The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman

Introduction

The book appeared in 2010 in Paris in Plon’s series “Terre humaine”, with a preface by Jean Malaurie; an English translation followed in 2013 at Harvard University Press and a Portuguese edition in 2015 with a preface by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Its text is based on recordings in Yanomami that Bruce Albert made with Kopenawa over many years and wrote down in French in Kopenawa’s voice; Albert explains the method in a long postscript. The three parts tell of Kopenawa’s becoming a shaman and of the spirits of the forest, of the arrival of the whites with epidemics, roads and gold miners, and of journeys to the cities of the whites, whose obsession with merchandise Kopenawa describes as a sickness. The book closes with the warning that the destruction of the forest and of its shamans will make the sky fall on everyone. It has become a central text of Amerindian thought and of debates on the Anthropocene.