Perspectivism - Anthropology - Oxford Bibliographies

Perspectivism - Anthropology - Oxford Bibliographies 10/14/20, 10:56 PM
Perspectivism
Marina Vanzolini, Pedro Cesarino
LAST MODIFIED: 26 AUGUST 2014

DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0083
Introduction
Perspectivism is a concept originally coined by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to encapsulate indigenous
conceptions that were already present in a range of ethnographies of Amerindian peoples from Lowland South America. Perspectivism
refers to recurrent characteristics found in Amerindian mythology and cosmology, but it also relates to war, hunting, kinship, and other
social phenomena. These reveal a particular configuration of distinctions between humans and nonhumans, which are irreducible to
Western distinctions between nature and culture. Viveiros de Castro was responsible for providing the concept through the
transformation of philosophical terms taken from authors such as Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Deleuze and Guattari. In this way, the author
was able to explore the implications of Perspectivism as a concept in Amerindian ethnology and anthropological theory (see Conceptual
Background).
General Overviews
Certain aspects of the concept of perspectivism, such as its essential difference to Western relativism, were present in a number of
studies written by Viveiros de Castro’s students, especially in Lima 1996 and Lima 1999 on hunting practices and shamanism among
the Yudjá (Tupi-speaking people from the Xingu River, Amazonia). Nevertheless, the general outline of the concept and its theoretical
consequences are elaborated in two of Viveiros de Castro’s most important articles, Viveiros de Castro 1996 and Viveiros de Castro
1998. To understand its contributions, it is necessary to begin by a general presentation of its mythological aspects. Amerindian myths
take place at a time when the cosmos’ multiple entities shared a generic human condition and were thus able to communicate with each
other. Myths often describe how, at some point, this condition suffers severe disruption, which results in the transformation of the
numerous types of humans that existed—already differentiated by the physical or behavioral traits characteristic of the nonhuman
beings they would later become—into the different present-day species of animals, as well as vegetables, artifacts, and other kinds of
beings. While in the “first times” all beings were perceived as humans and nonhuman at the same time (or in a flux of constant
transformation into one or another of these forms), myths tell how they permanently finally adopt the animal (or other) bodies they have
today—a process that Viveiros de Castro describes in terms of the transition from intensive to extensive differentiation. However,
shamanism and hunting reveal that this previous human condition was not entirely overcome, since animals, objects, and spirits can
still reveal an inner human form, usually associated with (what is commonly translated as) their “soul” or “double.” External nonhuman
appearance is thus usually conceived as skin or clothing that hides a human interior. This body or skin is responsible for determining a
specific point of view. Rather than an opposition between internal human essence and external nonhuman appearance, these
cosmologies postulate a radical relationalism: While viewed by humans as animals, animals and other beings view themselves as
humans and live in conditions similar to humans; that is, they have a social life similar to those who inhabit an Amerindian village. In
some cases they may view humans as enemies, while in others they may perceive humans as animal predators, most commonly as
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jaguars. Humanity is thus the reflexive condition of a subject to itself, while animality is the condition of the body regarded from an
external point of view. This ontological shift is condensed in the contrast between multinaturalism (different corporeal states that
presupposes a similar human and cultural condition) and multiculturalism (the same and common nature or reality, regarded by different
cultural points of view). Multinaturalism entails a relationalism (which is perspectivism), while multiculturalism entails a relativism (that
must not be mistaken for perspectivism). Årjem, et al. 2004, although not directly used by Viveiros de Castro in his elaboration of
perspectivism, offers good examples of perspectivist elaborarions written by Amazonian peoples themselves.
Årjem, K., L. Cayon, G. Angulo, and Garcia, M. 2004. Etnografía makuna: Tradiciones, relatos y saberes de la Gente de Agua.
Gothernborg: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia ICANH.
Written by Makuna Indians, the book is a an autoethnographic reference that has a number of interesting examples of perspectival
situations and ideas in the words of the Makuna themselves.
Lima, T. S. 1996. O dois e seu múltiplo: reflexões sobre o perspectivismo em uma cosmologia tupi. Mana 2.2: 21–47.
Stolze Lima’s article on Yudjá shamanism, personhood, and hunting was published in the same year as Viveiros de Castro’s
comparative article on perspectivism and can be considered its conceptual complement.
Lima, T. S. 1999. The two and its many: Reflections on perspectivism in a Tupi cosmology. Ethnos 64.1: 107–131.
English translation of Stolze Lima’s seminal article in which the main ethnographic source for the elaboration of perspectivism is
presented.
Vilaça, A. 2005. Chronically unstable bodies: Reflections on Amazonian corporalities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 11:445–464.
Vilaça’s material on the Wari’ (Txapakura-speaking group from Rondonia State, Brazil) was central for the conceptual development of
perspectivism. In this article, the author argues that the Amazonian notion of body does not correspond to a substantial identity but to
the subject’s point of view of itself and others.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 1996. Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio. Mana 2.2: 115–144.
The first attempt to articulate perspectivism, published in Portuguese. It offers the ethnographic and conceptual background for the
concept, as well as a discussion on corporality, kinship, animism, and ethnocentrism. This condensed version of the text was translated
into English (1998), revised in a second Portuguese version (2002) and also in an expanded English version (2012).
Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 4.3: 469–488.
This article is the English translation of Viveiros de Castro’s original Portuguese essay on perspectivism. It was responsible for the
international dissemination of the concept. The text was later republished in A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, edited by M.
Lambek (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 306–326, and Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, edited by H. Moore and T.
Sanders (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 552–565.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2002. A inconstância da alma selvagem. São Paulo, Brazil: Cosac Naify.
The book presents some of Viveiros de Castro’s most important articles on a variety of themes, such as ethnological models for
describing Amazonian societies, kinship systems, shamanism, and his seminal article on perspectivism, all selected and revised by the
author.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2004. Exchanging perspectives: The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian
cosmologies. Common Knowledge 10.3: 463–484.
This presentation on perspectivism by Viveiros de Castro was published in the Common Knowledge Symposium Talking Peace with
Gods: Symposium on the Conciliation of Worldviews (Part 1), which also benefitted from contributions by Bruno Latour, Tobie Nathan,
Ulrich Beck, and Jeffrey Kripal. This combination of texts is particularly interesting for the contextualization of Viveiros de Castro’s ideas
and other cosmopolitical proposals such as Latour’s (see also reference to Isabelle Stenger’s philosophy of science in Animism).
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2012. Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere. HAU: Masterclass Series 1:45–168.
A publication of four lectures given in Cambridge in 1998 in which Viveiros de Castro describes the principal ethnographic
characteristics and theoretical consequences of perspectivism, incorporating more recent reflections on the possibilities of using this
notion for describing systems of thought outside Amazonia.
Previous Ethnographic References
Viveiros de Castro’s identification and analysis of a potentially pan-Amerindian cosmological configuration was based on numerous
important ethnographic studies describing Amerindian conceptions regarding the perspectives of nonhuman entities and/or the animal
clothes that hide a human interior. Among these, Viveiros de Castro gives special mention to the presentation of Makuna ecosophy in
Århem 1993, which he reexamines for his formulation of Amerindian perspectivism. He also cites the studies of Weiss 1972 and Baer
1994 on the Campa and Matsiguenga, respectively, and Goldman 1975 on the Kwakiutl, among many others. These ethnographies all
presented substantial material that could be related to perspectivism. However, the conceptual language used by some of these
authors transforms Amerindian ontological regimes into a kind of indigenous platonism or vitalism, projecting dualities such as
“essence” and “appearance” without any critical reflection of their Western roots (and here “Western” is taken as an homogeneous unity
only as a heuristic device for the study of other forms of thought). Viveiros de Castro’s ethnographic review thus offers a profound
reformulation of the conceptual basis of Amerindian ethnology, probably the most important since Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work. Although
ethnographic studies of a great number of Lowland South American indigenous peoples were present in Viveiros de Castro 1996 (cited
under General Overviews), the author’s first article on perspectivism, Viveiros de Castro acknowledges that material provided by two of
his students was most significant for developing this concept. This material can be found in the ethnographies in Lima 2005 on the
Yudjá and Vilaça 1992 on the Wari’—the former a Tupi-speaking people from the Xingu river and the latter a Txapakura-speaking
people from the State of Rondônia (Brazil). While Lima’s work draws mainly on relations with animals in hunting and shamanism, Vilaça
explores the relation between cannibalism, war, and perspectivism. Viveiros de Castro 1992, the author’s own ethnography on the
Araweté, who are also Tupi speakers from the Xingu region, presents important ideas related to war and cannibalism later developed
by Vilaça and already points to the notion of perspective, which the author only fully developed a decade later. All of these studies,
written as doctoral theses, were later published in Portuguese and in some English articles (noted in the annotations).
