The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman by Davi

Kopenawa, Bruce Albert (review)

Michael A. Uzendoski

Collaborative Anthropologies, Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2015, pp. 211-215

(Review)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2015.0006

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/613414

Access provided at 12 Jan 2020 07:12 GMT from Western Ontario, Univ of
Book Reviews

Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a

Yanomami Shaman. Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy.
Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2013. 622 pp. Cloth, $39.95.
michael a. uzendoski, Facultad Latinoamericana de
Ciencias Sociales—Ecuador

The Falling Sky is a “life story, autoethnography, and cosmoecological

manifestó” (1) that provides the reader with an intimate portrait of the
thought and life of an extraordinary Yanomami Shaman and activist,
Davi Kopenawa. The book is written in the first person, and Kopena-
wa weaves a fascinating narrative throughout that reflects his knowl-
edge and experience, experience that includes not only shamanic ini-
tiation by the spirits and life among his people but also working and
living among white Brazilians, Europeans, and anthropologists. The
book provides a story of a shaman leaving his natal home communi-
ty to travel and come to know different kinds of people. As Kopenawa
details from his earliest memories, white people and their system have
wrought havoc upon the Yanomami people, who have been constant
victims of the aggression of whites for wealth, land, and power. Mis-
sionaries and government institutions, for example, preached about
God and country but were really wanting to control and change the
Yanomami, and they did not care much about the deadly diseases that
they brought to the Yanomami in the process. Gold prospectors killed
Yanomami people and invaded their land with little action from the
state or government to stop them. The prospectors organized a mas-
sacre of Yanomami people including women, girls, and even babies—
attacks that were backed by entrepreneurs. Kopenawa provides a skill-
ful and powerful account of the Yamomami experience of white people
 and their system, a system that continues to threaten the very existence
of the Yamomami. This narrative of the “machine of cannibal war”
(Whitehead 2014) of the West is but one layer of a rich and complex
book that begins with Kopenawa’s life story.
The first part of the book is Kopenawa’s account of how he became
a shaman and the complex spirit world of the Yamomami. One of the
interesting aspects of this section is the way that Yamomami shamans
work with images and the body to communicate with the xapiri, the
spirits who inhabit the forest and who give power to heal, see, and un-
derstand. The creation of the Yamomami cannot be separated from the
origins of the whites. White people were once Yanomami brought into
being by Omama, the supreme creator—who brought into being dis-
tant lands like Europe and Japan as well as the Yamomami world. Oma-
ma also decided that people should speak different languages.
So what went wrong with white people? According to Kopenawa,
white people do not see the xapiri, they do not follow in the ways of the
ancestors, and they have turned into imbalanced, spiritually corrupt
beings. Their main problem is that Yamomami spiritual ecology and
love of the forest were replaced by an unhealthy arrogance and a love
of merchandise. One day, for example, white people declared, “We are
the only ones who are so clever! We truly are the people of merchan-
dise!” (327). These words then drove white people to spread all over
the globe to take over far off lands, cut down trees, and spoil water. In
the process, as Kopenawa astutely observes, white people can no lon-
ger drink their own water, have sickened their own land, and no longer
have the forests they once had. “This is why they want to do the same
thing again where we live” (327). This account, crafted from the cate-
gories of Yamomami thought, explains the power of the “commodity”
and how commodity-oriented thinking engenders the constant expan-
sion and ecological destruction caused by the world capitalist system.
Kopenawa’s account of the Yamomami reveals a deeply spiritual
people who perceive life and life force in all living things, who work
ritually with plants and images to “see” and communicate with those
beings, and who value their relationship with the xapiri above all else.
The xapiri songs “make our thoughts grow and keep them strong. This
is why we will continue to make their images dance and defend their
houses as long as we are alive” (423). White people do not understand
this world and think of the songs as “lies.” But Kopenawa’s life expe-

212 • collaborative anthropologies • 7:2 • spring 2015

riences and his deep spirituality convey the wisdom, beauty, and peace
that shamanic thought and practice bring to individuals who master it.
His shamanism and spirituality are the source of his intelligent thought
and capacity to be a leader of others.
Although the book is not written as a handbook of methodologies, it
does have serious implications for the practice of anthropology. It tells
a tale of two anthropologies, anthropologies that take Native thought
and practice at different levels of seriousness. The first is the evolution-
ary model of anthropology and its reduction of Yamomami thought
and practice to Western imaginaries of the warlike “savage” compet-
ing for sexual fitness and control over women. Kopenawa attacks the
beast at its heart, bringing it down, when he identifies its main fault—
ethnographic incompetency:

Obviously, those who say such things do not know us, and their
words are false or are just lies. It is true that our long-ago elders en-
gaged in raids, just like white people had their own wars. But theirs
proved far more dangerous and fierce than ours. We never killed each
other without restraint, the way they did. We do not have bombs that
burn houses and all their inhabitants (356).

