Spaces of contestation and alliance in Foucault and Kopenawa

Abstract

This article aims to deal with the falling sky announced by shaman Davi Kopenawa, also a Yanomami political leader, in a critical connection with the approach of “heterotopias” by thinker Michel Foucault. Kopenawa's warning about the fatal fall of the sky, caused by the greed of the “commodity man” to expropriate the forest, combines here opportunely with Foucault's attention to the spaces in which the erosion of minority lives occurs. Addressing heterotopias here then becomes a way of highlighting spaces of contestation as an alternative to the silencing resulting from a history of powers that materialized both in the devastation of indigenous lands and in the massacre of many lives. The heterotopic dimensions of Foucault and Kopenawa indicate that they are linked to anti-colonialist thought, provoking the opening of borders through neighborhood relations, critical areas where it is possible to find allies and resist colonial invasions and destruction