Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies CLALSIS
McNeil 473
Abstract:
The book "The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman" by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert presents an innovative approach by engaging in a "counter-anthropology." In this perspective, it is the indigenous intellectuals themselves, particularly the shamans, who analyze white culture. Kopenawa, as a Yanomami shaman, had his experiences with white culture marked by the invasion of missionaries, farmers, and gold prospectors in the Amazon rainforest, bringing destruction and diseases to his people. Furthermore, his travels to major cities in Brazil and around the world led him to denounce the destruction of his people and seek support for their cause. In these encounters and throughout his shamanic research, Kopenawa developed a sophisticated analysis of white culture, summarized in two main propositions: whites are the people of merchandise, living to produce and consume products, and they are the people who only know how to dream of themselves, forgetting about alterity (the spirits, nature, other peoples). Our presentation aims to discuss his analysis, translating it into our thinking through philosophy and psychoanalysis, and analyzing how, in his anthropology of whites, Kopenawa touches on two central aspects of our social production: political economy (commodity production) and desiring economy (production of narcissism).
Presenter Bio:
Marcio José de Araujo Costa is the CLALS Visiting Scholar for 2023-2024. Marcio is a psychologist and psychoanalyst with a doctorate in Social Psychology from the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. He completed a Post-Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and a Post-Doctorate in Psychoanalytic Theory from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His works include "Time and Spirit: Essay on the virtual paradigm in psychology;" "Foucault and the ways of life;" and "Brazilian Psychology: education, clinic, politics, and minority aesthetics." As a visiting scholar, he is developing a project that uses the tools of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and social psychology to map the production of subjectivity in institutions and society at large. His current research is centered on the work "The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman," by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, where he seeks to extract three issues: 1) the production of the shaman's body as a perspective of a world inhabited by life where there are no objects, only subjects; 2) the criticisms that Yanomami cosmology makes of Western culture and subjectivity; and 3) how this oral and political work can be considered literature, with implications for the fate of literature in the West.