I begin this article with a warning: it is necessary to say that I am not an expert on Yanomami people, but I have researched, over the last few years, the relation between photography, drawing and image in anthropology[1]. This research affords me an unsuspecting dialogue on the drawings of The Falling Sky, the Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa’s book co-written with Bruce Albert. If Bruno Latour[2] defines good science as the one which establishes unexpected connections and recognizes differences instead of eliminating them, I hope this article will follow in a similar way, establishing revealing differences. This is one of the reasons why I entitle this text as “preliminary diffractions” and not “preliminary reflections”. The explanation draws upon a brief story. I had the privilege of meeting Davi Kopenawa over a few days. He came to the city of Goiânia, in the midwest of Brazil, to participate in a series of activities at the Federal University of Goiás. At that time, he explained to me that seeing xapiri is like going to the movies. Many people from the Amazon have compared the cinematographic images to hallucinogen trips with visionary plants such as Yãkoana or Ayahuasca, among others. This is what Peter Gow[3] called “cinema of the forest”. The comparison is related to the luminous intensity of the spirits of the forest, which is perceived by the shamans. Viveiros de Castro taught us that “the Yanomami shamans know that the forest belongs to the xapiri and it is made up of its ‘mirrors’, that is to say, brilliant crystals. The crystal forest, then, does not reflect or reproduce images, but dim, glow or shine”[4]. In other words, the luminescence of these brilliant crystals does not reflect or reproduce images, but glows or diffracts, creating diverse infinitesimal lights. It is important to remember that diffraction is a concept proposed by Donna Haraway and Maria Puig Bellacasa[5], in order to think the role of science beyond the reflection, as a reflection of itself. Thus, I consider that the drawings of Davi Kopenawa create diffractions and not reproductions of the invisible world he sees as a shaman. Therefore, this article aims to make preliminary diffractions and not reflections.

Yet, I think that the graphic inscriptions of Davi Kopenawa create a diffraction of the way the west understand the drawing. The drawings bring contributions to the increasing recovery of drawing in anthropology through the work of Tim Ingold, Michael Taussig, Karina Kuschnir and Aina Azevedo, among other, who have thought about the drawing as a form of knowledge and a privileged research technique for the encounter with the other.

Before the epilogue of The Falling Sky, in the last chapter intitled “The Shamans’ Death”, Davi Kopenawa says: “even if they [white people] do not listen to my words while I am alive, I am leaving the drawing of these words on this paper skin so that their children and those who are born after them can one day see and understand them. Then they will discover the thought of the Yanomami shamans and know how much we wanted to defend the forest”[6]

In this paragraph that closes the chapter, it is evident that the book The Falling Sky is a [com]position, not in the sense of representation, but rather in the sense of positioning-with the drawings[7], if we understand composition in the terms of Latour. This idea is a good way to emphasize by most reviews, analysis and paratexts where there is no information regarding almost 84 drawings in the book.

The drawings are part of the original version in French and, in the Brazilian version, are disposed in the same places. The English version is more economic, only bringing in the drawings before each chapter. The version in Portuguese is more complete because it includes all the drawings of the original version, besides photographs and colored drawings. Despite the differences between the editions, I think that the drawings are an important part of the book, not only before each chapter, but also alongside the writing of Davi. The suppression of colored drawings in the French version and other drawings along the paragraphs in the English version reveal how western presses establish a great divide between drawing and writing. The differentiation of modes of inscription are not made by the Yanomami people and Davi Kopenawa. Furthermore, being of the same mind as  David Lapoujade, Kopenawa’s vision creates agency of embedded planes: “the perceptual plane with the cosmological plane, and the intensive plane with the non-representative, but figurative, plane”[8]. It seems to me that the invitation made by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert is to read The Falling Sky through the coexistence of a multiplicity of perspectives and planes. Or in the terms of this article, to make writing and drawing on the same topology coexist.

