This presentation was given at the Program for Evolution and Spirituality Conference on Spirituality and the Arts at Harvard Divinity School in April 2025. It examines body painting within Indigenous Amazonian cosmologies as a deeply cosmopolitical and epistemological practice. Drawing on the framework of Amazonian perspectivism and grounded in examples from the Yawanawá, Assurini, and other Indigenous groups, the talk argues that body painting is not merely an aesthetic act, but a transformative one—dissolving the boundaries between body, spirit, and environment.
Through sacred designs, body painting enacts protection, ritual connection, and relational identity, functioning as both archive and spiritual “technology”. The presentation reflects on body art as a living pedagogy that resists commodification and colonial erasure, highlighting how these practices express Indigenous sovereignty, transmit ancestral knowledge, and sustain worlds. It ultimately invites us to engage Indigenous art not as static symbolism, but as an active cosmological language—one that continues to shape, heal, and defend life.
