Davi Kopenawa is a shaman and an internationally known spokesperson of the Brazilian Yanomami. Bruce Albert, a French anthropologist who has worked with the Yanomami in Brazil since 1975, is Research Director at the Research Institute for Development (IRD), Paris, and Associate Researcher at the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), São Paulo.
A perfectly grounded account of what it is like to live an
indigenous life in communion with one’s personal spirits. We are
losing worlds upon worlds.
*New York Times Book Review*
What does it mean when someone says they can understand the inner
lives of animals, trees, or even forests? Bruce Albert and Davi
Kopenawa provide a vivid sense of this in The Falling Sky: Words of
a Yanomami Shaman. The Yanomami of the Amazon, like all the
indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, have experienced
the end of what was once their world. Yet they have survived and
somehow succeeded in making sense of a wounded existence. They have
a lot to teach us.
*The Guardian*
One of the first and best autobiographical narratives by an
indigenous lowland Amazonian…The book is a mix of autobiography,
history, personal philosophy, and cultural criticism of whites for
their destruction of the world, worship of the material, and lack
of spirituality and vitality…The book is not only finely detailed
and full of challenging philosophical points, it also contains much
humor…Ultimately, it is Kopenawa’s voice that tells us who he is,
who his people are, and who we are to them. It is complex and
nuanced; I’d go so far as to call The Falling Sky a literary
treasure: invaluable as academic reading, but also a must for
anyone who wants to understand more of the diverse beauty and
wonder of existence.
*New Scientist*
I have just read your manuscript and am enormously impressed by
this work of such powerful methodological interest and prodigious
documentary richness. It wholly captivates the reader yet is
simultaneously so complex, raising so many questions.
*Claude Lévi-Strauss, letter to Bruce Albert, July 10, 2006*
The words of the Yanomami shamans are powerful: they conjure up
another world responsible for this one. Davi Kopenawa proves it for
us. Not only do his words give us an unparalleled experience of the
life of the Yanomami, but his moving description of their struggle
to save the forest and themselves from destruction by the whites
reveals the modern tragedy of indigenous peoples in ways we never
imagined.
*Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago*
Kopenawa provides a fascinating glimpse into his life as well as
into Yanomami cultural beliefs and practices, setting his story
against the various threats the Yanomami people and their forest
have faced since the 1960s...Kopenawa's story is eloquent,
engaging, and thought-provoking, exuding heartfelt wisdom. This
extraordinary and richly detailed work is an outstanding
explication of the Yanomami worldview as well as a plea to all
people to respect and preserve the rain forest.
*Library Journal (starred review)*
This engaging text, the autobiography of Yanomami shaman and
activist Davi Kopenawa, translated with some prefatory remarks,
appendixes, notes, and additional biographical comments by
anthropologist Albert, offers a valuable insider perspective on a
much-studied Amazonian society, with rich details on myth and
religious practices, including shamanic initiation. Albert frames
this story with a half-century-long history of exploitation by
Westerners, ranging from anthropologists to government officials
and developers. Kopenawa’s direct experiences with, and assessment
of, his white interlocutors is often charged with a well-justified
anger, but through the course of his personal history the need for
mutual respect and, where appropriate, collaboration is likewise
made evident. The text offers a trenchant critique of the
characterization of the Yanomami as humanity’s primordial ‘fierce
people,’ highlighting the beauty and virtues of these people while
reminding readers of Western cultural and ecological destruction in
the Amazon (an exceptionally virulent brand of fierceness).
*Choice*
Anthropologists and other specialists will find much to relish in
this beautifully crafted evocation of Yanomami culture and
philosophy. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews taped in
native language, it is enriched by almost a hundred pages of
footnotes, ethnobiological and geographic glossaries,
bibliographical references, detailed indexes and, last but not
least, an essay by Bruce Albert on how he wrote the book. While the
book resonates with current Western metaphysical angst about
finitude, it is written principally as a long shamanic chant that
opens up a multitude of interior journeys and provides a new
consciousness of the world as a whole… The Yanomami have suffered
the effects of deadly epidemics, land dispossession and aggressive
missionary evangelism. The resulting break in the flow of knowledge
between older and younger generations, a lack of communication
between indigenous and nonindigenous interlocutors, and a general
loss of connection with the natural environment, are common
problems. Despite remarkable political gains in the past thirty
years, including the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples by the General Assembly of the United Nations in
2007, a health and social crisis is deepening within many
indigenous communities. As The Falling Sky makes plain, this crisis
is rooted in the symbolic violence exercised by the dominant
society, which fails to recognize the value (rather than just the
right) of being different and of living in a distinct human
collectivity… It is, above all, a splendid story told by an
exceptional man, who barely knows how to read and write. That the
story was written down by an ethnographer who elected not to adjust
his research to the canons of academia adds to its importance. The
use of the first-person singular to tell the tale involves a fusion
of authorial voices, a sign of mutual recognition and true
friendship if ever there was one; it lends a musical quality to the
resulting ‘heterobiography.’ Through their sonorous presence, the
numerous beings evoked in the shamanic chant usher in the fertility
of life as shamans see and feel it. What better way to entice
readers away from everyday forgetfulness than to invite them to
hear the forest’s vast and timeless symphony?
*Times Literary Supplement*
The Falling Sky is several things. It is the autobiography of Davi
Kopenawa, one of Brazil’s most prominent and eloquent indigenous
leaders. It is the most vivid and authentic account of shamanistic
philosophy I have ever read. It is also a passionate appeal for the
rights of indigenous people and a scathing condemnation of the
damage wrought by missionaries, gold miners, and white people’s
greed. The footnotes alone harbor monographs on Yanomami botany and
zoology, mythology, ritual, and history. Most of all, The Falling
Sky is an elegy to oral tradition and the power of the spoken word…
Kopenawa’s elaboration of shamanic concepts goes beyond ethnography
and becomes a new genre of native philosophical inquiry. When an
indigenous narrator this articulate produces an original exegesis
of his own worldview, anthropology and anthropologists have become
almost obsolete… Like his ancestors, whose voices will continue to
echo in shamans’ songs after his death, Davi Kopenawa has made sure
that his own powerful words will be preserved.
*New York Review of Books*
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