Entity

Yanomami

Living rainforest people of the Brazil-Venezuela borderlands (Parima range) with rich shamanic cosmology centered on xapiri spirits.

Where the headwaters of the Orinoco rise in the Serra Parima, the watershed itself stands as a boundary that no map drew first. The rain that falls on the eastern slope runs to the Branco and the Negro and at last to the Amazon; the rain on the western slope runs to the Orinoco and the Caribbean. On the high ground between, in the forested ranges along what the states of Brazil and Venezuela later agreed to call their border, live the Yanomami — a people of some thirty-five thousand spread across hundreds of communities, the largest comparatively unbroken forest society remaining in northern Amazonia. To the south of the Orinoco watershed and to its north, in the states of Roraima and Amazonas and across into Venezuelan Amazonas, the same forest holds villages that speak four related but not freely intelligible tongues of the Yanomaman family — Yanomam, Sanöma, Ninam, and Yanomamï. The name that gathers them is recent and external in its current sense; in their own speech a person is yanomami thëpë, human beings, set against napë, the outsider, and against the animal-ancestors who were human once and are human still beneath their fur.

The forest is the old sky

In the account of the world that the shamans carry, the present forest is not the first one. An earlier sky once stood over an earlier earth, and that sky fell. Its inhabitants were hurled into a world below, and the underside of the fallen sky — its back, now turned upward — became the ground on which the Yanomami walk. The forest, in this telling, is the old sky seen from beneath. Above it a new sky was raised and set on metal foundations driven deep into the earth by the maker, so that it would not fall again. It is not held firmly. It sags; it can be made to fall a second time; and what keeps it aloft is not the metal alone but the work of the spirits and of those who summon them.

The maker is omama. He shaped the rivers and the game, set the first peoples in their places, and — at the asking of his wife, who was troubled over how the children would be healed — brought into being the spirit images that answer when a shaman calls. He made the napë as well, the outsiders, and the distant lands they came from, and the metals and merchandise that are their particular hunger. The world the Yanomami inhabit is thus not the work of an absent god but of a maker whose decisions are still legible in the shape of things, and whose chief safeguard against catastrophe — the foundations beneath the sky — is exactly the thing that mining now disturbs.

Xapiri: the spirit images

At the center of Yanomami cosmology stand the xapiri, and everything else in the system can be read outward from them. They are the spirit images of the animal-ancestors, the yarori — the beings who in the beginning were people and who, transformed, became the game of the forest while their images remained luminous and unaging. Every kind of being keeps such an image. The great kapok and other forest giants have theirs; so do the smaller trees, the stones, the leaves, the waters, the wind, the storm; so do the sun and the moon and the thunder; so, the shamans say, do the outsiders, though they do not know it. The xapiri are tiny and brilliant and innumerable, arriving in ornamented descent, dancing, mirror-bright. They are not metaphors for natural forces. They are the persons of the forest, and the forest’s continued standing depends on their presence.

Only certain people see them and keep their company. The specialist who does so — shapuri in some Yanomami speech, the calling and embodying of the spirit images named by ethnographers with the borrowed analytic word shamanism — is made, not born to it: the spirit images come, settle, build their dwelling in the person, and thereafter live with him. He sees them, speaks with them, sends them out to find the cause of a sickness or to set right the rhythms of rain and drought. The cosmological substance by which the images are made visible is the yãkoana snuff, the pollen-fine powder that the elders also call by the wider Orinoco name epena or yopo — here a named element of the rite, the food of the spirits, never a method. Among the spirit beings the hekura move as a distinct order, the harder and more dangerous of the forest’s persons, called and held by the same specialists. To carry the xapiri is to take responsibility for a piece of the world’s balance, and the shamans say plainly that when they die and no one is left to call the images, the sky will have nothing to hold it.

Reahu: the long work of the dead

Death among the Yanomami is not finished in a single act. The body is first removed from the living settlement and given to the forest; when the flesh is gone the bones are gathered and burned, and the ash and pulverized bone are kept, often sealed in a gourd. The ash is not buried with the burning. It is consumed — stirred into a soup of ripe plantains and taken by the kin and allies of the dead — across a sequence of feasts that may run for years, until none of it remains.

