João Miguel Silva

This article explores how Indigenous communities of the Brazilian Amazon conceive the relationship between humans and the natural world, contrasting their relational, eco-ethical understanding with the mechanistic view of nature that emerged in early modern Europe. Drawing on ethnographic work among the Yanomami, Tukano, Enawene-Nawe, Wajãpi, and Krahô, we connect early Indigenous critiques of the European drive for accumulation to present-day debates over multispecies agency. Since these Indigenous ontologies frame plants, animals, and spirits as intentional beings within networks of reciprocity, they reveal a metaphysical continuity between humans and nonhumans, challenging Western assumptions about nature as inert matter. By juxtaposing these perspectives with contemporary reflections—from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to Davi Kopenawa—we argue that Indigenous eco-ethical knowledge from the Amazon offers an alternative to the exploitative logics driving the current ecological crisis and expands previous concepts of Indigenous relationality. We suggest that the Indigenous Amazonian worldview invites a reimagining of human–nature relations grounded in complex forms of multifaceted relationality.

The present article offers a contrastive analysis of articles published online by two media outlets of two different countries dealing with science, technology and interrelated topics. In so doing, the goal is to explore the role played by gender dynamics in the pragmatic strategies which underlie the communication of scientific knowledge to the wider audiences by the mainstream media. The multi-layered interpretative approach centred on corpus-based discourse analysis and visual semiotics adopted in this paper, it is argued, allows for a more holistic understanding of the role played by the media in the perpetuation of power imbalance and gender stereotypes among their readership, better understood here as discursive communities, and their everyday communicative practices. It is further suggested that an analysis of how knowledge is mediatized can offer ways into understanding wider cultural patterns and values.