In a 2014 article in The Guardian, an Indigenous shaman of the Yanomami people of the Amazon rainforest named Davi Kopenawa offers a devastating critique of white society. It is formed of excerpts from multiple interviews, which form the basis of his memoir The Falling Sky, compiled and translated by his French anthropologist collaborator Bruce Albert. Here I bring the dual lenses of philosophy and dance studies to explore how Kopenawa’s lifelong interaction with white people facilitated his reworking (...) of Yanomami shamanic discourse into a parrhesia against the “epidemic fumes” of climate change, on behalf of the Yanomami of the Amazon, white people, and all the beings of the earth. (shrink)

Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made (...) to serve as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized). (shrink)

It is well known the harmful effects that savage capitalism has been causing to the environment since its introduction in a sphere in which a different logic and approach to nature are the essential conditions for the maintenance of the ecosystem and its complex relations between humans and non-human organisms. The amazon rainforest is a portion of the planet in which for thousands of years its human dwellers have been interacting with nature that it is understood beyond its (...) physical condition. Thus, to what extent Amazonian’s approaches to nature could be considered as a moral philosophy through which the way of conceptualizing nature and its non-human denizens enhances the continuity of life and the intimate relations between entities? To answer this question, I will explore the cosmological system of the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon with whom I lived for 5 months between July and November 2018, and thereby elucidate the spiritual relations that this society has with the metaphysical domain of nature. (shrink)

If dangerous climate change is to be avoided, it is vital that carbon sinks such as tropical rainforests are protected. But protecting them has costs. These include opportunity costs: the potential economic benefits which those who currently control rainforests have to give up when they are protected. But who should bear those costs? Should countries which happen to have rainforests within their territories sacrifice their own economic development, because of our broader global interests in protecting key carbon sinks? This essay (...) develops an argument from the “principle of fairness,” which seeks to establish that outsiders should pay states with rainforests so as to share the costs of protection. If they do not, they can be condemned for free-riding on forest states. The argument is, I suggest, compelling and also capable of enjoying support from adherents of a wide variety of positions on global justice. (shrink)

Scientific realists don’t standardly discriminate between, say, biology and fundamental physics when deciding whether the evidence and explanatory power warrant the inclusion of new entities in our ontology. As such, scientific realists are committed to a lush rainforest of special science kinds (Ross, 2000). Viruses certainly inhabit this rainforest – their explanatory power is overwhelming – but viruses’ properties can be explained from the bottom up: reductive explanations involving amino acids are generally available. However, reduction has often been (...) taken to lead to a metaphysical downgrading, so how can viruses keep their place in the rainforest? In this paper, we show how the inhabitants of the rainforest can be inoculated against the eliminative threat of reduction: by demonstrating that they are emergent. According to our account, emergence involves a screening off condition as well as novelty. We go on to demonstrate that this account of emergence, which is compatible with theoretical reducibility, satisfies common intuitions concerning what should and shouldn’t count as real: viruses are emergent, as are trout and turkeys, but philosophically gerrymandered objects like trout-turkeys do not qualify. (shrink)

Những năm qua, một số tác giả Việt đã thử sức đưa sách của mình giới thiệu đến quốc tế bằng việc xuất bản sách tiếng Anh tại thị trường Mỹ và trên các nền tảng như Amazon.

Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, often focus on managing the impact of these technologies on workers. They leave the question of how these technologies are designed or how workers can determine their own futures unanswered. This approach risks surrendering the Future of Work debate to techno-determinist imaginaries aligned with corporate interests. Using Cornelius Castoriadis’ early writings on worker struggles in French Tayloristic (...) factories and his later oeuvre on conflictual social imaginaries, I propose an agonistic approach to the Future of Work. Not merely companies implementing workplace technologies, but also workers themselves possess agency in determining the Future of Work. Workers’ frequent contestations against machinic surveillance and technologically mediated coordination of the labour process disclose an alternative Future of Work in which technologies are used to enhance worker autonomy rather than bureaucratic control. Worker struggles at Amazon Mechanical Turk illustrate this agonistic dynamic: Amazon mobilizes algorithmic management to fragment and control a workforce of globally dispersed remote workers, but the latter form online social communities and create counter-technologies to reappropriate control over the labour process. (shrink)

