Native cinema versus extractivism: dialogues between techniques and worldviews

Abstract

Cinema, as a Western cultural industry, presupposes the technical and civilizational progress characteristic of modernity, but also the habits, beliefs, ideologies, and institutions of the modern subject. To describe the modern worldview, this article draws on Martin Heidegger's reflections on the dynamics of technology and the inherent risks of mass media. It also employs concepts that allow us to consider the situation of Indigenous cinema in the face of extractivism, including Bruno Latour's asymmetry, Yuk Hui's technodiversity, and Viveiros de Castro's Amerindian perspectivism. From the perspective of the ontological change in anthropology, this article seeks to develop a theoretical reflection on film production by members of Indigenous communities. A brief section is included to define the object of study, which encompasses documentary film, ethnographic film, ethnofiction, and protest documentaries. In this regard, an archaeological reading is proposed—in the sense proposed by Foucault—of films associated with the origins of ethnographic documentary in the Americas is suggested, based on testimonies and reflections from contemporary Indigenous filmmakers who oppose extractivism, understood as a colonization dynamic characterized by the intensive extraction of natural resources and the occupation of strategic territories. This process harms communities and produces epistemic violence, ethnic decharacterization, racism, and ethnocide.