Epistemology

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.