Frontier Modernity and the ubiquity of terror: the historical and ethnographic dimension of the Embrace of the Serpent

The article approaches the relations between frontier, modernity and terror through the analysis of the ethnographic and historical background of the movie The Embrace of the Serpent (2015). It illustrates the ubiquitous and opaque features of terror as the discursive substrata for the world-system, the imposition of patriarchy as the basis of colonialism and the relation between civilizing projects and irrationality. This paper concludes that global frontiers are neither timeless nor static spaces, but frames of constant generation and resignification of images within a mutable historicity.