Århem, K. 1993. Ecosofia makuna. In La selva humanizada: Ecología alternativa en el tropico húmedo colombiano. Edited by
F. Correa, 109–126. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología.
A short article based on an ethnography of a Tukanoan-speaking group from northwestern Amazonia that, according to Viveiros de
Castro, offers the best description of a native ecology that recognizes “humanness” in animals and associates their animal appearance
with clothes that hide a human interior.
Baer, G. 1994. Cosmología y Shamanismo de los Matsiguenga. Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala.

Ethnography of an Arawak Amazonian people from southeastern Peru. The author describes Matsiguenga conceptions on animal
perspectives of humans. The study also provides translations of shamanic sessions and an analysis of the Matisguenga cosmos.
Fausto, C. 2001. Inimigos fiéis: História, Guerra e xamanismo na Amazônia. São Paulo, Brazil: EDUSP.
A monograph based on Fausto’s doctoral thesis on the Parakanã, a Tupi-Guarani people from Amazonia, written while the concept of
perspectivism was being forged by Viveiros de Castro and his students (Fausto among them). The author formulates the concept of
familiarizing predation, which is closely related to Viveiros de Castro’s concept of ontological predation, and the idea that among
Amazonian peoples subject–object positions in any given relationship are associated with predator–prey positions.
Goldman, I. 1975. The mouth of heaven: An introduction of Kwakiutl religious thought. New York: Wiley-Interscience.
In this analysis of data collected by Franz Boas, Goldman presents aspects of Kwakiutl cosmology, regarding relations between
humans and animals and the idea of an animal perspective of the world, that greatly resemble those described in Lowland South
American societies. In a later article (Viveiros de Castro 2002, cited under Shamanism and Language) acknowledged that Goldman’s
work allowed him to extend perspectivism as a pan-Amerindian cosmological configuration.
Lima, T. S. 2005. Um peixe olhou pra mim: O povo Yudjá e a perspectiva. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora Unesp.
The book is primarily based on Stolze Lima’s doctoral thesis on the Yudjá, a Tupi-speaking people from the Xingu river basin. Stolze
Lima’s material was the main source for the development of Amerindian perspectivism as a concept, derived from the author’s analysis
of Yudjá conceptions on relations with animals and other kinds of nonhumans, such as the dead.
Vilaça, A. 1992. Comendo como Gente: Formas do canibalismo wari’. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora UFRJ.
In this monograph on the Wari’, Vilaça presents an analysis of ritual and funerary practices that points to the importance of
commensality in constructing relations of identity and alterity and to the way in which these relations are understood in terms of shared
or different perspectives of, for instance, a kinperson’s corpse.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 1992. From the enemy’s point of view: Humanity and divinity in an Amazonian society. Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press.
This is a condensed English version of Viveiros de Castro’s doctoral thesis (1986) on the Araweté, a Tupi-speaking group who live in
the Xingu river basin. The concept of “perspective” appears in the analysis of Araweté warrior songs, which are characterized by the
complex alternation of the enunciator’s point of view. The author also presents an analysis of Tupinambá anthropophagy in the 16th
century and its transformation into a contemporary Araweté eschatological system.
Weiss, G. 1972. Campa cosmology. Ethnology 9.2: 157–172.

The author presents an analysis of indigenous narratives showing how this Arawakan people from the Peruvian Amazon consider that
all beings had a cultural condition in premythic times, thus revealing the connection between perspectivism and mythology. This is also
an important source on Amerindian shamanic cosmologies.
Conceptual Background
In keeping with works such as Strathern 1988, Wagner 1981, and Latour 1991, Viveiros de Castro reinvents philosophical concepts of
perspectivism (such as that presented in Deleuze 1988, a study on Leibniz) for an ethnographic theory that challenges the classic
Western opposition between nature and culture or the given and the constructed. The author crafts this theory in an effort to translate
the Amerindian conceptual and ontological originality. Viveiros de Castro uses modern Western epistemological dichotomies (human
and nonhuman, mind and world, interior and exterior, nature and culture) as conceptual tools challenged by Amerindian thought in order
to provide an alternative conceptual vocabulary. This strategy is analogous to the one adopted by Wagner for conceptions of group and
culture, Strathern on gender and society, Latour for the concept of nature, and French philosopher Isabelle Stengers for scientific
knowledge. Perspectivism aims to destabilize another persistent Western assumption, particularly in relation to so-called savage or
primitive peoples, wherein they are not seen to have anything resembling a logic or an ontology but instead are driven by ideological
projections, categorical mistakes, beliefs, or superstitions. Following the way opened by authors such as Lévi-Strauss (see Lévi-Strauss
2008) and Clastres (see Clastres 1974), Viveiros de Castro sees Amerindian thought as having a positive and autonomous status. He
also describes this logic as independent of the contrastive images that have been projected by Western philosophy onto mythico-
religious traditions. Thus, for example, shamanism cannot be understood as a belief, as an ideological construct, or as a series of
categorial mistakes. Instead the author interprets it as an alternative ontology founded on a multiplicity of virtual subjective positions
controlled and mediated by ritual action. These multiple virtual subjective positions are seen as an index of another formulation of the
person, of its multiple aspects and epistemological parameters. Perspectivism also contributes to a post-structuralist anthropology
(although Viveiros de Castro explicitly recognizes that Lévi-Strauss was the first post-structuralist thinker). It is not by chance that
Viveiros de Castro 2009 points to connections between Deleuze’s philosophy and the legacy of anthropological structuralism.
Perspectivism has widely explored the concepts of intensity, becoming (devenir) and multiplicity, useful to an understanding of
shamanic ontologies. As Viveiros de Castro shows, although these concepts did not compose the core of Lévi-Straussian theoretical
formulations, they were preformulated in his writings, especially in the Mythologiques. Lévi-Straussian structuralism was itself a
transformation of Western thought through Amerindian conceptual regimes; ethnology played a key role in the development of Deleuze
and Guattari’s writings (specially Deleuze and Guattari 1980). It is therefore possible to say that perspectivism follows that path toward
a symmetrical ethnographic theory.
Clastres, P. 1974. La société contre l’État. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Like his teacher Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres proposed an interpretation of Amerindian societies that attributed a positive value
to what had thus far been considered as evidence of a lower stage of development: The absence of the State among Amerindian
peoples, which had always been viewed as negative political and ontological indexes, was thus taken to be an alternative and positive
cosmological organization by the author.
Deleuze, G. 1988. Le pli—Leibniz et le baroque. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

The problem of perspectivism was already present in Western philosophy, as Leibniz’s conception of monadology shows. Deleuze’s
study on Leibnizian philosophy was particularly important for developing reflections on perspectivism’s conceptual consequences, such
as those related to the problem of positionality, which strongly influenced Viveiros de Castro’s work.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1980. Mille plateaux. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
This book offers some of the key concepts used in the development of perspectivism, such as multiplicity, intensity, and becoming
(devenir). Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy was itself constituted through a transversal dialogue with ethnology (among other
disciplines and phenomena): The 12th Plateau is particularly central for this dialogue and was also very important for the formation of
perspectivism.
Latour, B. 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: La Découverte.

Latour’s classic volume in which he reflects on the significant consequences of an anthropology of science. It is a fundamental
reference in the critique of the presence of a Western notion of nature in descriptions of Amerindian ontologies, which is also
undertaken by Viveiros de Castro in his elaboration of perspectivism.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 2008. Oeuvres. Paris: Gallimard.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was probably the most important reference in the development of perspectivism, and this volume presents his
complete works. La pensée sauvage and the six volumes of the Mythologiques (including the last two books, La potière jalouse and
Histoire de lynx) had particularly important roles: the first for its proposition of the “savage mind” as an alternative logic and the second
for its revelation of Amerindian narrative and cosmological configurations.
