Julien Pallotta
Julien Pallotta is an associate researcher at IFCS/UFRJ, specializing in French social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of the social sciences (anthropology, sociology).He is also a translator of Brazilian anthropology and reverse anthropology into French (E. Viveiros de Castro, Ailton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa).
If anthropology is philosophy with the people in, then philosophy can shape its concepts by learning from anthropology.[1] In this article, I propose a few inchoate ways of thinking about indigenous cosmo-aesthetics, based on the words of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. My real point of departure is a remark by Darcy Ribeiro, reported by Sergio Cohn to Ailton Krenak, on the Amerindians’ desire for beauty in their daily lives.[2] For Krenak, there is an essential link between the cultures of the Amerindian peoples and the creation of beauty in the most everyday gestures, such as in a small feather in a child’s headdress, in a bamboo box containing water, or, during ceremonies, in the dances and songs of the participants. Hence my point of departure: the indigenous preoccupation with beauty.
To ground my approach to an indigenous “cosmo-aesthetics” based on the Yanomami case, I will first argue that this concern is a certain disposition of aesthesis—of feeling—towards the cosmos, here understood as the Yanomami “forest-land” (urihi a): a sensitivity to the beauty of the forest. To explore this, I will study aspects of Yanomami cosmo-aesthetics by analyzing the shamanic experiences narrated by Kopenawa. Then, I will explain how this cosmo-aesthetics is inseparable from a cosmo-politics understood as the defense of the forest and the search for allies to carry out this defense.
Cosmo-aesthetics as a shamanic experience of the Forest
I propose to distinguish two inseparable meanings of Yanomami cosmo-aesthetics: firstly, it is an aisthesis, a feeling that experiences the power of forest beings; secondly, it is an everyday practice of beauty, manifested in rituals, ornaments, and songs, and this practice operates through an imitation of the powers the Yanomami seek to capture. More generally and more encompassingly, cosmo-aesthetics is an experience of the forest that consists in being sensitive to its beauty. To analyze the first meaning I give to cosmo-aesthetics, we need to go back to Davi Kopenawa’s description of his shamanic experience of inhaling the hallucinogenic powder yãkoana. Let’s start by recalling that, in Yanomami society, the shaman’s knowledge comes from his position of initiated person: his knowledge (based on mastery of the repeated experience of transformed perception) is not accessible to “ordinary” people, to the “profane.” Such knowledge embodies the idea of cosmo-aesthetics in two ways: firstly, it is the experimentation of another aisthesis, which is a way of being affected by the other-than-human; secondly, the appearance of these beings, the shamanic “spirits,” takes on a fundamental aesthetic twist in the sense of an experience of the most sparkling beauty.
The description of the shamanic experience of shamanic “spirits” can be found in the first part of The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, entitled “Becoming Other.” This title refers to the shamanic experience of the “becoming-other” of perception and aisthesis: the “death” of ordinary vision, experiencing another ontological and perceptual state, and accessing a higher form of vision to see “spirits.” This superior way of seeing is a plunge into myth. According to Lévi-Strauss, myth is a “story of a time when humans and animals were not yet distinct.”[3] Time of myth is an absolute past, a past that has never been present. Under the effect of yãkoana, the shaman sees the xapiripë, a term that is translated as shamanic “spirits” and that designates, in Yanomami cosmology, the utupë: the (non-iconic) image, true essence of the beings of the forest and, at the same time, the images of the archaic humanity of the mythical past, whose members bear the name of animals and whose metamorphosis has given rise to the present-day, empirical animals of the forest (those who may be, for the Yanomami, game).
As Viveiros de Castro shows, what the shaman experiences in bringing down the spirits is an ascent to the virtual stage prior to the actualizations that distribute the finite, external differences between species, an ascent that enables him to experience an infinite difference within himself. To illustrate the idea that this experience does not reveal an indistinction between humanity and animality, Viveiros de Castro gives the example of the mythical jaguar (a common one in his work, but not especially highlighted by Kopenawa):
Knowing if the mythical jaguar is a block of human affects in the form of a jaguar or a block of feline affects in the form of a human is rigorously undecidable, given that mythical metamorphosis is a heterogeneous “event” or “becoming” (a dense superposition of states) and not a “process” of “change” (a vast transposition of homogeneous states).[4]
This becoming corresponds to the first meaning of cosmo-aesthetics: the experience of becoming-other-than-oneself in the way one feels. The term “cosmo-aesthetics” is justified by the fact that the shaman experiences an aisthesis that makes him feel the states of other beings who populate the cosmos of the forest-land: in this sense, the shaman is an inhabitant of the forest in the strong sense that he is inhabited by it. But beyond this first sense of cosmo-aesthetics, we need to return to the description of the xapiri to see how the shamanic experience is also an aesthetic one: encountering the beauty of forest beings.
