Eliran Arazi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The discovery and rescue of four young Indigenous children, 40 days after the aircraft they were travelling in crashed in the remote Colombian rainforest, was hailed in the international press as a “miracle in the jungle”. But as an anthropologist who has spent more than a year living among the Andoque people in the region, conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I cannot simply label this as a miraculous event.
At least, not a miracle in the conventional sense of the word. Rather, the survival and discovery of these children can be attributed to the profound knowledge of the intricate forest and the adaptive skills passed down through generations by Indigenous people.