Ophiocordyceps is a fungal pathogen of ants of the tribe Camponotini. It is called zombie fungus, since it changes the host behavior, causing them to die in an exposed position, typically clinging onto and biting into the adaxial surface of shrub leaves. This study aimed to describe the occurrence of parasitic associations between Ophiocordyceps and ants of the genus Camponotus in an urban fragment of Atlantic Rainforest in southeastern Brazil and to measure the rate of hyperparasitism in Ophiocordyceps by (...) other fungi in the same location. We found 57 individuals of four species of ants and three species of fungus. The age categories of fungi were equally distributed, and rate of hyperparasitism was 17.5% (n = 10). The sampled area was recognized as an important site of Ophiocordyceps occurrence. (shrink)

For centuries, fiction—particularly fables—has seamlessly combined storytelling, moral lessons, and societal reflections to engage readers on both emotional and intellectual levels. Despite extensive research on the benefits of reading and the emotional responses it evokes, a critical gap remains in understanding what drives readers to form deep emotional connections with specific works. This study seeks to identify the characteristics of a book that foster such connections. Using Bayesian Mindsponge Framework analytics, we analyzed a dataset of 129 Amazon reviews of (...) Wild Wise Weird, a collection of 42 fables that intertwine traditional storytelling with contemporary sensibilities, offering life lessons, humor, and social commentary. Of these reviews, approximately 66% expressed love for the book. The findings reveal that readers who describe the book as unique, whimsical, quirky, or innovative are more likely to express affection for it. Similarly, readers who are drawn to the book’s illustrations and characters tend to form stronger emotional connections. The cultural richness and representativeness of the book also emerged as significant factors in fostering readers’ love. The book successfully captures and conveys the depth, charm, and moral essence of Vietnamese culture to a global audience. Readers have expressed heartfelt gratitude after engaging with the book, underscoring its success in fostering meaningful emotional connections. Thus, insights from this analysis offer actionable recommendations for stakeholders in the literary ecosystem, from authors and publishers to marketers, to enhance readers’ emotional attachment and commitment to books. (shrink)

Mấy dòng ngắn để bố cáo có vidéo ngắn (khoảng gần 1 phút) của anh Jordan Kelly trên Amazon.

In the essay I intend to revalue the descriptive principle in the contemporaryAmazonian geography, as presented to us by the geographer from Pará EidorfeMoreira (1960). Laterally, I call the attention of Amazonian geographers to thesensitivity of his work, which is not present in the bibliography of the training coursesin Geography in Pará. The methodological strategy is descriptive-interpretative with aphenomenological tone. I conclude: the refusal of the description is installed by aprejudiced effect of our current formation in relation to the procedures (...) consideredtraditional; the production of knowledge, eager for explanation/analysis, can produceethical violence; the abstraction - which flirts with abstractionism - imposed by thehasty generalization of certain ideas about the Amazon, from geographical studies,installs an artificial cut between the symbolic and the emotional in the act of makinggeography in our region. (shrink)

Được mừng tuổi có thích hay không, điều này còn tùy thuộc tính cách, quan niệm từng người. -/- Nhưng hôm nay, ngày đầu năm 1-1-2024, được mừng tuổi thì tôi cảm thấy rất thích thú. Vì đó chính là “em”: sales.

In the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America new environmental ethics have emerged that postulate intrinsic values in the non-human. These biocentrisms do not derive directly from the deep ecology of Arne Naess, presenting several differences, but there are also important similarities, which are briefly noted. Southern biocentrism recognizes the rights of Nature but does so in an intercultural perspective, is much more politicized, and is part of ̳ontological openings‘ to alternatives of ecological community that go beyond modernity.

Cuốn sách do TS. Vương Quân Hoàng biên tập làm rõ hơn bản chất, quá trình khởi sinh, và cơ chế của hiện tượng serendipity hay khả năng dẫn đến những đổi mới mang lại cho các cá nhân hoặc tập thể những lợi thế cạnh tranh.