Davi Kopenawa uses the term “spirits” to describe the xapiri, but he actually describes them as tiny humanoids adorned with extremely bright and colorful ornaments and body paint. Following a long ascetic initiation, the shaman becomes able to call down or summon the spirits who appear in a dance. The descent of spirits mobilizes not only vision, but also smell, hearing, and taste. The xapiri are clean bodies, untainted by the consumption of game meat, and are covered in red body paint (annatto dye) and adorned in shiny black. They move at high speed over shiny mirrors, surfaces that reflect only light. As they fly, they give off a delicious, intoxicating perfume. Their bodies are so delicate that even their farts are fragrant. Their beautiful songs are learned while they were close to the trees. The blackbird’s mythical ancestor is the inventor of the songs sung at reahu inter-community festivals.[5]
On arriving at their “father,” the shaman who summoned them, they evoke the places from whence they came, the waters of a sweet river, and the disease-free forests where they feast on unknown foods. All these descriptions suggest a superlative state of the body: the xapiripë are human bodies minus the vicissitudes and imperfections of the ordinary state of the body. The xapiripë body, Kopenawa says in the film A Queda do céu, is as solid and resistant as a rock.[6] Removed from the fragility of ordinary human bodies, from the possibility of falling ill, the xapiripë body is, in the end, immortal. A body escaping the normal determinations of the body, it is, as Viveiros de Castro puts it, both less than a body because it is comparable to dust, and more than one body because it is capable of metamorphosis.[7]
The experience of beauty is central to the shamanic “descent” of spirits. The shaman must make himself “the spirits’ house,” providing them with a welcoming place that suits them and is pleasing to them. To achieve this, the shaman, who is their “father,” must imitate the superior state of their body: he must follow an ascetic diet, including sexual and dietary restrictions. But he must also – and this is basically the same thing – take care of the beauty of the place where they are welcomed. To summon many spirits, the young shaman must rely on the help of the elders who initiate him and send the spirits of the cock-of-the-rock, the dove and the tãrakoma bird as emissaries to the others. These spirits invite the others to join them, extolling the beauty of the place.[8] Shamanic initiation is thus an ethico-aesthetic process: to summon the spirits, one has to become like them, to be their “father,” i.e. to purify oneself to become more and more beautiful. The experience of beauty is also notable as Kopenawa states that he has preferences in his relationship with the spirits: he marvels at the song of the ayokorari cacique spirits, whom he considers “the most beautiful” and thus distinct from all others. His desire is to constantly carry “their path in [his] thought.”[9]
To complete the analysis of Yanomami cosmo-aesthetics, it may be interesting, in a reverse-anthropological vein, to consider, in contrast, the way in which Kopenawa conceives the cosmo-aesthetics of the napëpë (the white people). This analysis is deployed in the chapter in which Kopenawa defines the white people by their “merchandise love,” in a carnal sense as he says that merchandise is for them a fiancée. The euphoria merchandise provokes ends up obscuring everything else in their minds,[10] and this obscuration can be understood as a negative cosmo-aesthetics: it reveals a lack of consideration for the multiplicity of beings that inhabit the “forest-land.” In the film quoted above, Kopenawa speaks of the white people who, greedy for merchandise, destroy the forest like insects eating leaves and have no consideration for the forest. To have an obscured way of thinking is to have no consideration for the forest, the forest felt and experienced as an infinite multiplicity of beings that inhabit it. Living an impoverished experience of the cosmos, the white people are only sensitive to the world of merchandise.
Understood as the shamanic experience of another way of feeling and as a collective concern for beauty (through imitation of the beauty and power of forest beings), Yanomami cosmo-aesthetics extends into the politics of the forest as a cosmos of multiple inhabitants. As a shaman tasked with healing his people and holding back the fall of the sky (according to the Yanomami myth of the end of the world), Davi Kopenawa entered politics to defend the forest and its inhabitants.