This is the reahu, and it is the largest event in Yanomami social life. A community that holds a reahu calls its allies from other settlements; the guests arrive in formal display, and the days are given to oratory, to the exchange of goods and news and marriage partners, to ceremonial dialogue conducted through the night, to the settling and the renewing of alliances among houses that are otherwise wary of one another. Folded into this gathering is the funerary act: the taking of the ash. The purpose, as the shamans give it, is to set the dead person at last out of mind and out of reach — to dissolve the lingering presence so that the soul, the pore, can complete its irreversible passage to the back of the sky, where it lives again in a forest without sickness or hunger. To leave the ash unconsumed would be to leave the dead half-present, a grief that does not close and a soul that does not depart. The practice, documented over decades, is endocannibalism in the strict sense — the eating of one’s own — and it is the opposite of an act of violence. It is the duty of the living to the loved dead, and the refusal to forget by any lesser means than this.

The structure of the afterworld answers the structure of the rite. The soul that reaches the back of the sky takes up an existence continuous with this one and yet released from its sufferings; other animating principles of the person disperse otherwise, one becoming a forest animal, one the wandering specter that the ash-feast is meant to lay to rest. Death is thus a sorting of the several souls a person carries, and the reahu is the human labor that makes the sorting come out right.

Davi Kopenawa and The Falling Sky

The most sustained statement of this cosmology from within it is the work of Davi Kopenawa, a shaman and spokesman born around 1956 at Marakana on the upper Toototobi in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Over three decades he gave his words to the French anthropologist Bruce Albert, who had worked among the Yanomami since 1975; the result, published in French in 2010 and in English by Harvard in 2013 as The Falling Sky, is at once an autobiography, an account of the spirit world, and an indictment. Kopenawa describes how the xapiri come to him, how he learned to hold them, what they show him of the earth’s frame; and he turns the cosmology outward as a warning. The outsiders, he says, do not know the words of omama or of the forest’s protector spirits; they cut and burn and dig at the metal foundations of the sky; and if the shamans are killed off and the images fall silent, the sky will fall a second time, and this time on everyone. The book reverses the long colonial direction of the ethnographic record, in which the Yanomami spoke through an observer’s frame; here the observer is the instrument and a Yanomami thinker is the author. For this work and his decades of defense of the forest, Kopenawa received the Right Livelihood Award in 2019, together with the Hutukara Yanomami Association he had helped found in 2004, and was later elected to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

The fierce-people image and its undoing

For much of the late twentieth century the Yanomami were known to the outside world chiefly through a single phrase. The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who began fieldwork on the Venezuelan side in the 1960s, titled his widely taught monograph Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968) and built from it a portrait of a society living in chronic warfare, later attaching that violence to claims about reproductive success and human nature. The image traveled far beyond the discipline and hardened into a popular fact. It is not one. R. Brian Ferguson’s Yanomami Warfare: A Political History (1995) argued that the conflicts Chagnon recorded were inseparable from the disruptions of contact — the uneven flood of steel goods, the epidemics, the mission and research stations that drew populations and rivalries into new shapes — so that the ethnographer was in part describing the wake of his own world’s arrival. Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado (2000) escalated the dispute into a public scandal and prompted a formal inquiry by the American Anthropological Association, and Robert Borofsky’s Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It (2005) anatomized the whole affair. What survives the controversy is a caution: the “fierce people” was a framing, weighted by the moment and the methods that produced it, and the Yanomami who appear in Kopenawa’s own words are a people defined not by warfare but by the care of the dead, the calling of the spirits, and the keeping of the sky.

