Care as negotiation: translation and the indigenization of conservation through the Amazon
Carlos Fausto in conversation with Hanna B. Hölling, Samidha Pusalkar, Juliana Robles de la Pava, and Marcello Rechberger
A Quarup post painted with the tihigu angagu motif, Ipatse Village, Xingu Indigenous Park, MT, Brazil, August 2015. Photograph by Carlos Fausto. Image derived from: Carlos Fausto, “Chiefly Jaguar, Chiefly Tree. Mastery and Authority in the Upper Xingu.”
As part of the ongoing conversations of the Critical Conservation project, on July 8, 2026, we had the pleasure of welcoming Carlos Fausto for an extraordinary conversation on what conservation might become when approached through plural forms of worldmaking and ways of knowing. Together, we reflected on how engaging with the ecologies of knowledge cultivated across the Amazon opens new epistemic and political possibilities for rethinking conservation beyond its conventional frameworks.
A Brazilian anthropologist based at the National Museum of Brazil, Fausto received his training at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Collège de France/CNRS. Throughout his distinguished career, he has held visiting appointments at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the University of Chicago, Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies, the University of Cambridge, the University of Bergen, and, most recently, Princeton University, where he served as Global Scholar affiliated to the Brazil LAB, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
Beginning with a broader reflection on how anthropological practice itself can become a form of conservation, Fausto invited us to question what conservation seeks to preserve. Drawing on his long-term collaborative research with the Kuikuro people of the Upper Xingu, he discussed initiatives dedicated to documenting and transmitting musical knowledge, demonstrating that conservation is not necessarily concerned with preserving objects but with sustaining living practices, relationships, and forms of knowledge transmission. One example of this approach is the project Upper Xingu Material Culture in the Past, Present and Future: Collaborative Documentation of a Multiethnic Tradition in Brazilian Amazonia, led by Fausto within the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme. Funded by Arcadia and hosted by the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum, the project extends this understanding of conservation through collaborative documentation of material knowledge and its transmission. In this context, conservation emerges less as the protection of material culture than as the ongoing cultivation of social and cosmological relations through which knowledge remains alive.
A central thread throughout the conversation was the importance of engaging Indigenous communities as protagonists of their own conservation projects rather than as participants in externally defined agendas. Fausto emphasized that conservation must begin by listening to communities’ own understandings of continuity, care, and cultural vitality. In many Amazonian societies, the preservation of material objects is not the primary concern. Instead, what requires care are the practices through which knowledge is enacted, the social relations that sustain collective life, and the intergenerational transmission of skills, stories, songs, and rituals.
The discussion also underscored the diversity of Indigenous perspectives across the Amazon. Referring to differences between Tupi–Guarani communities – where artefacts often occupy a less central place – and the Kuikuro of the Upper Xingu, Fausto demonstrated that there is no singular Indigenous approach to conservation. Rather, each community articulates its own understanding of what should endure and how knowledge circulates. He noted that songs, designs, and other forms of cultural production are often understood not as inventions of individual creators but as knowledge received through dreams and encounters with non-human beings. Creativity thus emerges less as personal expression than as the careful transmission of relationships extending across different worlds. These differences call for conservation practices that are attentive to local realities and responsive to the distinct ways communities understand relationships between people, objects, territories, and the more-than-human world.
An especially significant moment of our discussion revolved around the relationship between conservation and identity. Conservation is often understood as the preservation of an object’s identity established through collective agreement and maintained over time. Drawing on Amazonian ethnography, however, Fausto suggested that this assumption becomes difficult to sustain. In several Indigenous societies, the collective “we” is constituted not through sameness but through alterity. Rather than being grounded in an internal essence, personhood and collectivity emerge through relationships with others: human and other-than-human alike. Knowledge itself frequently comes from outside, acquired through encounters with enemies, spirits, animals, and other beings. What we conventionally call identity is therefore better understood as an ongoing process of becoming other, in which alterity is not opposed to continuity but is precisely what makes social reproduction possible. This dynamic, which Fausto has explored extensively through the notions of predation and familiarization, invites conservation to move beyond preserving fixed identities toward sustaining the relational processes through which persons and communities continually transform themselves.
