The film is about knowledge and how men of different worlds can come together for knowledge.
-Ciro Guerra
“The world speaks. I can only listen. Hear the song of your ancestors.”
There’s a moment in Ciro Guerra’s masterpiece, Embrace of the Serpent, where silence becomes the most profound source of knowledge. Silence uninterrupted by the cranking of a gramophone. The noise of a scratchy travel-worn record playing Joseph Haydn’s The Creation. It’s this silence that gives way to the sounds of the jungle, of Karamakate’s memories, of a people and their wisdom slipping into oblivion. At its heart, this film is a meditation on knowledge—what it means to know, who gets to define it, having the humility to try to understand it, and what is lost when one way of knowing supersedes another. To navigate these waters, the philosophies of Gregory Cajete and Linda Tuhiwai Smith offer some invaluable insights.
“Cappi won’t help you if you don’t want to believe.”
Cajete, in his seminal work Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence, articulates an indigenous perspective that views the world as a web of interconnections. This perspective isn’t just theoretical; it’s lived. Cajete writes about the importance of relational knowledge—an understanding that comes from participating in the natural world, recognizing that humans are part of, not separate from, the ecosystems they inhabit. Cajete articulates this kind of relational knowledge saying, “Native people expressed a relationship to the natural world that could only be described as ‘ensoulment.’ The ensoulment of nature is one of the most ancient foundations of human psychology. This projection of the human sense of the soul with its archetypes has been called the ‘participation mystique,’ which for Native people represented the deepest level of psychological involvement with their land and which provided a kind of map of the soul. The psychology and spiritual qualities of Indigenous people’s behavior reflected in symbolism were thoroughly ‘in-formed’ by the depth and power of their participation mystique with the Earth as a living soul. It was from this orientation that Indian people developed ‘responsibilities’ to the land and all living things, similar to those that they had to each other. In the Native mind, spirit and matter were not separate; they were one and the same.”
In Embrace of the Serpent, this philosophy is embodied in Karamakate, the shaman whose wisdom is not cataloged in books but alive in his relationship with the jungle. When Theo, the German explorer, seeks the yakruna plant, he approaches it as an object to be found and used. Karamakate’s response is almost a rebuke: the plant’s power cannot be divorced from its context, its place in the intricate web of life.
Cajete’s teachings challenge the Western notion of knowledge as something that can be extracted, abstracted, and owned. Instead, he offers a vision of wisdom as participatory and holistic—a vision that the film echoes through its immersive portrayal of the Amazon and its indigenous inhabitants. The jungle isn’t a merely a backdrop; it’s a character, an archive of knowledge that requires humility.
“Knowledge belongs to all. You do not understand that. You are just a white man.”
While Cajete helps us understand the depth of indigenous wisdom, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies exposes the ways in which Western research has often been complicit in its erasure. Smith critiques the colonial roots of academic disciplines that have historically treated indigenous cultures as objects of study rather than as holders of legitimate knowledge.
This critique finds a vivid counterpart in Embrace of the Serpent. Theo and Evan, the explorers separated by decades, are both products of Western traditions of inquiry. Their journals, maps, sketches, and scientific methods serve as metaphors for the colonial impulse to document and control. Yet, the film resists this narrative. Karamakate repeatedly asserts that knowledge cannot be reduced to pages in a notebook. Karamakate in one scene crumples Theo’s map and tosses it into the river, stretching out his arms wide saying, “The world is like this, huge. But you choose to see just this”, pointing back to the map. His frustration with Theo’s approach mirrors Smith’s critique of Western research paradigms that prioritize extraction over understanding.
Smith’s work also emphasizes the importance of storytelling and oral traditions as valid and vital ways of knowing. The film itself carries a nonlinear almost episodic narrative structure, shifting between Theo’s and Evan’s journeys. This reflects a cyclical, interconnected view of time and knowledge—a stark contrast to the traditional linear, progressive ways of storytelling. It is a distinct vision which lends to the overall themes at play.
“Return a whole man.”
Both Cajete and Smith warn of the cost of disregarding indigenous knowledge. Cajete speaks of a disconnection from the natural world that leads to an incomplete view and divorces one from a kind of ecological context, while Smith highlights the cultural pride inherent in dismissing indigenous ways of knowing. These warnings resonate throughout Embrace of the Serpent, which portrays the Amazon as a site of spiritual and ecological wisdom.
The film’s final moments—with Karamakate guiding Evan through a transformative ritual—offer a glimpse of what might be regained if we approach knowledge with humility. It’s not about exploitation of indigenous wisdom but about recognizing its value and the need to protect the contexts that sustain it.
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Conclusion
Embrace of the Serpent is more than a film; it’s a call to rethink what we mean by knowledge. It challenges us to move beyond the Western frameworks that have dominated global discourse and to honor the wisdom embedded in relationships—with the land, with each other, and with the stories that connect us all.
Reading List
Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence by Gregory Cajete
Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