The invasion of the territory

The threat the shamans name is not a figure of speech. In the late 1980s some forty thousand gold miners — garimpeiros — poured into the Brazilian Yanomami lands; in roughly seven years, malaria, influenza, measles, and mercury killed close to a fifth of the Brazilian Yanomami. Out of that catastrophe came the long campaign, led by Kopenawa with Survival International and the Pro-Yanomami Commission, that secured in 1992 — on the eve of the Rio Earth Summit — the official recognition of the Terra Indígena Yanomami, a contiguous reserve of some ninety-six thousand square kilometers. The protection was paper-thin where it was not enforced. In 1993 garimpeiros fell on the village of Haximú and killed sixteen people, among them a child and the old; five men were later convicted of genocide, a verdict the Brazilian Supreme Court upheld in 2006, the first such conviction in the country’s history.

The invasion returned. Through the years around 2020 an estimated twenty thousand illegal miners again occupied the territory; the Hutukara association’s 2022 report documented mining up forty-six percent in a single year atop a surge of several thousand percent over the preceding four. Malaria cases, carried from the mining camps, rose more than sevenfold between 2014 and 2021; mercury from the dredges entered the rivers and the fish and the bodies of nursing mothers; in four years more than five hundred children under the age of five died of preventable disease, and surveys found over half of Yanomami children malnourished, in some communities nearly all of them. In January 2023 the Brazilian government declared a public-health emergency in the territory and began, again, to drive the miners out. This is the falling sky as the shamans always said it would arrive — not as myth but as fever, hunger, and poisoned water, the foundations under the world being dug away while there is still time to stop.

The forest’s persons among other persons’ worlds

The Yanomami cosmos is one rendering of a conviction widespread across the western and northwestern Amazon: that the forest is densely peopled by non-human persons, that certain humans can cross to where those persons are, and that the crossing is the work on which collective life depends. Their nearer kin in this respect are the visionary specialists of the Ucayali, the Shipibo-Conibo, and the long-resistant Asháninka of the western montane forest; further off, the Anaconda-canoe cosmos of the Tukano of the Vaupés and the prophetic search of the Guaraní south for the Land Without Evil; and among the earthwork-and-plaza societies of the southern Amazon, the garden-city network of the Upper Xingu. Each is its own world; the xapiri are not the spirits of any of the others, and the snuff that opens the Yanomami’s sight is not the brew whose modern clinical study is treated under Ayahuasca Research. The vocabulary the outside has reached for — that these are traditions of the soul and the spirit, of reincarnation and animal worship, of ecstasy and divination, of ritual and the suspicion of witchcraft — names real features and yet flattens them, since each term was forged elsewhere and carries its home tradition’s freight. The honest course is to hold the borrowed words lightly and let the Yanomami terms govern: xapiri, hekura, reahu, pore, omama, napë.

The record and its makers

Because the Yanomami tradition is oral, living, and held by initiated specialists, the documentary record is the work of outsiders, and the appropriation problem that shadows all colonial ethnography of Indigenous America applies here with full force: the legal availability of a text settles nothing about whether and how it should circulate, and the most authoritative interpreters of the tradition are now the Yanomami themselves. The indispensable source is therefore The Falling Sky (Kopenawa and Albert, Harvard University Press, 2013, trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy), the cosmology stated by a shaman and editorially shaped by an anthropologist of four decades’ standing in the same communities; the volume of critical responses gathered in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (vol. 4, no. 2, 2014) treats the methodological stakes of that collaboration. Bruce Albert’s own earlier ethnography of Yanomami illness, blood, and the ritual ordering of space (his Paris-Nanterre thesis of 1985) underlies the account of the reahu. On the violence debate, R. Brian Ferguson’s Yanomami Warfare: A Political History (School of American Research, 1995) and Robert Borofsky’s Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It (University of California Press, 2005) are the standard correctives to Chagnon’s Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968). The biography and public record of Davi Kopenawa are documented through the Encyclopedia of Anthropology of the University of São Paulo and the Right Livelihood laureate archive; the contemporary crisis is documented by the Hutukara Yanomami Association’s reports and by Survival International.

The shamans put the matter without ornament. The sky is heavy and the metal beneath it can be shaken loose. As long as there are people who know how to call the xapiri and feed them the snuff and dance them through the night, the images will go on holding the world up. When the last of those people is gone, the work stops — and the duty laid on the living is not, finally, to mourn the forest but to keep the spirits dancing in it.