When Davi says he is “leaving the drawings of these words” so that the next generations can see them, he is referring to a drawing which is no different from writing; words to be seen and not only read. The Yanomami describe writing “by using terms applied to certain patterns of their body painting: oni (a series of short dashes), turu (a group of dots), and yãikano (sinusoidal lines). To write is therefore to ‘draw dashes’, ‘draw dots’, or ‘draw sinusoids’ and writing, thë ã oni, is a ‘drawing of words’”[9].

The reader must be questioning: if the Yanomami language uses the same words to designate drawing and writing, why should I detach the drawn images in relation to the text, in The Falling Sky? In other words, if the written words and the drawing are to be of equal value, would the analysis that only approaches the textual part of the book thereby encompass the drawings? In a certain way, this objection is correct, but only provisionally. We learn with Viveiros de Castro, Peter Gow and Els Lagou, among other anthropologists, that Amerindian cosmologies understand everything as constant transformation. Thus, the definitions are provisory, varying according to the play of perspectives. This play of perspectives is the very way in which drawing, writing and words are interspaced, be it disposed in separate forms, be it united in terms of “drawings of words” or “drawings of writings”. The afore mentioned note emphasizes that drawing and writing as verbs are equivalent acts. But writing as an inscription and a noun is defined in terms of drawings of short dashes, different from the drawing of sinusoidal lines.

On a specific plane, drawing, writing and body painting are called tr ã ë. On another plane, drawing is utupë, a term that Bruce Albert translated into English as image. Utupë is used by Yanomami to designate many things, such as newspaper, photography, film, painting, drawing and even the bodily state with a visual dimension, which is related to vital energy and movement[10]. Davi Kopenawa refers to this visual, luminous and bodily dimension when he compares seeing xapiri with being inside the movie theater. Maybe utupë could be translated provisionally as image-body, like Stella Senra translates, inspired by the Deleuzian idea of image-time and image-movement. Drawing is therefore more than writing. It is something that varies from plane to plane, depending on the perspective. According to Bruce Albert, the image as the translation of the word utupë is the initial point from which we can create an inner critique to the Western conception of image.

Drawing, writing and image are many things. They are actualizations of virtual universes in constant movement. In other words, I want to emphasize that The Falling Sky has multiple readings, depending on the positioning of the reader’s perspectives. The book prevents the possibility of a linear reading. Sometimes, drawings are writing. And, often, drawings are something more that writing, depending on the viewer’s point of view. In this sense, this article aims to walk through some perspectives without ever closing them, always indicating another side, beyond my own words. But I will use the term graphic inscription to encompass drawing and writing as inscriptions of a continuous gesture on the same plane. When I say drawing, I refer to what westerners understand as drawing: lines that do not form words. Thus, when I say writing, “drawing of writing” or “drawing of words” ­­– the terms used by Davi – I am referring to writing as a syntactic composition of words.

I explore now the diffractions produced by the perspective, which puts the act of drawing and the act of writing on the same plane. As I mentioned above, the difference between the editions of the book in Portuguese, English and French reveals nothing but the ways we distinguish writing and drawing, remarking the former in detriment to the latter. Davi Kopenawa has said many times that he produced this book with Albert in order to bring the words of Omama to white people, who need to be affected by the importance of defending the forest. Thus, the suppression of some drawings in the English version and colored drawing in the French version, even if the suppression was allowed by Davi, certainly reveals the ways by which the west emphasizes the writing to the detriment of the drawing. This differentiation is not made by Davi. Davi joins drawing and writing persistently as one and the same act throughout the book and in the first chapter, intitled “Drawn words”. This persistence expresses his refusal of accepting a western great divide, which creates an abyss between us and them, between oral peoples and peoples with writing, between historical peoples and peoples without history.