Cosmopolitics as defense of the Forest
Davi Kopenawa’s politics is based on his cosmo-aesthetics and on the Yanomami practice of inhabiting. If cosmo-aesthetics is the power of being affected by the multiplicity of beings and agency of the forest, then indigenous cosmo-politics is a politics of representing this multiplicity to the encompassing society, i.e., in this case, Brazilian national society. The slogan “defend the forest” can be understood in this way: defend the inhabitants of the forest in their multiplicity, and, to do so, defend the specificity of the Yanomami by granting them autonomy over a “demarcated” territory.
Indigenous cosmo-politics is therefore inextricably linked to cosmo-aesthetics, because for Kopenawa, the elders of his people “simply thought that the forest was beautiful and that it must continue like this forever.”[11] This cosmo-politics is bound to encounter the other meaning of cosmopolitanism, that inherited from the Enlightenment: the demand for a politics that goes beyond the national framework. In Kopenawa’s career, this encounter has taken place in two ways: through the support of various NGOs, and through his speeches at the UN General Assembly. The political strategy was to mobilize a sphere of international public opinion that can put pressure on national society and its government.
Thinking about Yanomami politics means thinking about a politics of alliances. Here, I’ll focus on the possible alliance with the white people. Kopenawa has realized that the term “ecology” (ecologia), which he pronounces in Portuguese, can communicate with potential white allies, the townspeople, and that its dissemination has even brought the Yanomami out of their invisibility. He believes that, without even knowing the word, the ancient Yanomami were already practicing ecology, inspired by the words of the xapiripë spirits. This inter-ethnic encounter with the words of white ecologists produced two notable effects on Kopenawa’s thinking: a positive borrowing, and a critical distancing.
About the borrowing, Kopenawa explains that by getting to know white people’s words on what they call nature, his thinking became clearer and broader. He understood that what had to be defended was not simply “the small area” where the Yanomami lived, but “the entire forest […] and even the white people’s land very far beyond [them],”: what, in Yanomami, is called “urihi a pree – the great forest-land”, i.e. “what the white people call the entire world.”[12] This friction between the words of white people and Yanomami cosmology has produced an interesting telescoping effect of two cosmopolitics: indigenous cosmopolitics as a practice of inhabiting place in intelligent negotiation with the other beings who inhabit it, and cosmopolitanism inherited from the Enlightenment understood as politics thought from the point of view of a humanity occupying the entire globe. As an extension of Kopenawa’s thinking, I have suggested elsewhere that if we are to think about the organization of this struggle as both local and global in the age of ecological crisis, we need to envisage a “cosmopolitical internationalism” (the new features of which are both nascent and yet to be invented).[13]
Concerning the critical distancing from white ecological thinking, Kopenawa returns to the (Portuguese) term for nature: meio ambiente, which literally means “ambient milieu” or “surrounding milieu,” commonly translated as “environment.” Bruce Albert suggests translating it as “natural milieu” to synthesize the ideas of milieu and nature. Kopenawa is highly critical of the understanding of forest as “environmental milieu”: understood in this way, the forest is no more than a remnant not yet eliminated by the production process of the industrial society of the “merchandise people.” Urban ecology sees the forest as a remnant or residual space whose diverse functionality may in part justify protection: one can preserve biodiversity useful to the pharmaceutical industry, one can use it for eco-tourism, or one can see it as space for spiritual renewal. In all cases, this urban ecology subordinates the protection of the forest to its economic functionality: once aware of the excesses of industrialism, the solution would be to put the brakes on overexploitation that is too destructive of the surrounding “milieus.” But this shallow ecology is a far cry from Kopenawa’s cosmic ecology, which is based on an “inhabited” love of the forest. Kopenawa’s visits to towns to talk to white people are merely tactical: he uses the town as a space for discussion and to spread his word in defense of the forest, but has no desire to linger there.
If the white people only talk about protecting reserved areas, there is a great risk, for Kopenawa, that the Yanomami will find themselves cornered in small, isolated stretches of land surrounded by spaces dedicated to the production of goods, which would further pollute and render uninhabitable the indigenous shreds of land. Reduced to a bare skin, the preserved and fenced-in “natural” space of the white people is unable to sustain what makes the forest so rich, what makes its “value of growth” (në rope). The threat is great of a considerable impoverishment of the yanomami existence as forest dwellers: a reduced forest means a forest dweller reduced to rubble. This is what Kopenawa cannot accept, and why he wants to defend the forest as a whole, not just a territory of his people.
