What Is Anthropogenic? on the Cultural Aetiology of Geo-Situated Visual Imagery in Indigenous Amazonia

Abstract

This article focuses on the problem of how native Amazonian peoples perceive and construct visual imagery on geological landscape and theorise on its causes and origin. Many native theory-building strategies seem to intertwine anthropogenic markings on lithological surfaces with systems of knowledge regarding geological and biological phenomena as a whole. When native Amazonian perceptions and theories are taken into account, it is not only graphic imagery, as a discrete entity, that is under consideration, but rather complex epistemological articulations between visual graphic expression and geo-environmental context. These cognitive articulations conceive geological phenomena just as culturally and intentionally constructed as rock art is considered in a Western perspective. The neuropsychological phenomenon of pareidolia is examined as a perceptual-cognitive trigger that intertwines geological features with sensorial constructs affording cultural responses. This phenomenon is exemplified by presenting evidence on the entanglement of rock art and geomorphic features in head representations with facial elements, which occur diversely and consistently throughout Amazonia and the Andes. The aim of this article is to explore the relational nature between Indigenous knowledge and geological phenomena, considering eventual consequences upon the ways native Amazonians conceptualise causal agency in geo-situated visual imagery. When geological phenomena are qualified as human-made, or made by ancestral, spiritual or animal/vegetal non-human persons, or are themselves considered as persons, this posits a basic question: what is anthropogenic?

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