Cuốn sách dày hơn 120 trang, vừa được tác giả hoàn thành vào đầu năm nay, có những bài viết đề cập những vấn đề vẫn còn đang được bàn luận nhiều như ChatGPT (ChatGPT, help!). Tổng cộng cuốn sách gồm khoảng 40 bài viết ngắn, dựa trên bối cảnh và hình thái xã hội Việt Nam, được chia thành ba phần: Science Sobriety (tạm dịch: Tỉnh thức trong khoa học); Business Intelligence (Tri thức kinh doanh); và Mandering Thought (Suy (...) nghĩ vẩn vơ). (shrink)

Based on accounts and rewrites, this article intends to think about paths in photography history, their connections between ethics, and use of image and narrative appropriations. Taking the Pará Amazon as a place of reflection, an effort is made to rethink the power relation-ship constituted by a specific point of view in the history of image. This text had the collaboration of Izabelle Louise Anaúa Tremembé, an indigenous student at Federal University of Pará (UFC). In her accounts, she talks (...) about appropriation culture, exotification of sacred objects, and sexualization of female bodies, as well in her speech, she affirms the lack of knowledge when it comes to their rituals and even brought up that indigenous autonomy in making art has always existed. The accounts were articulated on the occasion of the meeting between teachers and photography and cinema producers, in April 2019, Alcantara, Maranhão. (shrink)

Amazon Book Review Series of “Meandering Sobriety”.

This article travels through the rivers and lands of a territorial body into a lived and imagined Amazon, a place of origin and affection that, telling the stories of the Ykamyabas –a tribe of women without husbands who lived in the lower Amazon river region –, gather the traces left for their mythical imagery in the archetypal relationship of the wild woman in narratives that come mainly through orality, from ways of life that subvert the split of the (...) world operated by the dualisms culture/nature, male/female, body/mind. To articulate scenes and, through photography, reconstruct realities, in a knowledge revealed by the mythical fact of the dream, of becoming an artist, of the subjectivity invested with the body, planting clues to other possible worlds. (shrink)

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

This text is part of an on going research. It deals with the relationship between the production and experience of the places on the edge of the Trans-Amazon Highway (BR 230), which cuts the North and a Northeast portion in the East-West direction. Considering its programmatic sense of occupation of the territory, as opposed to the explanation already accepted, which expresses the road as an engineering system, therefore, means to flow, is that I propose to think the road as (...) an everyday living space, emphasizing the educational dimension to understand the existence of places. My purpose is to analyze the spatial imagination underlying the external understanding to the Trans-Amazon, in the educational plan, regarding the unique geographicity produced by local groups living near the road. Methodologically, I seek a dialogue between a phenomenological design and the existentialism, developing field of research procedures, literature review that supports the concepts of spatial imaginations, place and field education, critical reading of official documents in the MEC sites imagery record in dialogue with the representation of those that live on the edge of “Strip”. As an indication of preliminary findings point out: 1. The denial of places as a geopolitical strategy which is materialized in the educational process and planning politics; 2. The inescapable geographicity of groups that self recognize and are related contradictorily to the Trans-Amazon Highway; 3. The Countryside Education as opening or denial of the place, both for those who live it, and for those who do not live it, which can be ignorance widespread factor in terms of knowledge of the Amazon spatiality or coping and creation of a new geographic and cartographic knowledge about the places cut by “Strip”. (shrink)

Mọi sự đầu tư lớn lao, mọi suy nghĩ nhân văn, mọi hành động hướng thượng, rốt cục vẫn cần tới nền tảng kinh tế. Thật không may (hoặc là may), các giao dịch tạo ra giá trị kinh tế cuối cùng vẫn chỉ có thể hiện thực hóa trên thị trường. Thị trường, tên gọi hay của cái chợ, là nơi những kẻ bán lẻ vĩ đại như Amazon đang kiểm soát. Nơi 30-70% giá trị giao dịch bị (...) cắt trừ thẳng tay bởi ông chủ Jeff Bezos thích phóng tàu vũ trụ trong lúc tắm biển Carribean. (shrink)

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

This text presents actions from the “live” moment of the ritual performance My Colour (Is) Red in which a political, ideological and ritualistic body seeks to understand the social dramas experienced by people who live and demark spaces in Amazon through performatic experiments that create connections with the social and anthropological life of Amazon. They act as resistance elements, poetical struggles and crossings, because it is a matter of (re)existing to exist in some places of this cartography.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Meandering Sobriety”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird".

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Meandering Sobriety”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Meandering Sobriety”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.