Rather, the editor has to con-front the outgrowth of a vast, fragmentary, and protean oral pretext, pro-duced by means of a long-term dialogue through which he must find aunifying thread

xplicit editorial agreement reinforced by thirty years of friendshipand ethnographic research. Third, Davi Kopenawa entrusted me with themandate to bring his words to the largest possible audience in the writtenform used in my world. This automatically ruled out producing a heav-ily annotated literal translation intended for specialized scholars. Finally,this book is explicitly the result and intersection of our politi cal and cul-tural meeting. It is as much a product of Davi Kopenawa’s shamanic andethnopolitical views as of my own experimentation with a new form ofethnographic writing based on what I called the “ethnographic pact.”

or it spurred Davi Kopenawato ask that I go beyond the bounds of my usual research and turn hiswords into a book

My flash went off a number of times and the blinding light seemed tofreeze the shamans in fits and starts in the darkness of the communalhouse

eth-nographic

Without this, the land would have remained sandy and friable and thesky would not have stayed in place.

I think thatwe will only be able to become white people the day white people trans-form themselves into Yanomami. I

am tied to Davi Kopenawa through along history of friendship and shared struggle

he takes pride only inchallenging the arrogant deafness of white people

and un-dertook the enormous task of translating them into French.

Bruce Albert, an anthropologistat the top of his field

This also means that philosophy itselfmust not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter,that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning, thatit consists entirely in describing this beginning, and finally, that radicalreflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life thatis its initial, constant, and final situation.

eeking the essence of the world is not to seek what itis as an idea, after having reduced it to a theme of discourse; rather, itis to seek what it in fact is for us, prior to every thematization.

In fact, all the significations of language are measuredagainst this experience and it ensures that language means something forus.

For if I am able to speakabout “dreams” and “reality,” to wonder about the distinction betweenthe imaginary and the real, and to throw the “real” into doubt, this isbecause I have in fact drawn this distinction prior to the analysis, becauseI have an experience of the real as well as one of the imaginary.

ensu-alism “reduces” the world by saying that ultimately we have nothingbut states of ourselves. Transcendental idealism also “reduces” the worldsince, even if it makes the world certain, this is only in the name of thethought or the consciousness of the world, and as the mere correlate ofour knowledge, such that the world becomes immanent to consciousnessand the aseity [independent existence] of things is thereby suppressed.

makes use of ourrelation to the world,

Thus, we must not wonder if we truly perceive a world; rather, wemust say: the world is what we perceive

For if we speak of illusion, this is because we have previ-ously recognized illusions, and we could only do so in the name of someperception that, at that very moment, vouched for itself as true, such thatdoubt, or the fear of being mistaken, simultaneously affirms our powerof unmasking error and could thus not uproot us from the truth. We arein the truth, and evidentness is “the experience of truth.

“exact science,” but it is also an account of “lived” space, “lived” time,and the “lived” world.

Phenomenology is the study of essences, and itholds that all problems amount to defining essences, such as the essenceof perception or the essence of consciousness. And yet phenomenologyis also a philosophy that places essences back within existence and thinksthat the only way to understand man1 and the world is by beginning fromtheir “facticity.”

Rather, I am the absolute source. My existence does not comefrom my antecedents, nor from my physical and social surroundings; itmoves out toward them and sustains them. For I am the one who bringsinto being for myself – and thus into being in the only sense that theword could have for me – this tradition that I choose to take up or thishorizon whose distance fr

To seek theessence of perception is not to declare that perception is presumed to betrue, but rather that perception is defined as our access to the truth

intentionality, to

eleol-ogy of consciousness