From human earth to the rise of an ecological "humanism" in the words of Davi Kopenawa, addressed to the whites

Abstract

In this article, I take as a starting point the observation that the book The Falling Sky, by the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa in co-authorship with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, was drawn up on the editorial ground of the Terre Humaine Collection, which historically disputes a Humanist bias as a guideline for the knowledge produced in the literate milieu. Mapping this bias, I compare certain editorial mediations, namely, the understanding of humanism and of human, with how these notions can be understood from Kopenawa’s shamanic perspective. I argue on how this, while expanding the understanding of the human, claims it as an ecological condition If, on the one hand, Kopenawa’s perspective speaks of a humanity that is not only human, divergent from the narcissistic anthropocentrism of Western Humanism, on the other hand, the appeal of his words is addressed specifically to the so-called humans, since they have become the privileged agents of the forest destruction. The article shows how Davi Kopenawa’s thought, elaborated in the center of ecology and as a book addressed to us, brigs the need to expand of the meaning of human, both as production of knowledge and recognition, and as a principle for coping with the major questions about the future of humanity in face of environmental collapse.