Strathern, M. 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press.
This is an influential study on gender, body, and reproduction in Melanesia. It begins with a critique of previous ethnographies and offers
a sophisticated reflection on several Melanesian conceptions relating to personhood and gift exchange. Strathern’s critique of a
Western theoretical lexicon and the revelation of an alternative ontological constitution is parallel to perspectivism’s epistemological
position in contemporary anthropological theory.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2009 Métaphysiques cannibales: Lignes d’anthropologie post-structurale. Paris: P.U.F.
As well as presenting a condensed version of his most important previous works, this book incorporates Viveiros de Castro’s recent
reflections on philosophy and anthropology. The book offers further elaborations of perspectivism and reveals the outlines of a post-
structuralist anthropology through associations made between Deleuze’s and Lévi-Strauss’s work. One of its most important chapters
was later published in English (Viveiros de Castro 2010, cited under Politics).
Wagner, R. 1981. The invention of culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

This is one of the most important studies on the epistemological status of anthropological reflection. It explores several important issues
relating to perspectivism’s status as an ethnographic theory, such as the possibility of a reverse anthropology and the anthropologist’s
position of mediation.
Alterity and Alliance Theory
Although the formulation of perspectivism as a pan-Amazonian ontological configuration was prompted by data on hunting and
shamanism, the first clues for the conceptual problem that it provokes appeared in analyses of war practices and cannibalism among
Lowland South American indigenous peoples. In an important study of cannibalism among the Tupinambá (a Tupi-speaking group that
occupied the Brazilian coast during the colonial period) during the 16th century, Carneiro da Cunha and Viveiros de Castro 1985 had
already pointed to several elements that were later included in the elaboration of perspectivism. The authors noted that, in the 16th-
century descriptions of the Tupinambá, once the captive was taken to live in his captor’s village he would be ritually produced as a real
person; that is, he would be transformed into a kinsman in relation to his enemies and he would live among them as such until his
execution. By executing this enemy, the captor-murderer would then capture the deadman’s soul perspective. The association between
war, kinship, identity, and power as an effect of the exchange of perspectives was thus already outlined in this work. These ideas would
also be confirmed further by ethnographies of other Amerindian societies, such as the Jivaroan-speaking peoples from Amazonian
Ecuador, who have a comparable ritual system for obtaining souls from their enemies through head-hunting (see Descola 1993 and
Taylor 1993 on war and head-hunting among Jivaroan groups), and other comparative more recent works such as Fausto 1999, on a
theory of familiarizing predation). The capture of external forces—in the form of outsiders’ perspectives of oneself—would also be
developed later on by many ethnologists working in Amazonia. Here we must consider not only the contributions made by those studies
toward the renewal of alliance theory in the Amazonian context but also the emphasis that they placed on the connections between
social and cosmological exteriors, thus confirming the impossibility of separating these domains (see Viveiros de Castro 2001, an
important article on the theory of potential affinity, and Rivière 1993, a revision on kinship and affinity in Amazonia).
Carneiro da Cunha, M., and E. Viveiros de Castro. 1985. Vingança e temporalidade: os Tupinambá. Journal de la Société des
Américanistes 71.71: 191–208.
The authors revise the classic theme of Tupinambá cannibalism, previously studied by Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes. The
new interpretation offered by the authors suggests that cannibalism and its vendetta system were related to the production of
temporality and its eschatological consequences: a position that Viveiros de Castro explores at length in other works that can be
considered precursors to perspectivism (such as his thesis on the Araweté).
Descola, P. 1993. Les affinités selectives: Alliance, guerre et prédation dans l’emsemble Jivaro. L’Homme 33.126–128: 171–
190.
An analysis of social productivity in war and head-hunting among Jivaro groups from equatorial Amazonia, Descola’s article is a
landmark in a movement that brought many Amazonian ethnologists together in the 1990s, emphasizing the importance of the exterior
for social reproduction. Formulated a few years later, perspectivism as a theory addresses the same question, showing how the capture
of external power involves the adoption of others’ perspectives in Amazonian societies.
Fausto, C. 1999. Of enemies and pets: Warfare and shamanism in Amazonia. American Ethnologist 26.4: 933–956.
Fausto expands the conclusions derived from his thesis on the Tupi-speaking Parakanã and proposes a pan-Amazonian theory of what
he calls “familiarising predation,” a dynamic that captures external power and alternates between periods of war and peace.
Rivière, P. 1993. The Amerindianization of descent and affinity. L’Homme 33.126–128: 507–516.
The author reviews the transformation of kinship theories in Amazonian ethnology, particularly the conceptual expansion of the notion of
affinity to signify relations of both social and cosmological difference.
Taylor, A. -C. 1993. Les bons ennemis et les mauvais parents: Le traitement symbolique de l’alliance dans les rituels de
chasse aux têtes des Jivaros de l’Equateur. In Les complexités de l’alliance, IV. Économie, poitique et fondements
symboliques de l’alliance. Edited by E. Copet and F. Héritier-Augé, 73–105. Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines.
The author describes Jivaro head-hunting rituals, showing that the hunted enemy must be apprehended as radical alterity in order to be
incorporated through ritual means as a crucial element for social reproduction.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 1993. Alguns aspectos da afinidade no dravidianato amazônico. In Amazônia: Etnologia e história
indígena. Edited by E. Viveiros de Castro and M. Carneiro da Cunha, 150–210. São Paulo, Brazil: Núcleo de História Indígena e
do Indigenismo.
This article is the original Portuguese version, later republished in the English translation mentioned above (Viveiros de Castro 2001). It
is one of the most important of Viveiros de Castro’s ethnological texts, mostly because it provides a definition for the concept of
potential affinity that was later so essential for the formulation of perspectivism. The article was also revised and republished in a
Brazilian collection of Viveiros de Castro’s most significant works (A inconstância da Alma Selvagem [São Paulo, Brazil: Cosac & Naify,
2002]).
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2001. GUT feelings about Amazonia: Potential affinity and the construction of sociality. In Beyond the
visible and the material: The Amerindianization of society in the work of Peter Rivière. Edited by L. Rival and N. Whitehead,
19–43. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Viveiros de Castro comments at length on anthropological theories of kinship that had been applied to the description of Amazonian
societies. He also expounds his theory on the centrality of affinity as a background for relationality in these contexts, with consanguinity
being constructed out of and against it.
Corporality and Kinship
The characteristics identified in Amerindian cosmologies through perspectivism had important implications for the understanding of
concepts of body and kinship, thus contributing to more general debates on these topics in anthropological theory (for general
ethnographical presentations on this topic, see Taylor and Viveiros de Castro 2006 and Belaunde 2006 on bodily fluids and corporality
in Amazonia). One of the central aspects of cosmological conceptions addressed by the notion of perspectivism is the importance given
to the body as the locus of perspective. This question had already been discussed many years before in Seeger, et al. 1979. In this
article, the authors argued for the central role played by Amerindian techniques of corporeal production in the daily and ritual life. In his
synthesis of perspectivism, however, Viveiros de Castro notes that by body we should understand an “assemblage of affects or ways of
being that constitutes a habitus” (Viveiros de Castro 2012, p. 113, cited under General Overviews) and thus determines the position of
different subjects in the world. By pointing to the nonessential character of humanity—understood as the reflexive perspective of a
subject on itself—perspectivism also allowed analytical connections between cosmological views and native conceptions of kinship,
which a Western biological model was not able to adequately describe; that is, it allowed for an understanding of kinship as a shared
identity constructed in bodies and knowledge forms (see Viveiros de Castro 2009 for a recent development of these questions). As
such, the capacity that any being in the cosmos has to constitute a subjective position involves participation in a kinship system that is
similar to those found among living human beings (see Animism). A human-like person is constructed as a relative and a “real human
person” through ritual, the aesthetic production of the body, commensality, naming, and other actions. The assemblage of persons thus
produced usually call themselves we, the real or prototypical humans. These pronominal self-designations are ontologically different
from substantive designations of people such as Brazilians, Russians, or Chinese. They do not presume a fixed identity but rather a
relational process: the potential to become human that, moreover, is not restricted to humans but shared by all possible candidates to
“humanness,” such as spirit-people and animal doubles. The potential to change points of view is, above all, given in a body produced
through kinship relations (a point explored in several ethnographical studies about corporality and shamanism, such as Rodgers 2002
on the Ikpeng, Vilaça 2002 on the Wari’, Gow 1997 on the Piro, and Taylor 1996 on the Achuar). This may also explain how Amerindian
peoples experience a process of becoming white by dressing in white peoples’ clothes, learning their language, and eating their food:
The experience of other bodies (and thus another point of view) also involves gaining another realm of knowledge.
