Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea (Dec 2020)

Lasciar parlare la foresta: politica, ecologia e mito in La caduta del cielo di Davi Kopenawa e Bruce Albert

  • Gioacchino ORSENIGO

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 4
pp. 176 – 188

Abstract

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This article aims to highlight the complex connection between ecology and politics within the mythological and cosmological formulation produced by the shaman Davi Koppenawa in his book The falling sky. Myth becomes a tool to elaborate the past but also the present. Yanomami cosmology speaks about a plural reality where every being is connected to the others. The history of Yanomami people can’t be isolated from the history of the forest and its non-human collectives and neither can be indigenous and environmental struggles. Politics and ecology become here one thing, which gains sense only within a cosmological and ontological structure: letting the native speak means letting an entire world arise and show its possibilities.

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