On Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian Perspectivism

“Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism” by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is one of the most exciting things I’ve read in a while.

It analyzes how Amerindian ontologies unsettle Western Nature/Culture dichotomies. (I’ll pay a beer to anyone who knows of sustained dialogues anywhere between ontological turn anthropology and Pittsburgh-style analytic German Idealism!) The result here is more of a Latourian/Deleuzian picture — it would be interesting, especially with Latour, to see which way the influence runs —, and one which seems to lend itself to raising the concept of translation to the rank of an ontological centerpiece.

Here’s a series of choice quotes from Viveiros de Castro’s article with some attempts at summarizing commentary.

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