Belaunde, L. E. 2006. The strength of thoughts, the stench of blood: Amazonian hematology and gender. Tipití: Journal of the
Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South-America 4.1: 129–152.
Belaunde discusses Amazonian ideas of body and person, showing that the central role played by the manipulation of bodily fluids in
these cosmologies is strictly related to the control of transformations between humans and nonhumans.
Gow, P. 1997. “O parentesco como consciência humana: o caso dos Piro. Mana 3.2: 39–65.
In an article devoted to elucidating Piro concepts of kinship, and in accordance with ethnographies that were already exploring the
importance of relations with sociological and cosmological otherness in social reproduction, Gow shows how these people from the
Peruvian Amazon understand kin identity as a continual construct that occurs following birth.
Rodgers, D. 2002. A soma anômala: A questão do suplemento no xamanismo e menstruação ikpeng. Mana 8.2: 91–125.
The article presents various aspects of the Ikpeng (also known as Txicão, a Karib-speaking people of Xingu River) cosmology, focusing
particularly on their conceptions of the person as the product of continuous corporeal alterations.
Seeger, A., R. Matta, and E. Viveiros de Castro. 1979. A construção da pessoa nas sociedades indígenas brasileiras. Boletim
do Museu Nacional 32:2–19.
This article presents a new emphasis for Amerindian ethnology of the 1970s and 1980s,. The authors’ argument on corporality as a
central aspect of Amerindian social life gained new life with Viveiros de Castro et al.’s analysis of the body as the locus of perspective.
The text was later republished in Sociedades indígenas e indigenismo no Brasil, edited by João Pacheco de Oliveira (Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil: Marco Zero, 1987), pp. 11–30.
Taylor, A. -C. 1996. The soul’s body and its states: An Amazonian perspective on the nature of being human. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 2:201–215.
The author explores native ideas about personhood among the Achuar from Equatorial Amazonia and argues for the intrinsically
intersubjective character of being (and feeling) human in that context.
Taylor, A. -C., and E. Viveiros de Castro. 2006. Un corps fait de regards (Amazonie). In Qu’est-ce qu’un corps? Edited by S.
Breton, 148–199. Paris: Musée du quai Branly.
This text, which was written for the catalogue of the exhibition Qu’est-ce qu’un corps? in the Musée du quai Branly (Paris), presents a
complete but synthetic and accessible approach to the theme of corporality and its relation to perspectivism in Amazonia.
Vilaça, A. 2002. Making kin out of others. Journal of the Royal Athropological Institute 8:347–365.
Bringing together examples from different Amazonian peoples, Vilaça investigates how the construction of kinship ties involves the
fabrication of bodies through the manipulation of substances—food, body fluids, and so on. Taking into account a perspectivist theory,
the article explores the connection between corporality and relations of identity and alterity.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2009. The gift and the given: Three nano-essays on kinship and magic. In Kinship and beyond: The
genealogical model reconsidered. Edited by S. Bamford and J. Leach, 237–268. Oxford: Berghahn.
With Gregory’s distinction between commodity and gift economies as a point of departure, Viveiros de Castro considers the alternative
to a juridical model of kinship (based on property rights) in socialities where the production and control of people, not things, are central
issues. Indigenous notions of body and personhood are involved in this post-perspectivist exploration.
Shamanism and Language
As already noted, perspectivism is a cosmological characteristic present in Amerindian mythic narratives (see General Overviews; De
Civreux 1970, a translation of Yekuana mythic narratives, offers several examples). Lévi-Strauss once defined Amerindian myths as
narratives of a time when human and animals could communicate. Commenting on this definition, Viveiros de Castro 2007 reminds us
that narratives do not exactly evoke past events lost in time, since the worldly configuration that they describe can be reactualized at
any moment (see some examples in the autobiographical report of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, Kopenawa and Albert 2010).
The cosmological distribution of potential human agency to different beings is strictly related to the formal and linguistic aspects of
discourse. Amerindian languages make constant use of reportative marks (or hearsays), which creates a complex polyphonic
enunciation where different points of view are constantly embedded in each other: An indication that the problem of knowing by
encompassing others’ perspectives is a central theme in these verbal arts. This is a common linguistic structure in many shamanic
songs and speech forms, such as the Tupi maraka songs, the Marubo (Pano) iniki (see a study and translations in Cesarino 2011), the
Ashaninka (Arawak) shamanic sessions (translated in Baer 1994, cited under Previous Ethnographic References), and the Kuna
(Chibcha) verbal arts (studied and translated in Sherzer 1998), among other examples. As they present an enunciatory structure that
allows for distinct interlocutors to speak through the shaman’s voice, these songs are one of the most clear expressions of
perspectivism. It is therefore not by chance that the fundamental intuitions for the development of perspectivism were already present in
Viveiros de Castro 1992 (cited under Previous Ethnographic References) on Araweté shamanic and war polyphonic songs. The
positionalist character of Amerindian thought was also noted by Lima 1996 (cited under General Overviews). The author described how
in Yudjá language it is grammatically impossible to report any event without reference to the perceiving subject: Even when expressing
a trivial fact such as “it is raining,” the Yudjá will say, “it is raining for me” (the use of reflexive suffixes is something common in other
Amerindian languages, such as in the Marubo case; Cesarino 2011). Perspectivism is thus not only an ontology but an epistemology
based on what can be known through others’ knowledge of the world and through immediate experience: hence the importance of
knowledge transmission and authority in Amerindian verbal arts (see Déléage 2009, a study on Sharanawa songs and shamanic
learning; see also Franchetto 2007, a study on evidential markers and authority in Kuikuro narratives). This indigenous epistemology is
not detachable from politics or a theory of power. In this sense, Viveiros de Castro 2002 and Viveiros de Castro 2007 propose a
definition of shamanic power as the communicative capacity to recognize subjectivity and agency in otherness. This is the exact
opposite of Western scientific knowledge as a form of knowing through objectification.
Cesarino, P. N. 2011. Oniska—poética do xamanismo na Amazônia. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora Perspectiva.
This ethnography on Marubo (Panoan-speaking people from the Vale do Javari Indigenous Reservation, Brazil) shamanism,
personhood, and verbal arts comprises several translations of shamanic songs, narratives of shamanic sessions, and biographical
accounts. The study is also an analysis of Marubo cosmology and its relationship with the multiple person, the problem of perspectival
positionality, and transformation.
De Civreux, M. 1970. Wattuna un ciclo de creación en el Orinoco. Caracas, Venezuela: Monte Avila Editores.
De Civrieux’s translation of Yekuana’s (Carib speakers of Venezuelan Amazonia) mythic cycle brings several examples of
perspectivism and can also be considered as a good source on the study of Amerindian mythological narratives. The book was also
published in English: Watunna: An Orinoco Creation Cycle (San Francisco, North Point, 1980).
Déléage, P. 2009. Le chant de l’anaconda—l’apprentissage du chamanisme chez les Sharanawa. Paris: Société d’Ethnologie.
This ethnography on Sharanawa’s (Panoan-speaking people from the Peruvian Amazon) shamanism and knowledge transmission
offers several translations of songs and narratives related to healing rituals, visionary experiences, and processes of transformation.