The conversation also turned to questions of authority, apprenticeship, and the legitimacy of transmitting knowledge. Who has the right to teach? Under what conditions can knowledge circulate beyond the community? Who has the authority to document knowledge in the first place? These questions became particularly salient in discussing the recording of Kuikuro ritual songs. As Fausto explained, while ritual specialists may receive payment for allowing songs to be recorded, the resulting recording cannot itself be sold as a transferable object. Knowledge does not become alienable simply because it has been materially fixed on a cassette or another recording medium. Rather, it can only be legitimately transmitted through embodied performance – from one voice to another – requiring that the songs become part of the memory and practice of the person who learns them (Fausto 2024). This mode of transmission reflects indigenous pedagogies that differ fundamentally from institutional models of education, as knowledge is acquired through relationships of trust, apprenticeship, and gradual incorporation rather than through the circulation of an object or information detached from those social relations. At the same time, songs are transmitted through distinct artistic lineages, each maintaining its own stylistic inflections and modes of performance. Musical knowledge, much like a musical score, only truly exists in its performance and remains inseparable from the relationships that sustain it.
Building on these reflections, one of the most compelling ideas that emerged from our conversation was Fausto’s understanding of anthropology as a practice of translation capable of generating productive dissonances in the ways we conceptualize the world. Rather than seeking perfect equivalences between different ontologies, anthropology creates spaces in which concepts unsettle one another, expanding the possibilities of thought. Yet translation is never innocent. By rendering indigenous concepts into Western academic vocabularies, anthropology inevitably transforms – and at times betrays – the worlds it seeks to describe. This tension is not a failure but a condition of dialogue, provided that translation remains reflexive about its own limits. Understood in this way, the anthropological translation of Indigenous knowledge has the potential to broaden both the epistemic and political horizons of conservation.
This perspective raises an important challenge for contemporary conservation sciences across natural and cultural domains. Much of ecological conservation continues to regard human presence primarily as a source of disturbance. Yet ethnographic and archaeological research across Amazonia has demonstrated that the long-term relationships between Indigenous peoples and their environments have been fundamental to shaping and sustaining the extraordinary biodiversity of these territories. Rather than threatening ecosystems, Indigenous practices have actively participated in their historical formation and ongoing vitality.
A key concept that emerged from this discussion was that of an ecology of knowledge: a constellation of relational concepts through which communities understand, produce, and transmit knowledge. Thinking through ecologies of knowledge may offer a path toward the indigenization of conservation science, a mode of resistance grounded not in replacing one epistemology with another but in creating meaningful encounters between different ways of knowing. Such an approach requires working alongside Indigenous intellectuals while developing practices of translation that, although always partial and inevitably insufficient, generate precisely the productive dissonances to which Fausto referred.
These ecologies of knowledge also operate as forms of resistance against the occupation of Indigenous territories and the violence imposed upon them. In this context, Fausto described Indigenous knowledge as a political instrument capable of contesting external regimes of territorial control. Our conversation consequently turned to the contemporary discourse of the rights of nature. As Fausto observed, this legal language remains distant from Indigenous conceptual worlds, which often produce profound dissonances not only with Western philosophical assumptions but also with the juridical frameworks that regulate relationships in modern states (see also an intervention on this topic on our Natureculture Lab blog). Yet an important insight emerged from this tension: dissonance is often made possible through resonance. While the notion of the rights of nature does not fully translate Indigenous ontologies, it nevertheless creates points of convergence through which dialogue, political action, and legal recognition become possible.
These resonances point to a permanent and necessary aporia between equivocation and compatibility, an unstable but productive space that characterizes both anthropological translation and collaborative work with Indigenous communities. Rather than resolving conceptual differences, conservation may instead learn to inhabit them, recognizing that it is precisely through negotiating partial translations and irreducible differences that new forms of knowledge, care, and political practice emerge.
Building on these discussions of translation and relational knowledge, one of the most powerful ideas that emerged during our conversation was Fausto’s proposal that conservation can also be understood as a different way of creating and sustaining kinship. Central to this perspective is the concept of familiarization, which invites us to rethink relationships with the more-than-human world beyond the language of domination or control. Rather than understanding human engagements with ecosystems through the notion of domestication – typically associated with mastery over nature – Fausto suggested that many Amazonian societies cultivate relationships based on processes of becoming familiar with other beings (Fausto and Neves 2018).
In this context, animals are not simply domesticated objects but beings with whom enduring relationships are established. The English term “keeper”, Fausto suggested, captures well these forms of coexistence since itexpresses, at the same time, the notions of possession, responsibility, and care. Such relationships offer another way of thinking about conservation: not as the management of passive environments but as the careful cultivation of ongoing relationships between humans and multiple beings.
This discussion also led us to critically examine what Fausto described as the contemporary decolonial vocabulary and the limits of what has become politically acceptable to say. While acknowledging the enormous importance of decolonial perspectives, he emphasized that Indigenous concepts cannot simply be assimilated into contemporary academic or political terminology. Rather, many Indigenous notions are translated by community members themselves through concepts they consider capable of resonating with external audiences, even when these translations exceed or complicate the boundaries of politically sanctioned discourse.