So the category of “fierce,” in Kopenawa’s thought and practice, only

makes sense in his culture when it is systematically compared to the
violence of the white system, a system that he knows and has experi-
enced as much more violent than Yamomami warring in past epochs.
But Bruce Albert is a different story, a story of careful, fine-grained
ethnography—collaborative in practice—and based on sharing expe-
riences and commitments. In the part written by Bruce Albert, he de-
scribes how despite lacking funding, he managed to enter the Yamo-
mami world with great humility and respect (428). Albert exposed
himself to Yamomami thoughts and teachings, and after an initial peri-
od was identified as someone the Yamomami could trust. He would be
useful in appreciating their world and communicating about it as well
as “mediating” with others. The result of these exchanges was the cre-
ation of an anthropologist who took up the challenge and dedicated his
career to the Yamomami cause. The Yamomami investment in Albert
was a good one, but unfortunately he has not been the only anthropol-
ogist to work among them.
As Kopenawa reports, the only two anthropologists who have

Book Reviews • 213

 “helped” the Yanomami are Bruce Albert and Alcida Ramos. This is
amazing, given how many anthropologists have visited and written
about the Yamomami! So what is it about these two figures? They are,
in Kopenawa’s words, “courageous anthropologists” (440). They are
not the kind who merely “do research and leave” (440). They “speak
our language” and help with what the whites are doing and saying as
well as with the activities of foreign governments.
There are many implications for anthropologists interested in a
more collaborative approach. First, the book shows that there are other
anthropologies that are non-Western and do not require university de-
grees and book knowledge to make a contribution to the understand-
ing of culture, power, and difference; it shows the penetrating insights
that Yamomami anthropology offers to anthropological dialogue.
Bruce Albert, the French anthropologist who has worked with Kopen-
awa, has taken on the role of helping translate and circulate Yamoma-
mi anthropology for other anthropologists. In this sense part of what
makes this book work so well is Albert’s humility and his willingness
to be a “student” of Yamomami thought and practice, resulting in Ko-
penawa’s trust of Albert to represent and publish his thought. The col-
laborative process thus reflects an attitude and way of being, a mode of
practice that has defined a lifetime relationship between the two men, a
spirit of collaboration more than a precise methodology.
In a larger theoretical context, Kopenawa’s account could be regard-
ed as one of the best articulated examples of what Roy Wagner (1981: 3)
calls “reverse anthropology,” using the categories and knowledge sys-
tem of normally “objectified” peoples to explain the “culture” of the an-
thropologists. In the spirit of reverse anthropology, Kopenawa uses his
Yamomami perspective to objectify and critique the white world, how
white people think, what they believe, their values, and their words. But
the novelty and power of The Falling Sky is that the reverse anthropology
is not based on an anthropologist’s account but the actual words and
thoughts of a Native “anthropologist.” And Kopenawa’s account is as
much an ethnography and interpretation of white people as it is of the
Yamomami, as the narrative strategy of the book is to explain who the
Yamomami are in contrast to how white people think and act.
In short, I highly recommend this extraordinary work, which in
my view should be taught not only in anthropology classes but also in
Western civilization classes, cultural studies, philosophy, international

214 • collaborative anthropologies • 7:2 • spring 2015

relations, development studies, and religion. It is a marvelous exam-
ple of the benefits of reverse anthropology for the discipline and for
knowledge in general.

References
Wagner, R. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Whitehead, Neil L. 2014. “Hambre divina: La máquina de guerra caníbal.”
Mundo Amazonico 4:7–30.

michael a. uzendoski is the author of The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador (Illi-
nois) and The Ecology of the Spoken Word: Storytelling and Shamanism among the Napo
Runa (co-authored with Edith F. Calapucha Tapuy, also published with Illinois).
In his free time Uzendoski enjoys fishing, playing the three-stringed violin, and
watching The Walking Dead. His favorite foods are maytu de tilapia with yuca and ají
sauce and chicha de chonta.

Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen, eds. Otros Saberes: Collaborative

Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Cultural Politics.
Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2013. 249 pp.
Paperback. $34.95.
gabrielle oliveira, Columbia University

This is an edited volume that brings together nine chapters by six

teams of researcher-activists and activist-researchers, including an in-
troduction by the editors and an epilogue. The goal of the work is to re-
veal methodological insights as well as findings on research projects in
indigenous and Afro-descendant cultural politics through collaborative
research. The Otros Saberes initiative was conceived as a project of the
Latin American Studies Association (lasa) in 2004 with the objective of
promoting collaborative research between civil society and academic-
based intellectuals and contributing to critiques and reformulations
in the field of Latin American Studies. The six research projects that
form the core of the initiative bring together a diverse group of Afro-
descendent and indigenous collaborations with academics. Across
teams, and within each team, the diversity in theoretical and political
trajectories of researchers contributed to varying degrees of knowledge
and internal cohesion of the groups. The focus of each research proj-

Book Reviews • 215