Franchetto, B. 2007. Les marques de la parole vraie en Kuikuro, langue caribe du Haut-Xingu (Brésil). In L’Énonciation
médiatisée II. Le traitement épistémologique de l’information: Illustrations amérindiennes et caucasiennes. Edited by Zlatka
Guentchéva and Jon Landaburu, 173–204. Paris: Éditions Peeters.
Bruna Franchetto’s study on Kuikuro (Carib-speaking group of Xingu Indigenous Reservation) language and verbal arts reveals the
significant conceptual aspects involved in a system of evidential markers, as well as its performative status. The article is a relevant
source for understanding Lowland South American regimes of knowledge, narrative authority, and discourse.
Gow, P. 2001. An Amazonian myth and its history. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
The notion of perspectivism helps Gow’s interpretation of the historical changes of a Piro (Arawakan speakers of Peruvian Amazonian)
myth, as the transformation of a narrative centered on cosmological order into a story concerning the Piro people’s imaginations of the
whites’ perspectives of them.
Kopenawa, D., and B. Albert. 2010. La chute du ciel—paroles d’un chaman yanomami. Paris: Plon.
Davi Kopenawa’s autobiographical narrative was published after a long partnership with anthropologist Bruce Albert, who is also the
author of the articles included in this book. The sophisticated translation of Kopenawa’s personal accounts of shamanic initiatory
processes offers several potent examples of perspectivism, processes of transformation, and other details of Yanomami cosmology.
The English translation is published as The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2013).
Sherzer, Joel. 1998. Verbal art in San Blas—Kuna culture through its discourse. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
This is a study dedicated to Kuna genres of verbal arts, such as the reports of a curing specialist and other mythic narratives. The
author provides translations of complete texts and general presentations of the ethnographical context and linguistics aspects of Kuna
discourse.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2002. Xamanismo e sacrifício. In A inconstância da Alma Selvagem. By E. Viveiros de Castro, 457–472.
São Paulo, Brazil: Cosac & Naify.
Based on Lévi-Strauss’s opposition between totemic and sacrificial logics—that is, between a system of classification and a system of
forces—Viveiros de Castro presents an interpretation of Amazonian shamanism as based on the reestablishment and control of
communication between species, which had been partially lost in mythic times. Translated and republished as “Chamanismo y
sacrificio,” in Chamanismo y sacrificio, edited by J.-F. Bouchard and J.-P. Chaumeil (Bogotá, Colombia: Fundación de Investigaciones
Arqueológicas Nacionales, 2005), pp. 339–351.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2007. The crystal forest: On the ontology of Amazonian spirits. In Special Issue: Inner Asian
Perspectivism. Edited by Rebecca Empson, Caroline Humphrey, and Morten A. Pedersen. Inner Asia 9.2: 153–172.
Using Davi Kopenawa’s (a prominent Yanomami shaman and political leader) speech on the shamanic knowledge about the xapiri or
spirit people as a point of departure, Viveiros de Castro discusses many ethnographic studies to analyze the notion of spirit in
Amazonia, emphasizing its connections with mythology and with the notion of image. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
Translation and Equivocation
In more recent studies, Viveiros de Castro extends the theoretical consequences of perspectivism to a reflection on the problem of,
what he calls, conceptual “equivocation.” The notion of perspectivism addresses the fact that if in Amerindian worlds different kinds of
beings share the same cultural or human life, they are nonetheless differentiated by their bodies or affects. These beings thus basically
talk about the same things, but the referents for what they say are not the same: What the dead see as manioc beer the living might
perceive as blood; what the tapir see as manioc cake humans see as feces, although they can employ the same equivocal names
(“manioc beer” and “manioc cake,” for instance) in communication processes. The author suggests that if we take anthropology to be a
type of “controlled equivocation” then the anthropological task is rather equivalent to this perspectival process: When we speak of
indigenous kinship or politics we must remember that the referents for these concepts are not the same in our own view and our
subjects’ worlds. More than that, Viveiros de Castro shows that perspectivism is in itself an indigenous anthropology, a process of
permanent comparative translation between different worlds (see Carneiro da Cunha 1998, a study on shamanism and translation). The
comparison aims at a critique of anthropological meta-theory. Instead of presenting itself as a translation of others’ concepts or
solutions for things and problems defined by scientific knowledge, and by taking Amerindian perspectivism as a model, anthropology
should recognize that others’ perspectives configure other worlds altogether. Through this proposition Viveiros de Castro does not imply
that communication between worlds is not possible—after all, communication is what perspectivism is about—but that there is no
privileged point of view from which to decide what is real or not. The author claims that this is the politico-epistemological position that
anthropology should assume (a position also developed by Viveiros de Castro 2002 in another article on anthropological theory). As
Viveiros de Castro 2004 makes explicit, the meta-anthropological reflections developed through perspectivism were highly influenced
by Wagner 1981 (cited under Conceptual Background), Wagner 1986 on a reverse anthropology (for developments of this problem
inside and outside Amerindian ethnology, see Kirsch 2006 on the Yonggom people of New Guinea and Kelly 2011 on the Yanomami),
and Sahlins 1981, reflections on structure and history through the productive misunderstandings related to the encounter of Captain
Cook and the Hawaiians.
Carneiro da Cunha, M. 1998. Pontos de vista sobre a floresta Amazônica: xamanismo e tradução. Mana 4.1: 7–22.
The article is dedicated to an exploration of networks of shamanic relations in Western Amazonia, mostly among the Panoan Kaxinawa.
The author proposes a connection between Walter Benjamin’s classical essay on the task of the translator (1923) and the problem of
perspectivism.
Kelly, J. A. 2011. State healthcare and Yanomami transformations: A symmetrical ethnography. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona
Press.
Incorporating R. Wagner’s notion of “reverse anthropology” and Viveiros de Castro’s idea of perspectivism as indigenous anthropology,
this monograph explores the equivocations experienced by both Yanomami and Westerners in the context of the health system
provided by the Venezuelan State for indigenous communities.
Kirsch, S. 2006. Reverse anthropology: Indigenous analysis of social and environmental relations in New Guinea. Stanford,
CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
An ethnography of the Yonggom people of New Guinea. Focusing on native interpretations of two political movements involving
relations with Westerners, the author puts into practice Roy Wagner’s claim that the task of anthropology is to describe its subjects’ own
anthropologies, that is, their conceptions of humanity, world, self, and other.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical metaphors and mythical realities. Virginia: Univ. of Michigan Press.
The book is a reflection on history and structure through a study of the encounter between Captain Cook and Hawaiians in the 18th
century. Sahlins concludes that cultural encounters are responsible for general transformations in structural systems of natives and
whites, triggered by processes of productive misunderstandings.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2002. O nativo relativo. Mana 8.1: 113–148.

Expanding on reflections in Viveiros de Castro 1996 (cited under General Overviews) on perspectivism, this text reframes the
epistemological background of anthropology, traditionally conceived as an assymetrical projection of explanatory theories. In this
symmetrical agenda, the task of the anthropologist is to study the natives’ systems of thought and explore the effects that they can
produce in our own through an analogy with the task of the literary translator. English translation: Viveiros de Castro, E. 2013. “The
Relative Native." Hau 3:469–502.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2004. Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation. Tipití: Journal of the
Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2.1: 3–22.
The author extends the notion of perspectivism, formulated in Americanist ethnology, to explore its consequences as an alternative to
cultural relativism for the conceptualization of anthropology. Anthropology should thus take Amerindian perspectivism as a model for its
own epistemological challenges, such as the study of processes of perspectival equivocation as a problem of translation between
distinct ontological backgrounds.
Wagner, R. 1986. Symbols that stand for themselves. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
A further development of Wagner’s symbolic theory as presented in The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), this book is an important reference for Viveiros de Castro’s critique of the relativist view of anthropology as a description of other
people’s symbolic constructs for a nature known only by Western science.
Animism
Parallel to the formulation of Amerindian perspectivism in Viveiros de Castro 1996 (cited under General Overviews), French
anthropologist Philippe Descola proposed a revival of the Victorian anthropological term of animism to describe the same phenomena
addressed by his Brazilian contemporary: the identification of human aspects in animals and other kinds of beings in Amerindian
cosmologies (Kohn 2013, an ethnography on the Ávila Runa people, presents an exploration of the theme). Descola first distinguishes
between naturalist and animist cosmologies. The author thus describes that while a naturalist cosmology (notably, a Western scientific
cosmology) identifies animals and humans by their common nature and differentiates them through humanity’s exclusive possession of
social and cultural attributes, animist cosmologies project human qualities onto animals, unifying all beings in a social/cultural relation.
