Embodying equivocations: Ecopolitical mimicries of climate science and shamanism
International audience ; This article proposes a non-recursive detour for the perspectival concept of 'equivocation' by applying it to an ongoing ecopolitical approximation. I will describe how a Brazilian climatologist and a Yanomami shaman translate their concerns about the Amazonian rainforest in order to reach each other´s audiences. Drawing on their public appearances and published texts, it will be argued that they mimetically rephrase their environmental thinking according to—what they assume to be— the conceptual imagination and the formats of communication of the Other. The shaman's and the scientist's connective gestures are thus taken as part of an exceptional form of public, ecopolitical dialog, concerned with the future of the rainforest. Whereas the concept of 'equivocation' has proven useful to disclose the translational-ontological gap between the native´s and the very ethnographer´s conceptual languages, this article aims at looking somewhere-else than the recursive, ethnographic Self. In particular, the argument will pay attention to how equivocations and the so-called 'ontological differences' might be embodied by specific actors, in specific situations, inviting us to describe how these differences are de facto navigated and co-implicated by other people than anthropologists. It has been argued that recent anthropological approaches that appear to endorse notions of ontological incommensurability between cultures or peoples are alarmingly ill-equipped to confront the common crises we all face, such as climate change. The appeal to common threats and collective solutions is particularly obvious in political contexts outside academia, but it is also present in anthropological reflections on itself, especially in the critiques of the ontological turn and its apparent failure to provide a politically tangible account for global forms of domination and 1