Hereamu aos brancos: Davi Kopenawa Yanomami e a experiência de uma linguagem

Abstract

This work is a language experiment that took place as a result of encounters and alliances. Its objective is to illuminate the documentation of the collection in process, the continuum of public sayings by the thinker, shaman, traditional leader and spokesperson for the Yanomami and Ye’kwana peoples, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami. In view of his role in the defense of life, territory, culture and the Yanomami thought regime, his discursive acts in Portuguese, a language named by him as "the borrowed language", operate as a device for his struggle of nearly fifty years. Using as a commentary that evokes the uniqueness of the language of the Yanomami universe, constituted by the profound visual and conceptual dimension, the work presents itself as a screen for a montage of images and conceptual approaches. Such devices structure and envelop the proposition that crosses the collection of sayings of a great Yanomami thinker aimed at maximum radical alterity, the “whites”2 . More than just a call, these are D. Kopenawa's teaching practices to non-Yanomami people and the ongoing compilation of written documentation for this oral transmission. Therefore, this search rests on the attempt to trace the path taken by Kopenawa's contact with non-indigenous peoples, the ways of saying within Yanomami society transposed beyond the contours of the territory and which are inscribed in the encounters between two peoples; a proposition to the different mediated by the word. In them, D. Kopenawa founds and propagates his saying with the conceptual and visual profusion of his singular language and the poetics that inhabit his thought. It is also about the opening to dialogue between Kopenawa, with his way of life and his Yanomami way of thinking, and a non-indigenous anthropologist in training, in which the sensitive field lies as a parameter, territory of language and the common that envelops affinities, affections, affects life and the support of art as a crossing of devices for doing together. That said, by sharing a common denominator, of epistemologies, cultures and different thought regimes in symmetrical positions, inhabiting untranslatable worlds, this research persists in the attempt to build a possible one, in which shared experience takes place, as a way of coexisting and safeguarding differences