In a later development, Descola 2005 posits this distinction within a broader framework, recognizing two further ontological modes that,
alongside naturalism and animism, would dispose of the distinction between nature and culture in a different way. The author then
presents Amerindian perspectivism as supplementary to animism, an ontological mode present in similar configurations in other parts of
the world (see Beyond Amazonia). In his first descriptions of Amerindian perspectivism, Viveiros de Castro acknowledges the similarity
of his theoretical project with that of Descola, suggesting that animism describes the continuities between humans and nonhumans
while perspectivism would address the ways in which species are differentiated, with their bodies as the locus of distinct perspectives.
However, more recently Viveiros de Castro has emphasized the differences between his description of Amerindian perspectivism as a
multinaturalist ontology—that is, as rejecting fixed and essential identities, which means that there is no privilege position responsible
for projecting social models upon the external world—and Descola’s description of the common social nature given to both humans and
animals in certain cultures (see also Latour 2009 on the differences between Viveiros de Castro’s and Descola’s theories). An important
critique of the use of animism to describe Amerindian cosmologies was also made by Tania Stolze Lima in her analysis of the Yudja’s
relations with animals (Lima 1999), in which the author notes the ethnocentrism implicated in the definition of animism as a projection of
human traits onto animals and things. Strathern 1999 and Stengers 2012 provide a critique of the implications of a multinaturalist
ontology both for knowledge practices and politics.
Descola, P. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.

This is one of the most important and influential studies by the French anthropologist Philippe Descola. The author provides a broad
reflection on four modes of ontological configuration (the animist, the totemist, the analogist, and the naturalist). From his point of view,
perspectivism can be understood as an extension of animism, a general category that Descola recovers from a classical
anthropological tradition. The English translation includes a foreword by Marshall Sahlins: Descola, P. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
Jensen, C. B., ed. 2011. Special Issue: Comparative Relativism: Symposium on an Impossibility. Common Knowledge 17.1.
This special issue offers a privileged view of perspectivism’s singularities as both an Amerindian cosmology and as a potential image
for anthropology itself, with articles by Casper Bruun Jensen, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, G. E. R. Lloyd, Martin Holbraad, Andreas
Roepstorff, Isabelle Stengers, Helen Verran, Steven D. Brown, Brit Ross Winthereik, Marilyn Strathern, Bruce Kapferer, Annemarie Mol,
Morten Axel Pedersen, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Matei Candea, Debbora Battaglia, and Roy Wagner.
Kohn, E. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Kohn’s ethnography of the Runa (Quechua speakers of Equatorian Amazon) presents interesting examples of an Amerindian theory of
nonhuman knowledge and proposes anthropological reflections “beyond the human” held in close dialogue with Viveiros de Castro’s
perspectivism.
Latour, B. 2009. Perspectivism: “Type” or “bomb”?. Anthropology Today 25.2: 21–22.

Latour’s guest editorial for Anthropology Today presents the debate “Perspectivism and Animism” held between Philippe Descola and
Viveiros de Castro at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Paris, 2009. The author offers the general terms of the debate in order to stress
the differences between both anthropological projects.
Lima, T. S. 1999. Para uma teoria etnográfica da distinção natureza e cultura na cosmologia juruna. Revista Brasileira de
Ciências Sociais 14.40: 43–52.
By presenting Yudjá ethnographical cases, the author explains why the concepts of relativism and animism do not permit an adequate
description of Amerindian cosmologies.
Stengers, I. 2012. Reclaiming animism. E-flux journal 36.

Taking Viveiros de Castro and Descola’s descriptions of indigenous cosmologies, Stengers claims that it is necessary to refuse a
reductionist approach to animism as one type of ontology, in order to allow its full political and epistemological potential.
Strathern, M. 1999. Property, substance and effect: Anthropological essay on persons and things. London: Athlone.
Strathern discusses different notions of perspective, arguing for the particularity of Amazonian and Melanesian conceptions in contrast
with a Western “merological” notion of viewpoint. See, particularly, “The Ethnographic Effect II” (pp. 226–258).
Social Change
As a theory of alliance, perspectivism is also important for an understanding of Amerindian strategies in social processes of change,
such as those triggered by European colonization and the emergence of contemporary South American capitalist societies. In fact,
perspectivism has always been related to Amerindian strategies for dealing with alterity, particularly if these societies are conceived as
singular points in a complex network of peoples developed over thousands of years in Lowland South America and beyond. As
Carneiro da Cunha and Viveiros de Castro 1985 (cited under Alterity and Alliance Theory) emphasizes (and, before that, Lévi-Strauss
in The Way of the Masks, 1975), an Amerindian theory of culture is a theory of perpetual acculturation or, in other words, a theory
directed toward the acquisition of knowledge, names, expressive forms from the outside (such as graphic patterns, songs, and
choreographies), as well as other relevant phenomena. Acculturation here should not be confused with an irreversible loss of
something like an “Amerindian identity.” Instead, the concept must be reframed in terms of Amerindian strategies and notions of
sociality, strictly related to the problem of affinity and mutatis mutandis to perspectivism. As a form of relationalism, perspectivism allows
an understanding of how Amerindians manipulate connections between different peoples through the adoption of different corporeal
habitus (which involves a form of capturing different knowledge forms since, for different Amerindian peoples, the body is the source of
knowledge). This form of relationalism connects living people (through relations of kinship affinity) to animal spirits, to dead kin and
other forms of extra-human agency, but also potentially to white people. In sum, the ability to change perspectives involves, above all,
corporeal transformation, which might involve the bodies of Anaconda people, Oropendola people, or white people with their clothes,
sexual habits, written knowledge, and food. Contrary to assumptions of substantive identity, these social and corporeal connections are
not seen by Amerindians as either irreversible or permanent: They do not necessarily lead to cultural loss but to a process of
sociocosmological transformation. This explains why several Amerindian peoples say that they are Christians without excluding
shamanic rituals or even cannibalism in the Brazilian colonial period (a theme explored in Vilaça 2010). It also explains why some
people choose to live with white people to learn to write and other such customs and then eventually decide to return to their villages
and live like their ancestors. This strategic sense of transformation is an important key to understanding Amerindians’ relationship with
money and urban spaces, as shown in Bonilla 2005, Gordon 2006, and Cesarino 2008; schooling, literacy, and patrimonialization, as
discussed in Carneiro da Cunha 2009 and Coelho de Souza 2012; or health policies, environmental conflicts, and religious conversion
(see especially Ramos and Albert 2002). Far from offering an anthropological portrait of cultural or cosmological monads, closed to the
outside and to social or historical change, perspectivism offers a powerful analytical tool to the understanding of this kind of phenomena
in such modern contexts.
Bonilla, O. 2005. O bom patrão e o inimigo voraz: predação e comércio na cosmologia paumari. Mana 11:41–66.
Bonilla’s article on Paumari (Arawa-speaking people of Purus River, Amazonia) shamanism provides data that relates to perspectivism
and cosmological transformations connected to the commercial system of Upper Amazonia.
Carneiro da Cunha, M. 2009. Cultura com aspas. São Paulo, Brazil: Cosac Naify.
A compilation of the more important articles by influential Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha. Among previous studies
dedicated to several issues on Amerindian ethnology, such as the relationship between colonial Tupi-speaking peoples and Jesuits, the
final chapter is also dedicated to the transformation of Amerindian traditional knowledge. This last chapter, “Cultura com Aspas,” has
been translated into English: “Culture” and Culture (Chicago, Prickly Paradigm, 2009).
Cesarino, P. N. 2008. Babel da floresta, cidade dos brancos? Os Marubo no encontro entre dois mundos. Novos Estudos
82:133–148.
A study on the reflections of Marubo shamans about the city and white people. It offers an analysis of mythical narratives on the origin
of whites and of shamanic speeches on land and technological products.
