Open AccessFrom morning to mourning: Yanomami listening practices in A Queda do céu
Author(s) -
William Mullaney
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
eutomia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1982-6850
DOI - 10.51359/1982-6850.2019.244647
Subject(s) - active listening , shamanism , ceremony , context (archaeology) , order (exchange) , meaning (existential) , reading (process) , aesthetics , nexus (standard) , politics , appreciative listening , sociology , history , art , epistemology , communication , linguistics , philosophy , computer science , political science , law , archaeology , finance , economics , embedded system
In Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s A Queda do céu, listening, within the context of Yanomami shamanism, entails transposing the words of Omama, the creator god, and his spirits, the xapiri into the present, with the aim of establishing a livable future. This text, with its complex questions of co-authorship, demands of the reader a kind of listening in order to open up to Yanomami forms of sense-making. Shamanic listening depends on an initiation ceremony, which is a “listening lesson” as much for Kopenawa as for the reader. The undecidable nexus of hearing/imitating is the grounds for the discovery of the otherness of the self, a self-difference from which meaning stems. The shamanic listening practice is embedded within collective political struggles emerging in resistance to the colonizing incursions of market capitalism. Matihi is the name the Yanomami give to commodities, as they integrate them into a system of exchange involving affect and interdependence. Matihi, connected to mortality and the forest’s lived past, illustrates the renewal process born of shamanic listening.