The proposal of Davi Kopenawa is understanding drawing and writing as a continuum. It establishes partial connections with the anthropology of Tim Ingold[11], which criticizes the great divide between oral people and people with writing. According to Ingold, all peoples have graphic inscriptions. Therefore, the question is to know when writing was separated from drawing. This differentiation between drawing and writing, according to the British anthropologist, is intrinsically related to the discontinuity between writing and orality, between visual and aural. Ingold shows that the Saussurian idea of the sound being secondary to the written language is recent and singular to the west. The medieval monks used to read their texts out loud, performing words in a sacred space. The anthropologist Peter Gow met Sangana, an ancient with shamanic powers among the Piro. Sangana said that, when he saw the newspaper under the effect of Ayahuasca, he had heard and seen the lips of a woman who uttered the printed words. During the Yanomami shamanic initiatory rite, the drawing-images can only be seen through chanting. The visual, the oral and the aural are brought together in the production of images during the shamanic ritual. Only the west, in the last three centuries, separated writing from sound. Reading became a silent individual act and reading words became different from seeing images. As if letters themselves were something different from an image. In a sense, when Davi speaks of “seeing drawn words”, he is exactly juxtaposing, on a same plane, acts that the west conceives as separate.

According to Ingold, silent reading indicates a perceptual transformation where the act of reading became a movement of separation and projection of letters in a syntactic and conceptual order. On the other hand, reading out loud is the performative act of following the flow of lines of cursive letters which form sound. Ingold understands that such a perceptual transformation occurs with the advent of the press, when the typographic technology was separated from the act of writing, the continuous gesture of a particular body, in order to become a standard movement, independent from the body that manipulates the typographic machine. Before the press, handwriting and drawing were inscriptions of a continuous gesture, where a particular body recorded all a history and an atmosphere, at the same time, during the inscription. As an example, I remember that the signature by hand became the mark of individuality in the west. Exactly because it keeps the history of the movement of one body, different from other bodies and histories.

It is interesting to observe that the process of standardization of writing and reading is intrinsically related to the development of capitalism, to the desire for the commodity, as Davi Kopenawa analyses. The press and the manufactured production of commodities follow the same process of fabricating coins. They aim to create interchangeable common factor, separate from the bodies and histories of those who produce them.

Drawings point to this other side, to a time when drawing and writing, as well as humans and animals, were not different. It is worth remembering that, according to Lévi-Strauss, the great mythical theme is the passage from the continuous to the discrete, from a time where things were undifferentiated to a time of differentiation.

Notice here the play of perspectives: when Davi Kopenawa equates drawing and writing on the level of language, he establishes a continuity because both are made of lines. Nevertheless, the disposition of sinusoid lines along the printed text is the revelation of a difference between drawing and writing, between drawings with long lines and drawings with short dashes. A difference between the gesture and the typographic standard, between body and machine. The way Davi Kopenawa handles drawing and writing on a continuous axis from the continuous to the discrete enacts the way xapiri act in the forest. Viveiros de Castro elucidates that xapiri “is the name for the disjunctive synthesis that separates-connects the actual and the virtual, the discrete and the continuous, the edible and the cannibal, the prey and the predator”[12] (2006, p. 326). Why not then the synthesis that separates/connects drawing and writing?

This interplay of perspectives brings another point of view to consider The Falling Sky, which Bruce Albert calls a heterobiography. Bruce Albert teaches us that the book is the fruit of an ethnographic pact and, therefore, it is not only a biography of one Indigenous being written by one white man, but rather a heterobiography. This writing is only possible by the transformation of the I-redactor in two people. As Bruce Albert explains:

This book consists of autobiographical stories and shamanic reflections and is told in the first person, in Davi Kopenawa’s inspiring and memorable voice. Yet this first person encompasses a double “I.” The words in this text are truly the narrator’s own words, rendered as faithfully as possible from a huge body of audio recordings. This narrator had a limited writing experience, however, and so the “I” in this narrative also belongs to a certain extent to me, his editorial alter ego. This book is thus a “written/spoken textual duet” in which two people—the author of the spoken words and the author of their written form—produced a text working together as one[13].

