from the authoritative scientific knowledge produced from those collections.[3]
Among the plants Spruce encountered in the Rio Negro was Banisteriopsis caapi, one of the principal plants used in the preparation of ayahuasca.
For botanical science, caapi could travel remarkably well. A fragment could be collected, dried, transported across the Atlantic, placed in a herbarium, named, compared with other specimens, and incorporated into a taxonomic system.
But the plant became portable partly because its relations did not.
Spruce encountered caapi within Indigenous ceremonial worlds involving music, collective gatherings, other plants, ritual objects, and forms of knowledge. During a dabucuri ceremony in 1852, he encountered caapi alongside tobacco, fermented drinks, and sacred paxiuba flutes. He later secretly removed four of these flutes, wrapping them in mats and hiding them aboard a vessel to prevent his Indigenous crew from discovering them.
The episode condenses something fundamental about colonial extraction. A plant becomes a botanical specimen. A sacred instrument becomes an ethnographic artifact. A ceremony becomes an observation in a travel account.
A relational world becomes a collection of things.
This does not mean that botanical specimens produce false knowledge. The specimen embodies a particular epistemological operation: a living entity is separated from many of the relations through which it was known and transformed into an object capable of circulating within another knowledge system. Colonial science could learn where a plant grew, how it was prepared, and what effects it produced without recognizing the relationships through which that plant was understood as a being in the world. Knowledge could be incorporated while the epistemology that produced it was classified as belief.
What if the plant is a relative?
There is another way to encounter caapi.
Jaime Diakara, a Tukano intellectual and researcher from the Vaupés region on the border between the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon, begins somewhere quite different from botanical taxonomy. Drawing upon ancestral memory and oral history, Diakara recounts a time ‘before time’, when Caapi appeared not first as a plant but as a human being. Its body was divided among the founding families of the region, establishing relationships among plant, ancestry, kinship, territory, and knowledge. To consume Caapi is therefore not merely to ingest a psychoactive substance. It is to enter into a relationship with a primordial being and activate a mode of knowledge transmission. This account and its genealogical understanding of Caapi are central to the longer article on which this essay draws.
Placed beside Spruce’s botanical specimen, Diakara’s account does more than provide ‘cultural context’. It destabilizes the specimen itself.
Botany asks: What species is this plant?
Diakara allows another question to appear: Who is this plant?
The asymmetry between these questions begins before we decide which answer is true. One is readily recognized as knowledge about reality; the other can easily be relegated to the category of myth. This distinction has a long intellectual history. As G. E. R. Lloyd has shown through comparative studies of ancient systems of knowledge, categories such as rationality, science, and myth cannot simply be projected across cultures as self-evident or universal standards of intellectual achievement.[4]
The problem, then, is not the existence of myth as a category, nor the suggestion that every cosmological proposition should be accepted as empirical fact. It is what happens when classifying an account as myth forecloses its epistemological, ontological, and political consequences. Diakara’s account can then be preserved as cultural narrative while botanical taxonomy retains the exclusive authority to tell us what caapi really is.
This reproduces precisely the problem I have encountered in the history of science: perspectives grounded in myth, kinship, ritual, or dream are admitted as objects of anthropological interpretation but rarely allowed to transform the analytical categories through which historians describe knowledge itself.[5]
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Cosmo-historical critique
To take Indigenous cosmologies seriously is not necessarily to believe them. It is to allow them to have consequences for thought. As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has argued, the challenge is not simply to think about Indigenous thought, but to think with it — allowing its concepts to transform the conceptual apparatus through which we apprehend the world.[6]
This is where the global division of intellectual labor becomes important again. Indigenous peoples have repeatedly entered histories of science as informants, guides, collectors, healers, or bearers of ‘traditional knowledge’. Their expertise can be acknowledged while still being treated primarily as information. The scientific institution recognizes that Indigenous people know things, while retaining for itself the authority to determine what those things mean.
The South supplies the ethnography; the North supplies the anthropology.
The South supplies the specimen; the North supplies the taxonomy.
The South supplies the raw material; the North supplies the theory.
Making Indigenous contributions more visible is therefore necessary, but insufficient. A decolonizing history of knowledge must also ask whether Indigenous intellectual traditions can alter the conceptual frameworks through which knowledge itself is understood.
This is why it matters how we read Davi Kopenawa, the Yanomami shaman, political leader, and co-author with anthropologist Bruce Albert of The Falling Sky.[7] Kopenawa is frequently invoked in discussions of Amazonian environmental destruction, mining, Indigenous rights, and the forest. But there is a danger in reading his work primarily as testimony: an Indigenous voice describing destruction while the work of conceptualization takes place elsewhere.
Kopenawa is not simply providing evidence for theories of colonialism, extraction, or environmental crisis. He is theorizing them.
His account describes a world in which humans, animals, plants, ancestors, spirits, rivers, and winds exist through relations that cannot easily be contained by the modern division between nature and culture. Knowledge, too, is relational. Dreams and shamanic encounters with xapiri are not simply representations or private beliefs but modes through which knowledge is produced, transmitted, and verified. Building on Kopenawa’s ideas, I argue that dream-knowledge and spirit-agency should not be relegated to the realm of symbolic metaphor, but taken seriously as part of a contested history of what counts as knowledge and evidence.
Taking Kopenawa seriously means more than adding an Indigenous perspective to an existing environmental debate. It means allowing apparently stable categories — nature, object, human, nonhuman, evidence, knowledge — to become unstable.
