Inmundo

In one of the central chapters of his monumental work The Falling Sky , written in collaboration with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, the activist, shaman, and chronicler of the Yanomami people Davi Kopenawa wonders how one can speak to white people. 1 How can shamanic insight into the impending catastrophe of a collapsing sky, Kopenawa asks, be shared with outsiders when these literally cannot see the forest for the trees? Because white society is only able to perceive the rainforest as an external, physical “nature” and not as a cosmo-political playing field on which various existents—including jaguars, ants, and even lianas and rivers—constantly actualize and negotiate their particular “humanity,” reiterating their different modes of being while also relating these to everyone else’s, white people can at best understand the deforestation of the Amazon as a “natural” catastrophe. Yet the escalating destruction of the forest, Kopenawa insists, is, above all, an assault on the fragile, multiversal diplomacy between shamanic emissaries of the multiple existents inhabiting the various planes of “worldliness” the forest holds together in an always precarious balance between earth and sky: Wherever human beings live, the forest is populated with animal spirits … The animals we hunt only move through the forest where the mirrors and paths of their ancestors’ images that become xapiri are. [White people] must think the soil and the mountains are placed there without reason and that the forest is just a great quantity of trees. But the shamans know that it belongs to the xapiri and that it is made of their countless mirrors! There are far more xapiris than humans in the forest, and all its other inhabitants know them! 2 Speaking to white people, Kopenawa continues, is also difficult because hereamuu (the instructive and analytical form of speech in which shamans memorize and recite the foundational feats of the community and the forest), as a ritual counterpart and prerequisite for shamanic ecstasy and healing power, requires lifelong learning, including about the ancestral knowledge stored in these accounts about the forest’s cosmic unity ( uhiri ). How can the persuasive power of a speech so grounded in repetition and memory be mobilized for a situation of extreme contingency and directed to an audience, Kopenawa asks, that has forgotten how the world came into being?