If the writing of the book crystallizes this effort of inhabiting the voice of the interlocutor in the transposition process of words and ideas, the drawings are the fruit of Davi Kopenawa’s continuous gesture and, then, inseparable from his own body. In this sense, the drawings are the most autobiographic dimensions of the book. Nevertheless, this ‘auto’ must be read with suspicion because, in the shamanic world, as Viveiros de Castro once said, it is not possible to suppose a constitutive individuality, but rather an indiscernibility of affects. The book’s drawings are an expression of the xapiri that inhabit Davi and which are inhabit by Davi. Indeed, more than one auto or heterobiography, the drawings are multibiographies[14]. They are graphic inscriptions of these multiple beings which inhabit the forest and multiply ad infinitum. They are the translation of the worlds accessed by Davi Kopenawa.

This point leads me to another plane: the drawings are not representations, but rather relations between the visible world and the invisible world. In a sense, the drawings of Kopenawa are like the drawings of Kaxinawa – Huni Kuin[15].

The drawings of The Falling Sky are the way through which Davi makes visible what is invisible to the white people and non-shamans. Even though, on the level of language, these drawings are related to the same word that designates body painting, such inscriptions have different natures. They are different because the drawings on the paper are already an effort of translation into a knowledge whose life is beyond the body of the shaman.

I shall clear up when I received Davi Kopenawa in Goiânia, I observed that he used drawings to explain his perspective to us, white people (I remember his explanation, with drawings on the demarcation of his territory, when we were at Casa do Índio). His task was to translate for the people who were not born in his land. As he tells us on the first pages of The Falling Sky, the words, sayings and drawings are part of the Yanomami ontology. He says:

I was not born on a land without trees. My flesh does not come from the sperm of a white man. I am a son of the inhabitants of the forest highlands and I fell on the ground from the vagina of a Yanomami woman. I am a son of the people Omama brought into existence in the beginning of time. I was born in this forest and have always lived here. Today it is my children and grandchildren’s turn to grow up here. This is why my words are those of a real Yanomami[16].

His sayings are fruit of this land with trees. They come from the Yanomami flesh and land, which are perpetuated in the forest and through the next generations. Davi continues: “These are words that have stayed with me in my solitude, after the death of my forebears. These are words the spirits gave me in dreams but also words that came to me through hearing the evil words white people spread about us. They are solidly rooted deep in my chest”[17].

These words, dreams and images are part of his body. They are rooted deep in his chest. But if he wants white people to understand his words, he needs to draw them on paper skins. The knowledge of Omama and Xapiri are inscribed deep in his body. The writings and drawings are the ways we, White peoples, inscribe the knowledge outside our bodies. Therefore, we have, according to Davi, hollow thinking.

The drawing on paper is something very recent for Yanomami. Formerly they drew on the body. They began to draw on paper in the Seventies, stimulated by Claudia Andujar e Carlo Zacquini, who have a long-lasting ethnographic pact with Yanomami and Davi Kopenawa. Andujar and Zacquini encouraged the shamans to draw “their world and their understanding of the world”[18]. Until then, Yanomami had never drawn with paper and colored pens. The drawing on paper with pen, different from body painting, is part of an endeavor of translation. These drawings were published in the book Mitopoemas Yanomamis.

Laymert Garcia dos Santos, discussing the drawings of the book Mitopoemas Yanomamis, brings more diffractions we can use to think about the drawings of The Falling Sky. The remarkable aspect for Laymert and others who see the drawings of Yanomami, but also the drawings of Marubo[19] and Xikrin[20], is what Laymert identifies as an extreme freedom of line, with a grace similar to Miró and Paul Klee. Or, in the words of the author: “How did drawing come to be [for a people who never drew with a pen]? And how can it be such a force of expression, such a line intensity, all the balance and movement, all the vibration? How can non-artists create such a splendor?”

