Embrace of the Serpent (film review)

Journal of Religion and Film, 2016

This is a film review of Embrace the Serpent (2015) directed by Ciro Guerra. Author Notes Rubina (Ruby) Ramji is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Cape Breton University. After serving as a Chair of the Religion, Film and Visual Culture Group for the American Academy of Religion and then on the steering committee, Rubina continues to serve on the Executive Committee for the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion as President and is the Film Editor of the Journal of Religion and Film. Her research activities focus on the areas of religion, media and identity, religion in Canada, and religion and immigration. This sundance film festival review is available in Journal of Religion & Film: http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol20/iss2/27 Embrace the Serpent (2015) Directed by Ciro Guerra The Colombian film Embrace the Serpent follows the life of an indigenous shaman, Karamakate, the last member of his tribe. The film tells the story of...

Antonio. His work crosses interdisciplinary lines and focuses on expanding the borders of critical social theories. His current work is manifesting becoming-serpent and its implications for a scholarly engagement with mystical and occult literature.

2017

"Wisdom of the Serpent," Chapter 13 in Dreams that Change Our Lives, edited by Robert J. Hoss & Robert P. Gongloff. A Publication of The International Association for the Study of Dreams. For thousands of years symbols have played an integral role in understanding the meaning of dreams. Archetypal symbols, symbols that resonate across a wide range of cultures, have a powerful role in dreams, and the archetypal symbol of the snake with its association with wisdom and higher knowledge, whether for good or for ill, appears universal. With respect specifically to healing and dreams, serpents played an important role in ancient Greece in the temples of Asklepios, which the sick visited with the expectation that they would either receive information to effect a cure, or would receive healing directly from the gods while dreaming.1 In depictions of the Greek god Asklepios, he holds The Sceptre of Medicine, which has a single snake coiled about it, representing divine wisdom and the power of healing. His daughter Hygiea, the goddess of Health, also commonly appears with a snake, and the Temples of Asclepios where the sick would sleep featured sacred snakes in both the main temples and in the dream incubation chambers. ( . . . )

This essay explores two themes played out in Ciro Guerra's 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, one being: the symbolic madness as a representation of manic corruption or irreconcilable loss between civilisations, and conversely the spiritual imaginary that overrides otherness. Both themes diagnose a moral ambiguity in the narrative demonstrating a subversive representation around post-colonial issues. Furthermore I will examine D.Berghahn's case study on the film regarding cosmopolitanism and exoticism to preface a conjecture on how themes-that subvert problematic representation-might be supressed or brought forward in cinema styles dealing with post-colonial subjects.

The people came out and shed their anaconda skins. — Irving Goldman, Cubeo origin myth While functionalist accounts of myth have generally yielded to structural analyses since the appearance of Lévi-Strauss's classic essay, " The Structural Study of Myth, " the relationship between myth and that analytical entity called " culture " is still unclear. The difficulty can be traced to an unfinished anthropological dialogue about what culture is or what cultures are, and how it / they can best be described. My central thesis is that anthropologists have tended to regard their subject matter — culture — as a received object of study and that they have been mistaken in this tendency. The essay proposes to regard " a culture " as generated and perpetually shifting meaning, a motivated affirmation of a system of differences. Establishing the semiotic form of two Arawak and Trobriand origin myths helps to show how 0 0 1 F an thropological theories are themselves composed. A textual criticism of one theory of myth — Malinowski's — is combined with an analysis of two bona fide " primitive " myths. The comparison indicates that the myths provide better theory about the dynamics of cultural identity than does the theory of myth, Anthropologists have written a great deal about myth, and this paper is intended in part to add yet a few more pages to that voluminous literature. But it also has a second purpose, one seldom developed in treatises on comparative mythology: I hope to demonstrate how a myth can contribute directly to anthropological theory. I want to claim that just as anthropological studies of myth have advanced our understanding of that phenomenon, so certain myths can provide insights into the anthropological perspective that informs theory. The thesis I develop in this essay is consequently that the myth-making mind and the anthropology-making mind have much in common at the level of fundamental symbolic processes. The myth I examine is one told by the Arawak of northwestern Guyana about

In Embrace of the Serpent, Amazonian warrior-shaman Karamakate, sees a photograph of himself for the first time and believes it is his “Chullachaqui” – a mythical figure that lures travellers into the forest by deceiving them, then takes their place as a copy, but is empty, hollow, and holds no memory. German anthropologist, Theo, tells him the photograph is simply “a moment in time” that he has passed through. In the two films, certain characters have become dissociated from their fragmentary memory – they have in some sense, become their Chullachaqui – be it through the decaying nature of time, through trauma or through technology. Memory, in the films, manifests itself in a virtual state – in photographs, in re-enactments, in film, in dreams – and characters are shown physically facing their memories that have, over time, become detached from the self. Whilst closely analysing this confrontation of memory and exploring philosophical thought on time, memory and identity, this dissertation will attempt to decipher – in Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra) and The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer) - how and why memories become dissociated from identity, how this disconnect is portrayed through the lens of contemporary cinema, and whether the identities of the characters can become reunited with these memories.

Periskop #24 Forum for kunsthistorisk debat, Dec 28, 2020, 2020

Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in the world. In this case, mestizo-Indigenous practices that stem from Amazonian Andean worlds and that have for long engaged with knowledge that is produced by other-than-humans. The findings presented were experienced as lessons gathered in the interaction with other-than-human beings, situations, and events. Can academic discussion aspire to validity when discussions about reality only happen between humans, in the absence of other non-human agents of history that build reality along with us?

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2009

And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.(Mark ...

Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-Than-Human World, 2018

God, the Highest, the god of Life and the Garden of Eden. The goddess as serpent power. Seal cylinders of Mesopotamia and Syria.