A particularly illuminating example is the monumental collaborative work of translation undertaken by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert in The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Kopenawa and Albert 2013). Rather than merely translating Yanomami cosmology into Western concepts, the book constructs a shared space in which two distinct epistemological traditions remain in dialogue without collapsing into one another. It exemplifies precisely the kind of productive translation that Fausto described throughout our conversation: one that neither erases difference nor fetishizes incomparability, but instead allows conceptual dissonances to generate new understandings.
Kuikuro Masque-tourbillon (Atuguá), Sepê Kuikuro Collection. Image derived from: Carlos Fausto, “Le masque de l’animiste. Chimères et poupées russes en Amérique indigène.”
Questions surrounding storytelling naturally followed from this discussion. We reflected not only on storytelling as a methodological concern within academia – how narratives shape our writing, our fieldwork accounts, and our relationships with readers – but also on the central role that oral narration plays within Indigenous communities themselves. In Amazonian societies, storytelling is far more than a literary device or pedagogical strategy; it is one of the primary means through which memory, knowledge, and social relations are continually reproduced. As Fausto, Bruna Franchetto, and Tommaso Montagnani have shown in their work on Kuikuro musical traditions, memory is not conceived as the passive storage of information but as a living practice of performance, repetition, and transmission through embodied relationships (Fausto, Franchetto and Montagnani 2011).
These reflections brought us to one of the central themes of the entire conversation: conservation understood as a practice of care. Hanna B. Hölling highlighted care as a key concept within critical approaches to conservation, opening a productive dialogue with Fausto’s work in Amazonian anthropology. For Fausto, care occupies a similarly fundamental position, although its meaning extends well beyond contemporary conservation discourse. He recalled how the notion entered Amazonian ethnography through the pioneering work of Joanna Overing, whose studies of everyday ethics, conviviality, and social life demonstrated that care constitutes one of the fundamental principles through which Amazonian communities organize collective existence (Overing 2000). Fausto also acknowledged the importance of Annette Baier’s philosophical reflections on care and moral relationships, whose work helped shape broader anthropological discussions of relational ethics.
From this perspective, care is not simply an ethical disposition directed toward vulnerable others. It emerges as a practical mode of inhabiting a world populated by multiple kinds of persons. Within many Amazonian cosmologies, humans do not occupy a unique ontological position. Animals, spirits, plants, and numerous other entities are likewise understood as persons endowed with intentions, desires, and capacities for action. Although this insight has often been discussed through the framework of animism, particularly in the work of Philippe Descola, Fausto emphasized that what matters most is not only the ontological classification of beings but the relationships established among them.
These relationships are never static or harmonious. Instead, they are sustained through continuous acts of negotiation. Care therefore cannot be understood as the absence of conflict; rather, conflict is one of its constitutive dimensions. Care is not just “caring for someone” but, most of the time, “taking care,” since the world is made of different people who want to produce others as kin. Predation operates transspecifically and is never one-way (Fausto 2007). One should always be aware of revengeful animals and human sorcerers.
Just as relationships among humans require constant adjustment, dialogue, and negotiation, so too do relationships with other-than-human beings, whose own intentions and desires must continually be taken into account. Caring for the forest, in this sense, does not mean exercising control over it, nor does it imply an idealized vision of harmonious coexistence. It requires an ongoing responsiveness to a world composed of multiple agencies whose interests do not always coincide.
Seen from this perspective, conservation itself appears less as the preservation of equilibrium than as the continual negotiation of relationships across heterogeneous forms of existence. Here Fausto’s reflections resonate closely with Donna Haraway’s notion of response-ability: the capacity to remain accountable within complex webs of interdependence rather than seeking definitive resolutions to conflict (Haraway 2016).
This understanding of care returns us to one of the central insights of the conversation as a whole. If conservation is to learn from Amazonian forms of knowledge, it cannot simply adopt Indigenous concepts as new theoretical tools. Instead, it must cultivate practices of negotiation capable of inhabiting the tensions, ambiguities, and productive dissonances that arise whenever different worlds encounter one another.
As our conversation drew to a close, we turned to the role of museums and material collections in contemporary Indigenous struggles. Fausto reflected briefly on the devastating fire that destroyed the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, where he has long been based as a researcher. The catastrophe resulted in the loss of a significant portion of one of Latin America’s oldest ethnographic and archaeological collections, assembled since the museum’s foundation in 1818. Beyond the destruction of historical objects, Fausto emphasized that the most devastating consequence of the fire was the loss of archival materials, objects and other documents that – despite having been collected within a colonial context – could have served as important tools for Indigenous communities in their struggles over memory, resistance, and the recovery of knowledge. These collections had acquired profound political significance in the twenty-first century because they offered possibilities for challenging colonial narratives and reclaiming historical knowledge. The value of these collections therefore lay not only in what they documented about the past but also in the ways they continued to participate in present forms of cultural and political life.
