Amerindian perspectivism
Lucas da Costa Maciel2024, EA
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Abstract
Amerindian perspectivism refers to the conceptual synthesis formulated by Brazilian anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1951-) and Tânia Stolze Lima
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Amerindian Perspectivism as Counter-Platonism: A Metaphysics of Transformation
Cosmos and History, 2024
This article explores Amerindian perspectivism as a radical counterpoint to Platonism, presenting a metaphysics of transformation, immanence, and multiplicity. Unlike Platonism, which constructs a hierarchical ontology emphasizing permanence and transcendence (Plato, Republic, 509d-510b), Amerindian perspectivism proposes a view where being is not static, but dynamic and relational. Through a critique of central Platonic categories such as form, idea, soul, and body, the article argues that Amerindian thought reveals the contingency of these concepts and affirms the primacy of change and interaction in constituting reality. Viveiros de Castro (1996) argues that the notion of "perspectivism" in Amerindian thought dissolves dualisms by demonstrating that all beings-humans, animals, spirits-are relationally constructed, not hierarchically arranged. The concept of the soul in perspectivism, for instance, is fluid and contextual, connecting all beings-humans, animals, plants, spirits, and objects-through a web of relations. This ontology of transformation challenges Western metaphysical assumptions, offering a new way of understanding existence that prioritizes difference, transformation, and the interconnectedness of all things. The article ultimately suggests that Amerindian perspectivism invites us to rethink our metaphysical frameworks and embrace a philosophy of multiplicity, fluidity, and the creative potential of relations.
Amerindian Perspectivism and Non-Human Rights (2013)
A discussion of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's theory of Amerindian Perspectivism in the light of the current critique of anthropocentrism and recent Legal Studies scholarship on the notion of non-human rights, i.e. the endowment of non-human beings as subjects of rights.
"Legal Amerindian Perspectivism: Brazilian jurisprudence between the indigenous and the state law." In: XXVI World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy
Legal Amerindian Perspectivism: Brazilian jurisprudence between the indigenous and the state law.
Divergences and Convergences of Perspective: Amerindian Perspectivism, Phenomenology, and Speculative Realism
Open Philosophy, 2022
According to Viveiros de Castro, comparison as ontology defines the ontological turn in anthropology. It presents a necessity for philosophy to approach the matter with comparative strategy. Morten Pedersen claims that ontological turn should be interpreted as a fulfillment of an anthropological version of Husserl's method. Thus, phenomenology enters the field of interest along with its critique in Speculative Realism. In this article, we will see clearly why this selection is not accidental but rather unavoidable. Amerindian perspectivism necessitates the philosophical reconceptualization of perspective in general, which is to be taken as a challenge for the established discourses. The need arises to rethink the problematic of Kantian perspectivism and its offspring. Amerindian perspectivism proposes cosmological deictics that hold a spatiality of the perspective of the other, of the in-itself, thus it comes into an opposition to Kant's system. Phenomenological perspective, as one of the Kantian offspring, faces a predicament that is interwoven with the critique of correlationism arriving from Speculative Realisms. The synthetic character of phenomenology allows enough flexibility for it to traverse these recent charges. We will draw a comparative picture of dynamic co-evolution of strains of recent thought, striving for a synthetic multiplicity, permeated by a common perspectival thread.
Amerindian Perspectivism and Non-Human Rights
This paper starts from Dipesh Chakrabarty's argument that in the newly named era of the Anthropocene—when human beings have become such a destructive force to the environment that they have acquired the status of geological agents, capable of interfering with the most basic processes of the Earth—, the history of culture can no longer be separated from the history of the species and of nature itself. I then develop the insight that the Anthropocene renews the relevance of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Ameridian perspectivism, a theory based on the widespread Amerindian postulate of an originary state of indifferentiation between humans and animals, and that the original condition common to humans and animals is not animality, as in Western thought, but humanity itself. The abundance of Amerindian narratives in which animals, plants, and spirits see themselves as humans is analyzed as an Anthropomorphic impulse that paradoxically contains an anti-anthropocentric potential, as “in a world where everything is human, being human is not that special.” The contrast between Amerindian anthropomorphism and Western anthropocentrism is further developed in the context of the recent Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutions, which for the first time confer on animals, plants, and bodies of water the condition of juridical subjects endowed with rights. The conclusion points toward the notion of non-human rights as a necessary and urgent task in the era of the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocentric Stance of Modern Ideologies: A contrast with the Andean Indigenous Worldview
The essay discusses the locus of human beings in regards to the natural environment taking as analytical tools the terms: ideology, worldview, and Cosmovision. It addresses two perspectives, namely a) the anthropocentric stance of modern transnational ideologies within the notion of a Western worldview, and b) the possibility of divergent postulates about the relationship between human beings and the environment from the standpoint of the Andean Indigenous worldview. Keywords: Cultural studies, Modernity, anthropocentrism, ideology, cosmovision, environment, Indigenous worldview, Capitalism, Socialism, Pachamama, Renaissance, Latin America, Bolivia.
