The tortoise and the fall of the sky: mimesis, memory and yanomami performance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14201/reb2021816137153Keywords:
Yanomami, shamanism, mimesis, memory, performanceAbstract
When the Yanomami shaman, Davi Kopenawa, saw a car for the first time, he wondered whether it was made like an iron turtle. Sparked by initial curiosity about what a Yanomami car would be like, this paper is an exercise in hearing the words of Kopenawa as written down by the anthropologist Bruce Albert in the book, Falling sky. Attention is directed to the manner in which a Yanomami mimetic faculty activates subjects and viewpoints, or bodies, at risk of disappearing or falling into oblivion. The creative powers of mimesis are illuminated in the shaman’s accounts of his experience in the forest and in cities. And, in an extraordinary way, in narratives of the arrival of the xapiri, the spirits of the forest. At a theoretical juncture involving Benjamin, Schechner, and Viveiros de Castro, this essay proposes the idea of a mimetic circuit formed by Yanomami and the xapiri spirits. A hypothesis is also formulated: in moments of f(r)iction produced by Amerindian performances, images of forest beings, revealed as subjects, flash up from beneath body-masks. This may contrast with cosmologies in which bodies are revealed behind persona-masks. Although the objective goes beyond the initial question, curiosity regarding what a Yanomami car would be like is pursued, as a recurring motif, in the various subtopics which make up this essay: a) cities; b) forest; and c) xapiri.
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