Coelho de Souza, M. 2012. A pintura esquecida e o desenho roubado: contrato, troca e criatividade entre os Kisêdjê. Revista
de Antropologia 55:209–253.
The article provides some reflections on the relation between Kinsêdjê (Ge-speakers from the Xingu River) traditional knowledge (such
as graphic patterns) and the negotiation of rights with shoe manufacturers. In this way, this piece also presents discussions on concepts
such as ownership, culture, and property and its connections with Amerindian cosmological categories.
Gordon, C. 2006. Economia selvagem: Ritual e mercadoria entre os Xikrin-Mebêngôkre. São Paulo, Brazil: Unesp.
In the context of relations between an Amazonian people and a State company, through a compensation scheme for mineral extraction
inside indigenous territory, Gordon analyzes the way in which money is related to in a culture that perceives the appropriation of foreign
goods and capacities as the essential way of producing people.
Ramos, A., and B. Albert, eds. 2002. Pacificando o branco: Cosmologias do contato no Norte- Amazônico. São Paulo, Brazil:
Unesp.
A selection of articles regarding indigenous peoples’ perspectives on the experience of contact with whites, including Albert’s masterful
analysis of shaman and political leader Davi Kopenawa Yanomami’s discourses on the theme. Their partnership led to the publication of
La chute du ciel (see Shamanism and Language).
Vilaça, A. 2010. Strange enemies: Indigenous agency and scenes of encounters in Amazonia. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
This is the English translation of Vilaça’s book Quem somos nós? Os wari’ encontram os brancos (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora UFRJ,
2010), in which the author describes native ideas about the colonial encounter and about the process of “becoming white”, making
explicit their relation to cosmology.
Politics
By throwing light onto processes of subjectivation—be they in the appropriation of foreign qualities, such as the ritual absorption of an
enemy’s position in warfare cannibalism or the construction of a common (human) identity trough commensality—perspectivism allowed
for new understandings of political ideology and practices in Amerindian societies. Particularly important in this regard was the analysis
in Sztutman 2012 of 16th-century Tupinambá leadership. Sztutman combines recent Lowland South American ethnology, such as
perspectivism and Pierre Clastres’ notion of the society-against-the-State and ethnographic theories formulated in Melanesian
ethnology, such as in Strathern 1988 (considerations on agency, cited under Conceptual Background). Barcelos Neto 2008, Costa
2010, Vanzolini 2011, and Guerreiro 2012 have also contributed with ethnographic material to the development of an indigenous theory
of leadership that takes into account native notions of body, kinship, agency, and power. Recently, in an afterword to a new edition of
Clastres’s Archeology of Violence, Viveiros de Castro 2010 presents some considerations on the direct relation between the former’s
view of Amerindian politics and perspectivism as a “cosmology against the State,” that is, one that conspires against the stabilization of
any being in the Subject position, the cosmological correlate of the community leader position.
Barcelos Neto, A. 2008. Apapaatai: Rituais de mascaras no Alto Xingu. São Paulo, Brazil: EDUSP.
A dense description of Xinguano ritual life, making explicit its implications for political life and the emergence of leaders in a context
where inheritance of a “chiefly” status is both necessary and insufficient for claiming village leadership.
Costa, L. A. L S. 2010. The Kanamari body-owner: Predation and feeding in Western Amazonia. Journal de la Societé des
Americanistes 96.1: 169–192.
Based on an analysis of a Kanamari concept in its complex meaning (the concept of warah’ and its possible translation as body-owner),
the author shows that native political ideology is marked by a logic of predation and familiarization operating in different scales of the
social order.
Guerreiro, Jr, A. R. 2012. Refazendo corpos para os mortos: As effigies mortuárias Kalapalo. Tipití: Journal of the Society for
the Anthropology of Lowland South-America 9.1.
An ethnography of the Kwarup mortuary ritual, stressing its function in constructing rather than simply celebrating important deceased
village chiefs, thus highlighting the connections between indigenous political ideas and theories of personhood and agency.
Sztutman, R. 2012. O profeta e o principal: A ação politica ameríndia e seus personagens. São Paulo, Brazil: EDUSP.
The volume is based on a doctoral thesis submitted in 2005 that focused on the analysis of the political system among 16th-century
Tupinambá. This bibliographic inquiry not only incorporates many recent ethnographic studies on the theme, thus providing a
convincing hypothesis both for historical and contemporary contexts, but also creatively combines perspectivism and a theory of agency
formulated in Melanesian ethnology.
Vanzolini, M. 2011. “Eleições na aldeia ou, o Alto Xingu contra o Estado?”. Anuário Antropológico, 2010.1: 31–54.
The article discusses Pierre Clastres’ theory of the “society against the State” in the light of an ethnography of the Aweti people from the
Upper Xingu region, arguing that, although apparently hierarquical, xinguano political system is marked by a centrifugal dynamics
closely associated with sorcery practices and the issue of perspective as defining group identity.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2010. The untimely, again. In Archeology of violence. 2d ed. Edited by Pierre Clastres, 9–51. Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e).
In an afterword for the second edition of Clastres’ Archeology of Violence, Viveiros de Castro argues that Amerindian perspectivism is a
cosmology “against the State”: by recognizing the potential humanness of any being in the world, as well as other being’s perspective of
anything, perspectivist cosmologies conjure both the stability of identities and the stabilization of power relations.
Beyond Amazonia
Viveiros de Castro’s synthesis of perspectivism has influenced many ethnographic descriptions of similar phenomena beyond
Amazonia. The notion proved to be particularly interesting for the ethnology of North Asian societies, as made evident by the
publication of a special issue of Inner Asia on the theme (Pedersen and Humphrey 2007). The contributors to this volume discussed
both the potentials and limits of using a theory forged in different ethnographic settings: The many apparent similarities between
Siberian and Amazonian cosmologies do not imply a total identity between them, as many authors point out (see Willerslev 2004,
Stépanoff 2009). Regardless of the precise arguments offered by Viveiros de Castro in his texts, critics have also addressed the
potential of perspectivism for describing the Amerindian cosmologies through which it was elaborated. According to Willerslev, for
example, perspectivism is an abstract representation that is inadequate for ethnographic application or for understanding indigenous
lived worlds and corporeality. According to Stépanoff 2009, another specialist in Siberia, perspectivism is an injection of phenomenology
into structuralism and the reactualization of a modern philosophical conception (such as Leibniz’s perspectivism). For this author,
perspectivism also reveals incommensurability and solipsism, which is supposedly neither relational nor positional enough for
understanding Amerindian and Siberian cosmologies. Recent exchanges between anthropologists working in Amazonia and Melanesia
have also prompted discussions over the place of perspectivism in ethnographic accounts of indigenous societies in Papua New
Guinea (see Brunois 2008 and Stasch 2009). In the opposite direction, Kelly 2005 has explored the possibility of understanding certain
Amazonian cosmological features through concepts originally formulated in Melanesia, thus showing the similarities between native
theories of the person in Amerindian perspectivist cosmologies and Melanesian gift economies. Connections with Central American
indigenous societies are less common, though Pitarch 2010’s description of Maya conceptions of the person and the body presents a
cosmology that is significantly similar to those found in Lowland South America. The issue at stake has been not only what might be the
best or most interesting way of using an ethnographic model to describe other contexts but also what actually defines perspectivism as
an anthropological theory. Even in Amazonia, cosmologies do not always present the exact same features identified by Viveiros de
Castro as characteristic of Amerindian perspectivism (see Introduction and Previous Ethnographic References). What then constitutes it
as a singular way of thinking, and why is it interesting for ethnography and ethnological theory? Strathern 1999’s reflections on
diverging notions of perspective (cited under Animism) show that at a more abstract and philosophical level perspectivism can be used
as an analytical tool for eliciting important cosmological or ontological differences between modes of thinking—see, for an ethnographic
example, Holbraad 2012’s ethnography of the notion of truth in an Afro-Cuban religion.
Brunois, Florence. 2008. Le jardin du casoar, la forêt des Kasua—Epistémologie des savoir-être et savoir-faire écologiques
(Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée). Paris: CNRS éditions et Maison des sciences de l’homme.
