The shamanism in the brazilian indigenous literature: from identity self-expression and self-affirmation to social criticism and political resistance: notes from Davi Kopenawa’s and Bruce Albert’s The falling sky: words of a yanomami shaman

Abstract

We argue that recent Brazilian Indigenous literature has been using the shamanism as correlation of identity self-affirmation and self-expression, in which the own communitarian anthropological-ontological and social-cultural basis is activated and utilized as substratum of the comprehension and manifestation of the indigenous by himself, and, from here, as epistemological-normative tool for cultural resistance and political struggle in relation to the modernization imposed technocratically, as well as to the violence and negation suffered as social-cultural minorities. The shamanism, re-stylized as literary voice-praxis, allows the reconnecting and the emphasizing with tradition, of the “I-We” (who becomes the literary “I-We”) of the Indigenous discourse-praxis, in which this “I-We” speaks for and from himself, without political and scientifical mediations. Therefore, the shamanism in and as Indigenous literature enables the voice-praxis of the “I-We” communitarian, based on ancestral tradition, emphasizing it as fundament of itself and using it as substratum of public criticism and struggle.