Davi Kopenawa

Works

• 2010The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman

  Life story and cosmology of a Yanomami shaman, recorded in Yanomami and written in French by Bruce Albert: the spirits of the forest, the epidemics and gold rush that came with the whites, and a warning that their destruction of the forest will make the sky fall.

Position

Kopenawa is on the map for “The Falling Sky”, an extensive account of an Amazonian philosophy given by one of its own thinkers. The book was spoken in Yanomami and written in French by Bruce Albert, who calls it a life story, an autoethnography and a cosmological manifesto; how words pass between a shaman’s speech and a European book is itself part of its subject. The forest, urihi, is alive and held together by the xapiri, spirits whom shamans call and dance with in visions; the sky has fallen once before, and it can fall again if the shamans die and the forest is destroyed. The whites appear as the “people of merchandise”, who never stop wanting goods, dig up the metals that the creator Omama had hidden underground and release an epidemic smoke, xawara. Their knowledge, fixed on “paper skins”, is set against shamanic knowledge gained in dreams and visions. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro compared the book with Lévi-Strauss’s “Tristes Tropiques”, and it has become a key text in debates on the Anthropocene, on cosmopolitics and on Indigenous philosophy in Brazil. No documented links yet connect Kopenawa with others on the map.

Life & context

Davi Kopenawa was born around 1956 at Marakana, a Yanomami community on the upper Toototobi river in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, near the border with Venezuela. In childhood Kopenawa saw epidemics brought by government agents and missionaries kill many people of the community, members of Kopenawa’s family among them. Kopenawa learned Portuguese at a mission station, worked in the 1970s as an interpreter for FUNAI, the national Indian agency, and settled in the region of the Demini river, where Kopenawa was initiated as a shaman. In the late 1980s, when tens of thousands of gold miners invaded Yanomami land, Kopenawa travelled to Brasília, Europe and the United States to speak for the Yanomami; in 1988 Kopenawa received the Global 500 award of the United Nations Environment Programme, and in 1992 the Yanomami Indigenous Territory was officially demarcated. In 2004 Kopenawa co-founded the Hutukara Yanomami Association and became its president. Over many years Kopenawa recorded conversations in Yanomami with the French anthropologist Bruce Albert, who had worked with the Yanomami since 1975; the result appeared in 2010 as “La chute du ciel”. In 2019 Kopenawa and Hutukara received the Right Livelihood Award.

Further main works

• Yanomami: The Spirit of the Forest (Yanomami. L’esprit de la forêt, with Bruce Albert, exhibition catalogue, 2003)
• The Fall of the Sky (A queda do céu, Portuguese edition with a preface by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2015)