SINGULARITIES OF THE SELF, AS A YANOMAMI SHAMAN

Abstract

From the need to gather subsidies that would allow us to carry out a careful reading of the work The Fall of the Sky – Words of a Yanomami Shaman, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, in our current research project, we tried to find answers to the misunderstandings in the historical, cultural and legal-institutional relations maintained between civilized and indigenous people who share the Brazilian territory,  or, according to Viveiros de Castro (2015) to elucidate a "poor, sporadic and highly unequal dialogue". However, when approaching the problem of the enunciation of person, which we proposed to face, the impropriety of the theoretical inflections chosen by us at the beginning of this investigation was revealed. Faced with this impasse, we decided to resume the studies already carried out, seeking, in the present text, to unfold them as a kind of report of errors – and possible course correction. Thus, we begin by exposing the difficulties posed by the use of modern literary and philosophical categorizations – autodiegesis and heterodiegesis, subject and alterity, author and reader. Next, we examine certain enunciative problems established by the autodiegetic figuration of a non-Western historical subject, as well as certain interpretative marks constituted both by the reading repertoire and by the horizon of expectations (ISER, 2013). By way of conclusion, we present the realignment of the epistemological perspective adopted to account for the intended investigation.