What to make of the hyperbole of indigenous cosmo-aesthetics?
From the point of view of a non-indigenous reader, Kopenawa’s cosmo-aesthetics represents a hyperbolic provocation. It’s hard for such a reader not to measure the cosmological distance separating them from what looks like a quasi-pre-industrial apprehension of the world. I’d say we have two distinct ways of concluding. First, we must recognize the irreducible otherness of indigenous cosmo-aesthetic experience. Kopenawa and his people want to be left alone in their territory: there is an “indigeno-pessimism” according to which the natives, expecting nothing good from the white people, demand to be respected in their desire for separation.[14] In this respect, it’s worth mentioning what is perhaps, for Kopenawa, the most insidious threat to the Yanomami as a people of the forest: not only the napepë’s greed (from which comes the ransacking of the forest stems), but the appeal of the White people’s powerful technological objects to the younger generation. Kopenawa mentions the smartphone as a typical object of the white people’s cosmo-technique, the object that, par excellence, connects the white people to their cosmos. Fascinated by the connection to the world via the smartphone screen, the young Yanomami may be tempted to become white. For Kopenawa, this object is part of the negative cosmo-aesthetics of the napë, which manifests a disconnection with the multiplicity of Forest beings. However, Kopenawa also conceives of a tactical use for the napë’s technologies. Since 2018, the Hutukara association he presides over has launched an audiovisual training program designed to fortify the transmission of yanomami knowledge. On the political significance of this program, anthropologist Marília Senlle (with whom Kopenawa develops this project) puts it this way: “it’s both a new weapon designed to pacify white people, and a way of subverting the smartphone so that, in [Yanomami] communities, young people can access content about the Yanomami themselves, recording their own knowledge, or that of other indigenous peoples, thus participating in a politics of images.”[15]
But another conclusion can be drawn from these considerations. Kopenawa himself seeks an alliance with urban people, concerned about the advancing destruction of nature by industrial society. We can then look for equivalents of indigenous cosmo-aesthetics in urban societies. As an example of affective alliances, we might mention the “garden sharing ” movement, which can be seen as an attempt to break down the separation between town and country, by experimenting with agricultural commons in the city, and whose idea of taking back land is in a sense a reindigenization of modernity. We can also think of Gilles Clément’s proposals on the “third landscape” (tiers-paysage, to be understood as the third estate of the landscape), a neglected space that functions as a reserve withdrawn from exploitation, inhabited by a diversity of living species. A synthesis of these two conclusions is undoubtedly necessary: to defend both the singularity of indigenous ways of being and feeling, and to seek equivalents of this hyperbolic radicality which, as such, is impossible to transpose, i.e. to make oneself as indigenous as possible in the modernity of the industrial world. Isn’t this eco-romantic program, which makes indianness a project rather than a memory of the past, as improbable as it is necessary?
[1] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Métaphysiques cannibales, Paris, PUF, 2009, translation by O. Bonilla, 164.
[2] Sergio Cohn (org.), Encontros. Ailton Krenak, Rio de Janeiro, Azougue, 2015, 257.
[3] Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Éribon, De près et de loin, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1988, 193.
[4] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “La forêt des miroirs. Quelques notes sur l’ontologie des esprits amazoniens” in Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten (dir.), La nature des esprits dans les cosmologies autochtones, Laval, Les Presses Universitaires de Laval, 2007, 51.
[5]The reahu feast is both a ceremony of alliance between close collective homes and a funeral home.
[6] Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, A Queda do Céu, Aruac Filmes, 2024.
[7] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “La forêt des miroirs,” op. cit., 56.
[8] Bruce Albert and Davi Kopenawa, The Falling Sky : Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Harvard University Press, 2013, translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, 99-100.
[9] Bruce Albert and Davi Kopenawa, op.cit., p.125.
[10] Ibidem, 332-333.
[11] Ibidem, 393.
[12] Ibidem, 396.
[13]See Julien Pallotta, Por uma internacional cosmopolítica, São Paulo, n-1 edições, 2024.
[14] See my article “De la contre-anthropologie comme lutte des peuples dans la théorie,” Les Temps qui restent, 1, April-June 2024.
[15] Marília Senlle, personal communication.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 