Laymert wanted another appraisal, and then he showed the drawings to the artist Francis Alÿs, who saw attentively almost 70 images. Alÿs said that:

What impressed him the most was how the drawing occupied all of the paper sheet. Even if the drawing was big or small, the lines and figures filled the entire page to the edges. To his understanding, the drawings activate the space in a radically different way from the experience of western drawing, which always seems loose on the sheet, always existing as a fragment, never as a totality[21].

Another point was relevant to Alÿs: these drawings made by Yanomami were a projection of an inaugural act: “the drawing drew itself”. He was surprised by

The way the drawing drew itself, the movement that reached the space, taking it entirely. And, suddenly, he understood the reason of the present process: he noticed that the drawings were constituted […] as projections of images set up as a whole, regardless if they came from the exterior world or from the spirit of the drawer. [Francis Alÿs] noticed that the hand of the drawer and the eye of the one who saw the image were the operators of an inaugural act. The passing act of an image that until then was not manifested exteriorly as such, but only found in the paper sheet a space for projecting itself. Hence the astonishing integrity of the drawing and the affirmation of a totality never seen before. For this reason, Alÿs considered the drawings were precious and unique[22].

The projection mentioned by Alÿs does not regard the notion of “design”, as a project to be enacted, but rather a kind of chimeric project, such as the Hopi drawing defined by Carlo Severi[23]. The few lines of the Hopi drawing need the projection of invisible lines by the observer, who completes the drawing. In the case of Yanomami shamanic drawings, it seems to me that each line projects another line in the very act of drawing, not previously, until it reaches to the totality of the paper. And, for this reason, the drawing draws itself.

Again, there is another possible interesting dialogue within the Ingold’s proposition of drawing for anthropology. The Yanomami drawings seen by Francis Alÿs suggests a notion of movement of the drawing in a totality. But, according to Tim Ingold, the movement of the drawing lies in its “anti-totalizing force”[24]. In other words, Ingold understands that drawing, different from oil painting or photography, is like a reserved place that can always be continued by other lines, whose finality is not prescribed previously. Therefore, according to Ingold, the possibility of adding lines ad infinitum to the drawings creates the movement because their definition never ends. He says, thinking with Paul Klee: “Form is the end, [form is] death”, but “form-giving is movement, ‘form-giving is action. Form-giving is life”. Hence, the form of the drawing is always continuing. This is why it is movement.

Now, the drawings made by Yanomami are also life and movement. They are operators of a drawn inaugural act. But the movement does not happen through a reserved space. It follows the lines to the very edges of the sheets, suggesting the continuity of the movement beyond the space of the sheet. This characteristic of continuity of the line beyond the paper is something common in the drawings of Amazonic peoples. Els Lagrou analysis that the drawings of Kaxinawa, for example, show a continuity “purposely putting the drawing on this oblique manner over the face or arm, […] suggesting that the drawing continues”[25]. Regina Müller found the same drawing technique among Asurini, calling it projection of window effect, whose line continues and threads other surfaces and worlds[26].

In other words, the movement can be produced by the fragments, as Ingold thinks, as well as by a totality, as we learn from Yanomami, Kaxinawa and Asurini.

In the case of Yanomami drawings, Laymert Garcia dos Santos shows that the freedom of lines expresses the very extrapolation of the western idea of figure and background. These drawings present two conceptions of Yanomami cosmology: 1) the notion of forest-land; and 2) the notion of the image.

The Yanomami idea of forest-land, according to Laymert, can be understood as magical thought, following the definition of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. Magical thought is an intimate and primeval relation between human and nature, in which there were no difference between humans and their environment, between figure and background. In these Yanomami drawings, disposing figures in a linear perspective does not make sense. The linear perspective organizes a relation between first and second plane. But in the drawings, all beings are embedded and immersed. Maybe, the drawings, reaching the whole surface, aim to disrupt any idea of the white part of the paper as the background. In the process of translation, the paper becomes a cosmological topology.

