A POLITICAL COSMOLOGY OF THE YANOMAMI

It is a new lesson from the heart. "Maybe in the end they will listen to the inhabitants of the forest and start to think more straight about them?" This is what the shaman, poetic philosopher and tireless climate activist Davi Kopenawa asks himself at the end of his speech in this powerful book, which he wrote together with the ethnologist Bruce Albert, not to mention the congenial co-authorship of the German translators Karin Uttend?rfer and Tim Trzaskalik. The real question is: how can we think about the indigenous people in a more straightforward way? Especially as we have still not learned anything from them and continue to tirelessly destroy the Amazon. Yet they are in possession of the knowledge about the forest, and the forest is the universal cosmos of life.

A statement in the foreword to the French edition: "We absolutely must take the indigenous people seriously.“ That is true. So the better form of the question is: How can we think with them, with the indigenous people? The attempt at an answer is the life project of Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. It is nothing less than a last ditch effort to save the world. And when I enter this highly endangered world with love and read "The Fall of the Sky", a single image applies: the Amazon is the lungs of the world, the Yanomami are its heart.

Another form of approach is the attentive observation of the way in which writing and narration are used here. It is an old liaison: indigenous speech gets caught up in the strange incunabula of the ethnological text, ethnography takes the helm in the rocking boat of oral culture. No, it is not a liaison or a love affair at all. It is the power relationship of subject and object continued in scientific language, in which the white man has written down everything about the Yanomami, who observe him walking through their world with wide eyes - but he has not SEEN them.

This is a precise observation by Davi Kopenawa. The allegory of ethnographic blindness to the essence of the Other can also be found in other cultural geographies of the ethnological project. And of course our man from the "people of the goods" has no eyes for the xapiri spirits and their songs, which are the other alphabet, the dancing alphabet of the Amazon. An American colleague of Bruce Albert, the anthropologist James Clifford, captures the questions of the relationship between ethno-graph and ehtno-source in a paradigmatic cipher: Writing Culture!

?At the time, it was novel to explain scientific methods and strategic approaches of anthropology in literary analyses of their writing styles. Today, postcolonial literature has long since canonized the topic - The Empire writes back!

- Who writes for which culture? What is knowledge? Where is the truth of the spoken word? How does the oral text come into its own? Davi Kopenawa has found his own, sovereign and free answer. "I want to explain these things to the whites, because I want them to know." Because they are will-o'-the-wisps and errors, the pretentious words on those thin skins of images on which the ghosts of whites dance, obsessed with power. A great promise in our dark crisis! Can a Yanomami explain things to us? Can the Amazonian glimmer of hope become a beacon?

Political cosmology of the forest

This book changes the precarious status of anthropological inequality. What Bruce and Kopenawa bring to the pictorial skins of our written culture is a collaborative text of rehabilitation. It is a straightening, to stay in the image of those straight words that Davi Kopenawa desires: a spiritual act of straightening, the healing of the pathogenic skew in cultural contact, the political cosmology of the Yanomami in their forest. Two components are connecting there cosmology to our mind: One is the document of a contrapuntally historical narrative, beyond the autochthonous myth fabrication and its ethno-graphy; the other is the anthropologist's cooperation and complicity with the Yanomami political struggle, beyond the literary ego-graphy.

"The Fall of the Sky" is first of all a reconstitution, in that we have to understand how concrete and what the shaman's knowledge is, how radically and consciously he sets himself apart from the discourse of the whites and how resolutely he leads the fight against the murderous invaders of the forest. In step with this inner development of the shaman into a political subject, the anthropologist Bruce finally turns away from his scientific contract, which increasingly appears to him as a betrayal, as collaboration in the imperialist project.

I believe that the secret of this work, which hopes for a renewed power of the forest, is the synchrony of a realization of the other in the decades-long project of writing together. This grandiose book is the symbiosis and adventure of an open mind that makes it possible to speak about the common in the simultaneity of the other. And in a mysterious way, this new science becomes literature, the forest writes back!