Moving Cloak, Tupinambá Women’s Cloak, Museum of Indigenous Cultures. Photo: Khadyg Fares. Image derived from: “The Return of the Tupinambá Cloak: Restitution and Internal Colonialism,” C& América Latina.
One emblematic example is the celebrated Tupinambá feather mantle, whose return to Brazil has renewed debates about restitution, Indigenous heritage, and museum practice. For many Indigenous peoples, such objects cannot be understood merely as ethnographic artefacts or aesthetic masterpieces. They are often conceived as beings with whom relationships can be re-established, entities that embody ancestral presences and continue to participate in the social worlds from which they originate (de Jesus da Silva 2024).
These reflections brought us back to one of the recurring questions throughout our conversation: what exactly does conservation seek to preserve? The discussion of the museum fire made evident that conservation cannot be reduced to safeguarding material remains. Its significance depends on the relationships that objects continue to sustain with the communities to whom they matter. Material preservation, while indispensable, acquires meaning only insofar as it supports living practices of remembrance, cultural continuity, and political self-determination.
The conversation concluded with a broader reflection on the position of anthropology itself and on the ethical commitments that accompany anthropological practice. For Fausto, anthropology inevitably occupies an in-between position, a position of estrangement that neither fully belongs to the world of those it studies nor remains entirely within the conceptual universe from which it speaks. Rather than resolving differences, anthropology inhabits them, generating the frictions through which new forms of understanding become possible.
This position demands a particular ethical responsibility. Throughout the discussion, Fausto repeatedly emphasized the importance of intellectual honesty and frankness in anthropological work. Translation does not consist in speaking on behalf of others, nor in smoothing over conceptual differences in order to produce comfortable narratives. Equally, it should avoid reducing Indigenous knowledge to categories that merely satisfy contemporary academic or political expectations. The anthropologist’s task is instead to remain attentive to the productive tensions that emerge through encounters with other worlds, while avoiding to patronize those with whom knowledge is produced.
Seen from this perspective, anthropology offers an important lesson for critical conservation. If conservation is conceived not as the preservation of fixed objects or identities but as the continual negotiation of relationships, then it too must embrace the uncertainties that accompany translation across different worlds. Rather than seeking universal solutions, conservation becomes a situated practice of listening, learning, and negotiating with multiple forms of knowledge, agencies, and values.
References
Albert, Bruce, and Davi Kopenawa. 2013. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Baier, Annette C. 1994. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
De Jesus da Silva, Glicéria. 2024. “O Voo do Manto e o Pouso do Manto: Uma Jornada pela Memória Tupinambá em um relato sobre a exposição Manto em Movimento.” In Modos: Revista de História da Arte, Vol. 8 No. 2, 294-333.
Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fausto, Carlos. 2007. “Feasting on People: Eating Animals and Humans in Amazonia.” Current Anthropology48 (4): 497–530.
Fausto, Carlos. 2008. “Donos demais: maestria e domínio na Amazônia.” Mana 14 (2): 329–66.
Fausto, Carlos. 2012. Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fausto, Carlos. 2021. “Under Heavy Fire: Brazil and the Politics of Anti-Memory.” Social Anthropology 29 (1): 14–18.
Fausto, Carlos. 2024. “How Much for a Song? The Culture of Calculation and the calculation of culture.” In Marc Brightman, Carlos fausto and Vanessa Grotti (Eds.) Ownership and Nurture: Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations. New York: Berghahn Books.
Fausto, Carlos, Bruna Franchetto, and Tommaso Montagnani. 2011. “Les formes de la mémoire. Art verbal et musique chez les Kuikuro du Haut-Xingu (Brésil).” L’Homme 197: 41–70. https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.22618
Fausto, Carlos, and Eduardo G. Neves. 2018. “Timeless Gardens: Deep Indigenous History and the making of biodiversity in the Amazon.” In Nuria Sanz (Ed.) Exploring Frameworks for Tropical Forest Conservation. Integrationg Natural and Cultural Diversity for Sustainability. A Global Perspective. México: UNESCO.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Overing, Joanna, and Alan Passes, eds. 2000. The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. London: Routledge
Cite this article: Carlos Fausto, Hanna B. Hölling, Samidha Pusalkar, Juliana Robles de la Pava, and Marcello Rechberger, “Care as Negotiation: Translation and the Indigenization of Conservation through the Amazon— Carlos Fausto in Conversation” Center for Critical Conservation, July 8, 2026, https://centerforcriticalconservation.com/1465-2