Although some drawings neither follow the edge of the paper nor fill all the blank space, the idea of continuity between multiple beings, humans or non-humans, is intrinsically related to the Yanomami definition of the image. According to Bruce Albert, the image utupë “is not a representation, but rather a processo of presentification of the invisible. (…) Neither metaphors nor replicas, the images utupë are nothing but ontological states, whose visibility is intermittently made effective during the shamanic session by means of an effect of corporal transduction”. That is say, the images seen by the shaman are “direct perceptions of an absolutely tangible exterior reality”[27]. Being affected by these images, the body of the shaman functions as a transductor that echoes these luminous lines to the paper. Or, in Laymert’s words, “we can consider the drawning-images as an echo of those [lines], an echo” [28] of the images of the shaman’s body.

If the shaman operates with multiple planes, his drawings are the effects of a transduction between the shaman and other worlds. Bruce Albert would add that “the drawings are a spontaneous entanglement of multiple-perspectives, that Yanomami territoriality is a set of points of view and that everything is embedded, imbricated in a multiplicity of spatial and temporal perspectives”. The philosopher David Lapoujade, in his dialogue with Bruce Albert, concludes that in the drawings “there is never an image… There is always various images. I should call it multi-image, actually.”[29]

Bearing in mind what has been said until now, what could we specifically say about the drawings in the book, The Falling Sky?  Hitherto, I have been establishing some parameters from which we could reflect on the drawings of The Falling Sky considering Yanomami cosmology, aiming to criticize the western thought on drawing. In this final part of the article, there are only some suggestions which require further investigation. We have only sparse information regarding the context in which the drawings were made and, therefore, it would be difficult to delimitate them. The Falling Sky displays the drawings in different forms. On the one hand, drawings of this experience of shamanic transduction with xapiri and other entities. On the other hand, drawings of animals, white men, and the city. There are drawings that seems framed at the beginning of each chapter, drawings whose lines reach the edge of the paper, or drawings whose position encompasses the totality of the paper. But there are drawings that, on a first analysis, appear as fragments in the interior of each chapter. It is important to remark that the frame and fragmentation are a result of edition work, with acquiescence of Albert and Kopenawa. Thus, it is impossible to know if the bird on page 75 of the Portuguese version is  part by a bigger drawing and if the framed drawings are out of context. Be it interference of the editor or not, what we see in the book is the published result anyway.

Taking these considerations into account, I would say it is possible to understand the disposition of drawings in the book through four categories: 1) drawings of the shamanic experience; 2) drawings of animals and indigenous utensils; 3) drawings that, at first sight, seem fragments amid the text; and 4) drawings of Davi’s experience of contact with white people. These categories serve for analytical purposes. We know that the way of uniting, separating and classifying Yanomami can be different, depending on the planes in which we are operating.

1) The drawings of the shamanic experience follow the approach proposed until now – as bridges between the visible and  invisible worlds. They suggest the continuity beyond the paper, with a topological dimension of the forest-land, without figure and background.

2) The drawings of animals and Indigenous utensils can be embedded in the perspective of Laymert, as if there was no differentiation between figure and background, between animals and bows and arrows. Moreover, animals and utensils also appear in shamanic experiences. In formal terms, the motifs of the lines and contour are very similar to the drawings of Xapiri and of the mirror-clearings. They are part of the same topology, but in the book, they are presented separately. It is worth pointing out that these lines can be many things, from ornaments, animals, scales, skins, feathers, paths, eyes, rivers to specific lines of a lineage or person. It would be worthwhile investigating the Yanomami graphic inscriptions in greater detail because this will enable a deep analysis of the images in The Falling Sky.

