---
title: "The People of Merchandise"
sousTitre: "Davi Kopenawa reverses the gaze: it is not the Yanomami he describes, but the Whites—a tribe he names after the passion that binds them, the love of accumulated objects."
description: "Matihi thëri pë, 'the people of merchandise': the name Davi Kopenawa gives to Whites in *The Falling Sky*—a Yanomami exonym, not 'consumerism'."
date: 2026-06-18
lang: en
tradition: yanomami
auteurs: ["Davi Kopenawa"]
---
# The People of Merchandise

Before describing the Whites, Davi Kopenawa recounts the question his people asked upon seeing them hoard yellow metal: “What do the Whites do with all this gold? Do they eat it?” A shaman and spokesperson for the Yanomami of northern Amazonia, Kopenawa spent over twenty years voicing—in Yanomami—the words that anthropologist Bruce Albert gathered and shaped into French in *The Falling Sky*. The chapter is titled “The Love of Merchandise.” It is not about the forest, but about us—and its first gesture is a reversal: the observed begins to observe, and names the one who thought himself only an eye.

This name, Kopenawa places in the mouths of the Whites themselves, at the moment when, having torn minerals from the earth and built factories, they grow enamored of what their hands can produce.

> We are truly the people of merchandise! We can grow ever more numerous without ever being destitute! Let us also create paper skins to exchange!
>
> — **Davi Kopenawa**, *The Falling Sky*, livre La Chute du ciel, ch. XIX, 'The Love of Merchandise', § XIX. éd. after the French translation by Bruce Albert, Plon, Terre humaine series, 2010.

*[matihi thëri pë]* Bruce Albert notes the Yanomami expression: *matihi thëri pë*, “the inhabitants, the people of merchandise,” or *matihi pë potima thë pë*, “the possessors, the masters of goods.” *Matihi* once referred to precious belongings—funerary ashes, feather ornaments; today, the word most often denotes the Whites’ merchandise.

One must grasp what this name does. Here, a tribe defines itself by an attachment—not by land, language, or ancestors, but by the object it covets. *Matihi*, the word that once named the treasures of the dead and the finery of feasts, has settled upon merchandise—and the people who make it identify with it so completely that they take its name. Kopenawa does not say the Whites *own* much; he says they *are* the people of that, as one belongs to a clan or a river.

The passion that binds them, he names with a precision that brooks no mercy. Before the warehouses of Manaus and Boa Vista, before those hammocks and axe blades piled to rot in locked houses, given to no one, he came to understand:

> The Whites treated their merchandise like women they were in love with. They only want to hoard them and keep them jealously before their eyes.
>
> — **Davi Kopenawa**, *The Falling Sky*, livre La Chute du ciel, ch. XIX, 'The Love of Merchandise', § XIX. éd. after the French translation by Bruce Albert, Plon, Terre humaine series, 2010.

It is love, then—but a love of capture: one does not give the beloved, one locks her away, sleeps with the keys. To this trait, Kopenawa contrasts, without emphasis, the ways of his own people—“we are not people who make a habit of refusing food to our visitors”—where the value of a thing is measured by what one distributes. The people of merchandise, however, take pleasure in withholding; and their joy, as he imagines it, is a euphoria of solitude.

> I belong to the people of merchandise and factories! I possess all these things alone! I am intelligent! I am an important man, a rich one!
>
> — **Davi Kopenawa**, *The Falling Sky*, livre La Chute du ciel, ch. XIX, 'The Love of Merchandise', § XIX. éd. after the French translation by Bruce Albert, Plon, Terre humaine series, 2010.

One must not mistake this name for our own. We have a word for this fever: *consumerism*. But it is an insider’s term—an autodescription, sometimes a sales pitch, always uttered by the one who consumes and knows himself to be consuming. *People of merchandise* comes from the other side. It is an exonym, the name one society gives another from the outside, as we have forged so many to designate those we observed. Except here, the arrow is reversed: the ethnographed names the ethnographer, and classifies him in turn—not among the civilized or the savage, but among those possessed by an object to the point of bearing its name. The diagnosis is not quantified; it is tribal. It does not say *you consume too much*; it says *this is who you are*.

Kopenawa does not judge; he describes—and the description, made with the eyes of a man who comes from another kind of wealth, is enough to render us strangers to ourselves. Three centuries before him, a Dutch painter had placed a row of coins beneath a skull and, above it, a bubble ready to burst, with these two words: *humana vana*. The forest had no need to go so far. It sufficed to look at the piled gold and ask if it was eaten.

## Sources

- Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert, *La Chute du ciel. Paroles d'un chaman yanomami* — Plon, coll. Terre humaine, 2010, trans. Bruce Albert (propos yanomami recueillis et traduits)


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-06-18-peuple-de-la-marchandise/