Maya Da-Rin's The Fever: Amerindian Perspectivism and the Agency of International Gesamtkapital (proofs)
2022
There are two modes for interpreting Maya Da-Rin's The Fever (2019, A Febre): the first, a "surface" reading of the pressures of assimilation faced by a small family of indigenous Desana descent who live on the outskirts of Manaus; the film also provides the lineaments of a metaphysical doctrine of Amerindian metaphysics and provides a pathway for applying this metaphysical doctrine within the social formations of international capitalism. In this paper, I provide sketches of both readings and focus on the themes of identity, the distinction between form and substance (including a fetishism at the heart of this distinction), and the film's ambiguous portrayal of the threats facing the local community and the film's protagonist.
Syllabus: Indigenous Philosophies of the Americas
We begin this course by asking not just what, but also where, we are studying. As it turns out, we need Indigenous philosophies of the Americas to help us answer this question. In Indigenizing Philosophy Through The Land, Brian Burkhart writes that "one of the most remarkable features of settler colonialism is the level of maintenance of sublimation that it requires on the part of the settler colonial state, not only in erasing or removing the Indigenous people from their land and setting up the settler state but even more in maintaining it psychologically." 1 This course introduces students to Indigenous philosophical ideas, currents, and traditions of the Americas (Abya Yala), and to key themes in contemporary Native American and Indigenous Studies. In so doing, it also aims to provide students with conceptual tools with which to critically interrogate "settler epistemologies," which are often understood as "racialized, anthropocentric, and capitalist understandings of places" 2 that sustain various forms of Indigenous erasure. We will explore how Indigenous systems of metaphysics and ethics are inextricably linked to land, kinship, and relationality, and we will further discuss how these ideas are currently being used by Indigenous thinkers and activists to resist enduring coloniality while building more ethical futures.
Um semeador da antropologia: os antropólogos como nativos e seus ritos
Mana-estudos De Antropologia Social, 2008
Since the eighteenth century, a huge mass of documentary records-reports, numerical data, images, and collections-on Brazil's indigenous peoples has been produced by naturalists and travelers of diverse kinds. Despite this enormous diversity, some characteristics are common to these gazes that represent themselves as rootless and foreign. First, they result from voyages: in other words, from short-term contact with the observed populations or even with the region or country where they were located. Second, the subject/narrator of these experiences was primarily in dialogue with the literate European public among whom his or her potential readership was almost exclusively located, along with visitors to museums and scientific exhibitions. Third, the political implications of the discourses produced by the travelers were only indirect, mediated by the readings of the ruling national elite, since the subjects/narrators do not pertain to the same legal and administrative units to which the described populations are subject. The combination of these characteristics allowed the crystallization of an atemporal, distant, and supposedly objective view, an exercise in "pure knowledge" without practical and political intentions or repercussions. Later, in the twentieth century, this was internalized by Americanist ethnologists as the preconditions for a narrative genre-ethnography-and for the ambitions and outlook of a scientific discipline. The foreign gaze anticipated and to a certain extent shaped the gaze of Americanist ethnology, infusing it with the premises and directives of its founding project.
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The Landscape Imagination: Intersecting Historical Ecology and Amerindian Perspectivism
Contingent Horizons, 2015
This article considers how the research programmes of historical ecology and Amerindian perspectivism may be combined and intersected to better describe the cultural understandings, agencies, and intentionalities that underlie the processes of landscape transformation in Amazonia. These research programmes will be discussed and interrelated towards points of contiguity and conjuncture. Historical-ecological research investigates the changing relationships between human beings and their landscapes across time. In particular, it considers historical examples of landscape transformations, which are anthropogenically derived environmental changes. Amerindian-perspectivist research investigates the relationships between human beings and other species within the cosmologies of Amerindian societies in the Amazon and elsewhere. The combination of these currently regnant approaches to ethnographic research among Amerindian societies provides new opportunities to better theorize the cultural contexts for the anthropogenic actions that lead to landscape transformations in the past and present. It also provides new opportunities to better describe how cosmological understandings are grounded in the processes that articulate human beings with their broader ecological contexts. This article considers these intersections and calls for further research with Amerindian societies that combines historical ecology and Amerindian perspectivism.
Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation
… the Society for the Anthropology …, 2011
PERSPECTIVISM IN ARCHAEOLOGY. Insights into indigenous theories of reality
Cambridge University Press, 2024
Perspectivism in Archaeology explores recurring features in Amerindian mythology and cosmology in the past, as well as distinctions and similarities between humans, non-humans and material culture. It offers a range of possibilities for the reconstruction of ancient ontological approaches, as well as new ways of thinking in archaeology, notably how ancient ontological approaches can be reconciled with current archaeological theories. In this volume, Andrés Laguens contributes a new set of approaches that incorporate Indigenous theories of reality into an understanding of the South American archaeological record. He analyses perspectivism as a stepby-step theory with clear explanations and examples, and shows how it can be implemented in archaeological research and merged with ontological approaches. Exploring the foundations of Amerindian perspectivism and its theoretical and methodological possibilities, he also demonstrates applications of its precepts through case studies of ancient societies of the Andes and Patagonia.
Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism
Radical Philosophy, 2013
This one-day event, organized by the Kingston London Graduate School, with the support of CRMEP, revisits Bloch's work in four themed panels on materialism, atheism, time & aesthetics, and political economy of hope. Venue Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Granary Building, Kings Cross, London N1 4AA Time 13.00-20.00, followed by a drinks reception.
Literal perspectivism in the Colombian Amazon
Art Human Open Acc J, 2018
The purpose of this article is to contribute perspectivism theory of Viveiros de Castro which is based on ethnographic information. A constructive criticism most based on conversations and interviews with indigenous people through an observation participation process of living in two communities in Colombian Amazon. I will refer to a jaguar who become man, United Nations programs in Colombia, under the sea's non-humans, substances purposes and religion, with these ethnographic information, two physical axes, time and space, could be added to perspectivism theory and for each ontology
The Bee Lecture: How Amerindian Perspectivism Psychoanalyzed the Western Symbolic Order and its Historicity and Set a Precedent for a New Kind of Politics.Bee Lecture Proof
Latin American Literary Review , 2021
“The Bee Lecture” is an essay/performance that attempts to make a consistent representation or sketch of Viveiros de Castro’s anthropological description of Amerindian cosmology, which he calls perspectivism, through the persona of ‘the Bee.’ Perspectivism serves as a jumping board for an exploration of performance and some of the implications that perspectivism has for our historical moment of crisis vis-à-vis climate change, mass extinction, and the violent appropriation of nature in the capitalocene (Jason Moore). Walter Benjamin’s critique of modern historicity and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of the Real allow for a theoretical staging of the non-human gaze as a performative challenge to the Western symbolic order. I pinpoint an equivalence, between perspectivist equivocation and the experience of transference in psychoanalysis, to argue for the need and possibility of a cure from the Western denial of nature’s gaze. I begin by locating in the language driven culture/nature duality the sign of a repression. Following Benjamin, I suggest that the avoidance of nature’s gaze is tantamount to a delusional game, called progress and/or historicity, that is disconnected from species life and a redemptive History. The theoretical conflation of the non-human, the Real, and History allows me to compare Western and Amerindian metaphysics and contrast their approach to the (Lacanian) Real. I conclude that a perspectivist metaphysics of becoming with the Other as one approaches the Real, is a radical political alternative that can end the impasse of the Western political and historicist transcendence of nature.
Animism and perspectivism: Still anthropomorphism? On the problem of perception in the construction of Amerindian ontologies
For more than a decade, a close continuity, rather than opposition, has linked Viveiros de Castro's "perspectivism" and Descola's "animism". Both theories are based on Amazonian ethnographic material and should be seen as theoretical constructions of the "Lowland" developed to explain the specificity of Amazonian ontologies. Today, both models exist independently of the south Amerindian data. In this paper, I will present some North-West Amazonian ritual and mythological material that illustrates the first, as well as the second theoretical point of view. The main aim of this paper is to show that general cognitive phenomena involved in the act of perception, such as anthropomorphism and analogical projection, are able to give an account of some Amazonian ontologies, especially if we draw iconographical expressions of past and present societies into the discussion.
‘Programa de Índio’: a look on mystification of Brazil’s socioeconomical indigenous life
2019
Final term essay for "Anthropology, Citizenship and Human Rights", Master in International Studies. This paper presents new looks on two major prejudices on the brazilian amerindians, dwells on its roots and is supported on literature and anthropological analysis.
Inhuman beings: morality and perspectivism among Muinane people (Colombian Amazon)
Like many other Amazonians, Muinane people often use perspectival imagery in discussions of relations between human beings and animals. It is a distinct possibility, within their ontology, that beings that humans perceive as animals, perceive themselves as human, and there are numerous complementary entailments to this. What is most striking about Muinane people's perspectival imagery, however, is that they use it saliently in their moral evaluations of subjectivity and action. I show that this makes perspectivism central to the everyday meaningful practices through which Muinane people achieve social life, and to their understandings of themselves. On that basis, I claim that accounts of Amerindian perspectival cosmologies should attend ethnographically to their morally evaluative potential and to their use by individuals in their discourses and other practices. [Erratum: pg 12, pp 1: "sited subjectivity" should read "cited subjectivity".]
Introduction: Amerindian Modes of Knowledge
Tipiti Journal of the Society For the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2006
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