3) In the third category, the drawings that appear as fragments amid the chapters of the Portuguese and French versions can be fragments of a bigger drawing but, being disposed amid paragraphs and even sentences, they can be on the same plane of continuity with writing. If we see drawings and words as graphic inscriptions, there is no discontinuity anymore, but rather a continuity between them. As I discussed above, tr ã ë puts drawing and writings on the same plane. From this perspective, the paper sheets of the book also become a topography where the lines of the drawings become lines of words or, like Davi said, “drawn words”.

4) The fourth category, the drawings with buildings, cars and other elements of the white man world show how Davi create a graphic inscription of that world. Notice that the lines with which Davi draws the white people, the cities and commodities are made of simple lines, often with no ornaments. Maybe, Davi Kopenawa makes these drawings in order to restore to us a modest image of the western world, which we westerners consider too complex. A kind of reverse anthropology of ourselves, a kind of reverse drawings of ourselves.

Nevertheless, I consider that there is another dimension regarding the Western world in these drawings. I finish focusing on the drawings because they bring a fundamental aspect of the shamanic craft, which is healing. According to Yanomami cosmology, “when shamans heal a person, it is the vital image that needs to be restored because it was attaches, harmed, burned, taken off, etc”[30]. During this healing process, “all the images of the early times are ‘downloaded’ by the shamans in order to heal, to control ecology, and so forth”[31]. As Davi explains: “[…] the xapiri work ceaselessly to cure the sick. The agouti, acouchi, and paca spirits tear out the harmful things that the evil beings stuck in their image”[32].

I thread a partial connection with the shamanic context of the Sibundoy Valley, where many rivers that drain into the Amazon River are born. Among the Inga shamans of the region, brilliantly described by Michael Taussig[33] and Tatiana Lotierzo[34], the process of healing  a person consists of chasing away the images possibly fixed on the body of the ill. During the ritual, the shaman redraw (redo) the body of the person with gestures and visions. Drawing the images that sickens us is a form of not being drawn by them. Maybe it is possible to say that Davi Kopenawa draws the white people, their products and cities so he will not be drawn by these images; he will not be captured by them. In other words, he captures the images before with his lines, so the lines of the white people and their commodities will not attack the lines of his vital image.

Indeed, I find it interesting that Davi, throughout the book, displays a series of images of the early ages amid the images of the white people and their cities, in order that the work can act as a healing device.

I conclude that The Falling Sky is, therefore, more than a book. The drawn words express vigorously its transduction agency and healing power. Or, as Davi wrote in a dedication present in every book he signed for white people, “an arrow to touch the heart of non-Indigenous society”.

Luis Felipe Kojima Hirano

Federal University of Goiás -Brazil

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Tim Ingold, Lines, Routledge, Londres, 2007.

Tim Ingold, Making, Routledge, Londres, 2013.

[1] This article is a version of the conference I presented at the Colóquio Internacional Sonho, mercadoria e mundo: três hipóteses para pensar A queda do céu, organized by the International Network of the research group “Cosmoestéticas do Sul”, bind to the departments of Philosophy of UFG, UFRJ and Universidade de Buenos Aires. I thank to Carla Damião and Pedro Hussak, on behalf of the International Network of the research group “Cosmoestéticas do Sul”. I acknowledge Luz Gonçalves Brito for the translation of this article and Carla Damião for reviewing it. Finally, I also thank to the anthropologist Tatiana Lotierzo, who has worked with Inga artists of Colombia, for the interlocution during the preparation of this article. The conference is available in:

[2] Bruno Latour, “Como Falar do Corpo? A dimensão normativa dos estudos sobre a ciência”, In João Arriscado Nunes e Ricardo Roque, Objetos Impuros: Experiências em Estudos sobre a Ciência, Edições Afrontamento, Porto, 2004.

[3] Peter Gow, “Cinema da floresta”, Revista de Antropologia, V38.02, 1995.  37-54, [online]: https://doi.org/10.11606/2179-0892.ra.1995.111558

[4] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “A Floresta de Cristal: notas sobre a ontologia dos espíritos amazônicos” Cadernos de Campo, 15(14-15), 2006, p. 319.

