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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.
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 Kopenawa weaves a fascinating narrative throughout that reflects his knowledge and experience, experience that includes not only shamanic initiation 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 community 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. Missionaries 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 massacre of Yanomami people including women, girls, and even babies- attacks that were backed by entrepreneurs. Kopenawa provides a skillful 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 understand. The creation of the Yamomami...