Book, PT, a story[LS]

Yanomami shaman's story reveals the wealth and struggles of the forest people in a unique genre book. A great shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami offers in this book an exceptional account, at once autobiographical testimony, shamanic manifesto and libel against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Originally published in French in 2010, in the prestigious Terre Humaine collection, this story brings the shaman's meditations on predatory contact with the white man, a constant threat to his people since the 1960s. The Fall of the Sky was written based on his words told to an ethnologist with whom he has a long friendship - there were more than thirty years of coexistence between the signatories and forty years of contact between Bruce Albert, the ethnologist-writer, and the people of Davi Kopenawa, the shaman-narrator. The vocation of shaman since early childhood, the result of cosmological knowledge acquired thanks to the use of powerful hallucinogens, is the first of the three pillars that structure this book. The second is the account of the advance of white people through the forest and their procession of epidemics, violence and destruction. Finally, the authors bring the odyssey of the indigenous leader to denounce the destruction of his people. Filled with shamanic visions and ethnographic meditations on white people, this work is not just a gateway to a complex and revealing universe. It is a powerful critical tool to question the notion of progress and development defended by those who the Yanomami - with prophetic intuition and sociological precision - call "commodity people".