Matihi thëri pë
matihi thëri pë
The Yanomami expression that Bruce Albert translates as *"the people of the commodity"*—the name Davi Kopenawa gives to Whites in *The Falling Sky*. Literally, *"the people, the inhabitants of the commodity"* (or *matihi pë potima thë pë*, *"the masters of commodities"*). *Matihi* originally referred to precious goods—funerary ashes, feather ornaments—before the word shifted to mean the commodities of Whites. It is an exonym: a society observed in turn names the society observing it, defining it not by territory or ancestors, but by the affect that grips it—the love of capturing accumulated objects. To be distinguished from *"consumerism,"* an insider’s term: *the people of the commodity* is a name given from the outside.
Nous sommes vraiment le peuple de la marchandise ! Nous pourrons devenir de plus en plus nombreux sans jamais être démunis ! Créons aussi des peaux de papier pour les échanger !
Matihi thëri pë is the name Davi Kopenawa gives to white people, and the gesture must be weighed: this is not a lament, but a classification. A tribe is defined here by what it covets. Matihi, which once referred to a dead person’s precious goods and festive adornments, has shifted to mean the wares of factories; and the people who produce them identify with them to the point of taking their name—“we truly are the people of the commodity.”
Kopenawa names the emotion without hesitation: white people “treated their goods like women they were in love with,” to be hoarded and jealously guarded. A love of capture, not of giving—opposite to Yanomami custom, where a thing’s value is measured by how much of it you distribute.
The word’s power lies in its direction. We say consumerism: a self-description, spoken from within by those who know they consume. People of the commodity comes from the other side—an exonym, the name one society gives another from the outside. Here, the gaze’s arrow is reversed: the urihi carved into parcels, and on the other side, those who carve it, now classified in turn among those possessed by an object. This is not Marx’s commodity fetishism, an internal analysis of a system; it is the name of a people, given by someone who comes from another kind of wealth.