Other books, other handwritings: indigenous reports

Abstract

It approaches in an unconventional way other books and other spellings present in the indigenous ways of writing, materializing and narrating their stories. The concepts of book and spelling are interpreted broadly. Activating a diversity of indigenous reports and exposing, through different thoughts, other possibilities of imagining them. Accepting the assumption that there are no unwritten cultures and that formulations about ‘illiterate societies’ are colonizing effects of an ethnocentric thought, the crossing proposed by this text is to attend, as far as possible, these other bibliographies crossed out and censored by the traditional book and by the universal spelling of Western peoples as primitive expressions. Decolonizing our bibliographic thinking is the horizon targeted by this research. Listening to the stories of the indigenous people is an endbeggining, devouring the end for the beginning. The end of the book is the cessation of its absolute, finished and universal condition. The end of the unique and western book is the beginning of the scriptural opening and its material plasticities. The strength of the concept of the book expressed in the semiophagy of the bookOunce, proposed from a differOunce (différonce), is a way of dreaming in the Amerindian way a new and, simultaneously, an old beginning: the open possibility of the book once more as a sign of freedom of self-determination from the multiple meanings of different peoples. This text brings a report of the cultivated jungle of Abya Yala – the Living Earth. Perhaps this is an endbeggining to the disconcerting otherness of the bibliographic messages that we insist on forgetting.