This does not mean that Amazonian cosmologies possess the correct answers while Western science has the wrong ones. Nor should ‘Indigenous knowledge’ become another homogeneous and timeless category. Kopenawa, Diakara, and João Paulo Lima Barreto, a Tukano philosopher and anthropologist, occupy distinct intellectual positions. Their differences are precisely what allow us to take them seriously as theorists rather than representatives of a singular ‘Indigenous worldview’.
What they offer is not another reservoir from which useful concepts can be extracted, but the possibility of conceptual friction.
A museum says: object. Kopenawa says: relation.
A herbarium says: specimen. Diakara says: ancestor.
A colonial archive says: collection. Another history may say: rupture.
Their encounter exposes the historical contingency of categories that have presented themselves as universal. This is what I have called a cosmo-historical juxtaposition: placing colonial archives and collections alongside Indigenous cosmologies without deciding in advance that one constitutes knowledge or historical evidence while the other constitutes myth or belief. The point is neither to erase their differences nor to make one validate the other, but to ask what becomes thinkable when neither is granted an automatic monopoly over reality. In the longer formulation of this method, the encounter is intended to be not merely additive but transformative: it asks historians to reconsider the very terms through which science, evidence, and knowledge are historicized.
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Thinking from the Amazon
Today, the Amazon is once again presented as indispensable to the future of the planet: as a reservoir of biodiversity, a carbon sink, a regulator of global climate, and a source of ecological knowledge. There is an urgent material truth to these claims. But the vocabulary can change while the geography of knowledge remains familiar. The Amazon can continue to provide biodiversity, genetic materials, ecological data, and Indigenous knowledge while authority over the concepts through which planetary crisis is understood remains concentrated elsewhere.
There is another possibility: the Amazon can be understood as a place from which concepts travel.
This does not mean looking to Indigenous cosmologies for ready-made solutions to climate change. After centuries of extracting plants, minerals, labor, artifacts, and ecological knowledge, turning Indigenous thought into a new resource for saving the planet would risk becoming another form of extraction.
The proposition is more demanding. It requires giving up a degree of conceptual sovereignty: recognizing that encounters with other epistemologies may transform not simply what we know, but the categories through which we know.
What happens to environmental politics when a forest is not only an ecosystem but a field of social and cosmological relations? What happens to the category of ‘natural resource’ when plants and animals are approached as participants in relationships rather than objects outside human society? What political possibilities are foreclosed when such propositions are classified as myth before their consequences can even be considered? And what happens to environmental justice when colonialism is understood not only as the seizure of territories and resources but also as the imposition of particular ways of determining what those territories contain and what kinds of beings matter?
These are theoretical questions. And they emerge from the Amazon.
This is why the distinction between knowledge from the South and theory from the South matters.[8] Knowledge can be collected, acknowledged, cited, incorporated into databases, or celebrated as ‘traditional knowledge’ while the conceptual categories through which it becomes intelligible remain untouched. The issue, then, is not whether the South produces knowledge — it plainly does — but who is authorized to turn particular knowledge into concepts with more general explanatory force. Theory, in the sense intended here, requires something more: recognizing Indigenous intellectuals not simply as sources of knowledge about Indigenous relationships with forests, plants, animals, and objects, but as interlocutors capable of challenging the categories through which we understand forests, plants, animals, objects, knowledge, and ultimately the Earth itself.
Perhaps this is where the Amazon’s most insurgent possibility lies.
Not in recovering an untouched Indigenous past.
Not in providing another source of raw material — material or intellectual.
But in forcing us to think differently.
For centuries, colonial science asked what plants, objects, labor, and knowledge could be extracted from the Amazon. The more difficult question today is: What happens to our own categories when we allow the Amazon — and other intellectual worlds across the Global South — to theorize back?
Raphael Uchôa is a tenured researcher in the History of Science at the Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins (MAST), in Rio de Janeiro, and an associate researcher with the ECO Amazônia project at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. A former Adrian Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge, his research explores the histories of science, extractivism, and the circulation of botanical and ethnographic knowledge between the Amazon and the Global North. Alongside his academic work, Raphael has developed a career as a screenwriter and researcher for documentary films addressing the history of science, extractivism, and environmental conflicts in the Amazon.
[1] Nussaïbah B. Raja, Emma M. Dunne, Aviwe Matiwane, Tasnuva Ming Khan, Paulina S. Nätscher, Aline M. Ghilardi, and Devapriya Chattopadhyay, ‘Colonial History and Global Economics Distort Our Understanding of Deep-Time Biodiversity’, Nature Ecology & Evolution 6 (2022): 145–154; Nakamura, Gabriel, Bruno Eleres Soares, Valério D. Pillar, José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho, and Leandro Duarte, ‘Three Pathways to Better Recognize the Expertise of Global South Researchers’, npj Biodiversity 2 (2023): 17; ‘Tackling Helicopter Research’, Nature Geoscience 15 (2022): 597.
[2] Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009).
[3] Raphael Uchôa, ‘”Savage Knowledge”, Ethnosciences, and the Colonial Ways of Producing Reservoirs of Indigenous Epistemologies in the Amazon’, Journal of Social Ontology 10, no. 2 (2024): 1–23.
[4] G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambivalences of Rationality: Ancient and Modern Cross-Cultural Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); G. E. R. Lloyd, Expanding Horizons in the History of Science: The Comparative Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
[5] Raphael Uchôa, ‘Amazonian Cosmologies, Plant–Human Relations and the Colonial Entanglements of Indigenous Artifacts’, History of Science (2026).
[6] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Metafísicas canibais: Elementos para uma antropologia pós-estrutural (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009).
[7] Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).
[8] Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012); Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
