Biographycal narrative of Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. Lecture delivered at the UNAM-PUMC program at inaugural session of the Cátedra Guillermo Bonfil.

In this article, I am making the argument that addressing issues of cultural and social representations of Peruvian Amazonia by the national community – both political civil society – with a narrow temporal synchronic and spatial materialistic perspective (three or four hundred years of history and the reduction of bio-physical diversity to a few commoditized “resources”) lessens drastically our ability to fully understand and interact intelligently and ethically with this vast portion of Peru’s national territory. I am proposing the qualitative shift to an emic way of thinking and analyzing Amazonia, that is to say adopting the indigenous way of knowing and co-existing with the forest as a living entity peopled by thinking and feeling entities with will, intentionality and teleological energy-synergy.

Foregrounds recents discussions on the re-ontologization the notion of socionature as a way of critiquing modern thought and practice, which subverted the original hylozoism of Andean peoples in South America.