Biography
Bruce Albert is a French anthropologist specialising in the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, particularly the Yanomami society of northern Brazil. Since the 1970s, he has undertaken ethnographic research and long-term collaborations with Yanomami communities, attending to their forms of organisation, knowledge, territorial relationships and experiences of the expansion of extractive activities. He has been associated with France's Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) and Brazil's Instituto Socioambiental.
His work with Davi Kopenawa resulted in La chute du ciel: Paroles d’un chaman yanomami (2010), known in Spanish as La caída del cielo. Palabras de un chamán yanomami. The work emerged from a prolonged collaboration and a process of recording, translating and shaping Kopenawa's testimony, whose voice and thought form its core. This project reconsiders the relationships between ethnography, authorship, translation and the representation of Indigenous knowledge.
Albert's research combines anthropological documentation with a commitment to defending Yanomami territorial rights. His contributions have helped bring the Indigenous critique of Amazonian destruction to international attention and challenge the conventional separation between academic knowledge production and political action in contexts of colonial inequality.
Published books