[5] María Puig de la Bellacasa, “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care”, The Sociological Review, V. 602, 2012, p 197-216. Donna Haraway and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, Routledge, New York, 2000.

[6] Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013, p. 411.

[7] In Portuguese the prefix “com” means “with”.

[8] Stella Senra. “Conversações em Watoriki – Das passagens de imagens às imagens de passagem: captando o audiovisual do xamanismo”, Cadernos de Subjetividade, ano 8, No. 13, 2011, p. 76. See also: Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Projeções da Terra-Floresta: O Desenho-imagem Yanomami, 2014 [online]: https://www.laymert.com.br/yanomami/

[9] Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013, p. 490.

[10] Utupë, is not body painting because body painting is not image, even though body painting is tr ã ë, which characterizes writing, drawing and painting. According to Bruce Albert, who knows Yanomami thought and life deeply, such graphisms are considered sinusoid lines and marks, not images.

[11] Tim Ingold (org.), Redrawing Anthropology, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011a; Tim Ingold, Being Alive, Routledge, Londres, 2011b; Tim Ingold, Lines, Routledge, Londres, 2007; Tim Ingold, Making, Routledge, Londres, 2013.

[12] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “A Floresta de Cristal: notas sobre a ontologia dos espíritos amazônicos” Cadernos de Campo, 15(14-15), 2006, p.326

[13] Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013, p.446.

[14] It’s important to clarify that the written text also has multiple voices, as Albert points out: “the “I” of Davi Kopenawa’s account also embodies the voices of many shamanic “images” of animal ancestors and cosmological beings. He refers to and quotes these entities throughout his stories and reflections to express or explain their point of view”. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013, p.447.

[15] Els Lagrou, “Entre xamãs e artistas: entrevista com Els Lagrou”, Revista Usina, 2015 [online]: https://revistausina.com/20-edicao/entrevista-com-els-lagrou/

[16] Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013, p.21.

[17] Idem, ibidem.

[18] Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Projeções da Terra-Floresta: O Desenho-imagem Yanomami, 2014 [online]: https://www.laymert.com.br/yanomami/

[19] Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino, “Cartografias do Cosmos: Conhecimento”, Iconografia e Artes Verbais entre os Marubo. Mana 2013, v. 19, n. 3, pp. 437-471. [online]: https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-93132013000300002

[20] Lux Vidal(org.), Grafismo indígena: estudos de antropologia estética, Studio Nobel, São Paulo, 2000.

[21] Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Projeções da Terra-Floresta: O Desenho-imagem Yanomami, 2014 [online]: https://www.laymert.com.br/yanomami/

[22] Idem, ibidem.

[23] Carlo Severi, Le Principe de la Chimère: une anthropologie de la mémoire, Editions Rue D’Ulm, Paris, Musée du Quai Branly, 2006.

[24] Tim Ingold, Being Alive, Routledge, Londres, 2011b.

[25] Els Lagrou, Entre xamãs e artistas: entrevista com Els Lagrou Revista Usina, 2015 [online]:https://revistausina.com/20-edicao/entrevista-com-els-lagrou/

[26] Idem, ibidem.

[27] Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Projeções da Terra-Floresta: O Desenho-imagem Yanomami, 2014 [online]: https://www.laymert.com.br/yanomami/

[28] Idem, ibidem.

[29]  Idem, ibidem.

[30] Stella Senra. “Conversações em Watoriki – Das passagens de imagens às imagens de passagem: captando o audiovisual do xamanismo”, Cadernos de Subjetividade, ano 8, No. 13, p. 76

[31] Idem, ibidem.

[32] Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013, p.115.

[33] Michael Taussig, I Swear, I Saw This, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011.

[34] Tatiana Lotierzo, Erosão Num Pedaço de Papel, Tese de doutorado, Universidade de Brasília, 2019, [online]: https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/38080