An ethnography of a melanesian “ethno-ethology” and its relations to mythology and social organization, inspired in Philippe Descola’s
critique of the Western notion of nature to give account of other people’s worlds.
Holbraad, M. 2012. Truth in motion: The recursive anthropology of Cuban divination. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Although not interested in “finding” perspectivism in this Afro-Cuban religion, Holbraad considers the idea that a special regime of truth
—implicit in the combined notions of perspectivism and multinaturalism—also operates in the Ifá divination system. The author also
explores the critical potential of perspectivism for a meta-theory of anthropology.
Kelly, J. A. 2005. Fractality and the exchange of perspectives. In On the order of chaos. Social anthropology and the science
of chaos. Edited by M. Mosko and F. Damon, 108–135. Oxford: Berghahn.
Kelly proposes a review of three Amazonian ethnographic accounts that deal with perspectivism in both cosmological and sociological
contexts. The author uses the concept of the fractal person, which was formulated through Melanesianist ethnology, as a
methodological tool.
Pedersen, M., and C. Humphrey, eds. 2007. Special Issue: Perspectivism. Inner Asia 9.2.
A special edition of Inner Asia dedicated to explorations of perspectivism and its descriptive potential in diverse Asian contexts. The
volume contains a presentation by the organizers and an afterword by Holbraad and Willerslev; both are authors who have been
discussing Viveiros de Castro’s ideas through specific ethnographic cases in recent years.
Pitarch, Pedro. 2010. The Jaguar and the priest: An ethnography of Tzeltal souls. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.
The book is an English version of an earlier monograph of Maya-Tzeltal (Central America), in which the author explicitly discusses the
relations of his ethnography to perspectivism in the context of Viveiros de Castro’s theory.
Stasch, R. 2009. Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
An ethnography of the Korowai from Papua New Guinea. The author describes cosmological conceptions very similar to those found in
Amazonian societies, as well as discussing the pertinence of some of Viveiros de Castro’s formulations on perspectivism and alliance
theory for this Melanesian context.
Stépanoff, C. 2009. Devouring perspectives: On cannibal shamans in Siberia. Inner Asia 11:283–307.
The author presents an ethnographic study of cannibal shamans in North Asia and discusses the applicability of perspectivism in an
understanding of human and nonhuman relations in the area. Through a review of the literature that extends the concept to Siberian
shamanism, the author proposes a theoretical and ethnographic reconsideration of perspectivism.
Willerslev, R. 2004. Not animal, not not-animal: Hunting, imitation and empathetic knowledge among the Siberian yukaghirs.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10:629–652.
The article discusses the possibility of extending perspectivism to Siberian yukaghirs’ conceptions of personhood, animality, and
hunting. It proposes an association between perspectivism and Michael Taussig’s concept of mimesis (developed in Mimesis and
Alterity [London: Routledge, 1993]) so as to provide an ethnographic study of corporality, animism, and relationship with animals. (See
also General Overviews and Critics and Debates.)
Willerslev, R. 2011. Frazer strikes back from the armchair: A new search for the animist soul. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 17:504–526.
The article presents comparative research on conceptions of the soul, animism, and perspectivism, reaffirming the importance of the
latter for ethnography in Siberia and other areas. The author argues that only the presence of a virtual totality of vision can produce an
animist soul, whereas its absence triggers a perspectival equivalence between aspects that anthropologists fail to translate as soul and
body.
Critics and Debate
Among those researchers working with Amazonian societies, Terence Turner (Turner 2009) and Alcida Ramos (Ramos 2012) have
been the most emphatic critics of perspectivism. According to Turner 2009, Viveiros de Castro reifies a modern Western metaphysics
through a rhetorical contrast with an equally reified overview of Amazonian ideas, formulated without sufficient ethnographic data.
Echoing Turner’s critique, Ramos 2012 accuses perspectivism of merely duplicating structuralism by inverting the equation
nature/culture without really disposing of dichotomies. The author argues that perspectivism fails to consider Amerindian societies’
historical and ethnographic specificities due to its generalizing and rhetorical style. In a similar vein, some critics address the general
opposition implied by perspectivism and animism between multinaturalism and multiculturalism—as representatives of a clear divide
between Western and non-Western worlds—from the point of view of an anthropology of the West. Following the work of science
studies developed by authors such as Bruno Latour, Mol and Yates-Doerr 2012 argues that the West must also be regarded as a
heterogeneous network in which different natures and relationships between humans and nonhumans can emerge, a point the authors
aim to illustrate through an ethnography of meat consumption in the West. However, while pointing to an oversimplification of the
ethnographic descriptions given by perspectivism (which was formulated through a rigorous and comprehensive study of Amerindian
ethnology), none of these criticisms (as well as those presented in the section Beyond Amazonia) seriously discuss Viveiros de Castro’s
understanding of anthropology as an intrinsically comparative project. In his view, concepts can only emerge in contrast to other
concepts, so that generalizations such as “Amerindian” and “Western” can only be heuristic and temporary results of that contrast,
rather than an unconsidered reproduction of a Great Divide (an operation also proposed by Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner, as
noted in Conceptual Background). It is also important to note the differences between Descola’s and Viveiros de Castro’s formulations
on the opposition between Western and non-Western ontologies in their elaborations of animism and perspectivism, respectively. As
argued in Latour 2009 (see references in Animism), Viveiros de Castro’s intention with the contrast is to destabilize the foundations of
modern philosophy in the concept of nature (see also Wagner 2012), through the ontological implications of a serious consideration of
Amerindian cosmological thought. Thus the distinction between multinaturalism and multiculturalism proposed by Viveiros de Castro
can be understood as one step in a collective movement toward destabilizing the category of “nature” and derived dichotomies, such as
culture/nature, representation/fact, human/nonhuman. The obsolescence of these dichotomies was already discussed by other
important philosophical projects connected to perspectivism such as those of Deleuze and Guattari and is also being debated by
contemporary authors concerned with a reevaluation of modern ontology (see Latour 2012 and Maniglier 2012).
Costa, L. A. L. S., and C. Fausto. 2010. The return of the animists: Recent studies of Amazonian ontologies. Religion and
Society: Advances in Research 1.1: 89–109 (21).
A review of the elaboration of animism and perspectivism in Lowland South American ethnology, focusing both on its main influences
and further developments in the more recent ethnological production.
Kelly, J. A. 2013. Multinatural perspectivism. In Encyclopedia of postcolonial life. Vol. 3. London: Blackwell.
A clear explanation of perspectivism and multinatulalism for the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Life, the text highlights its dual existence
as both anthropological theory and ethnographic fact, presenting many examples taken from different Amazonian societies.
Latour, B. 2012. Enquête sur les modes d’existence; Une anthropologie des modernes. Paris: La Découverte.
Bruno Latour’s most recent book and project (the Enquête is also an online open platform) concerns the study of different forms of
existence and the possibility of connections between these through anthropological mediation. It offers an anthropology of modernity
and a reconfiguration of the notions of ontology and truth, offering the potential for dialogue with perspectivism as an anthropological
model. English translation: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2013). Available online.
Maniglier, P. 2012. Un tournant métaphysique? Critique 11.786: 916–932.

French philosopher Patrice Maniglier discusses Bruno Latours’ recent book and project (2012) and its transformation of ontology into an
ensemble of multiple actors engaged in a heterogeneus relational network. The thesis is close to Viveiros de Castro’s characterization
of multinaturalism as an Amerindian ontology that is irreducible to an image of other people as cultural phenomena (in opposition to the
West’s privileged access to ontology, knowledge and science). Available online for purchase or by subscription.
Mol, A., and E. Yates-Doerr. 2012. Cuts of meat: Disentangling Western natures-cultures. Cambridge Anthropology 30.2: 48–
64.
The authors present a critical study on the division between multinaturalism and multiculturalism as framed by Viveiros de Castro and
Descola. Through an ethnography of meat consumption and production in Western worlds, the article attempts to reframe and
complexify the category “West” as currently mobilized in anthropological contrasts with non-Western societies.
Ramos, A. 2012. The politics of perspectivism. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:481–494.

Ramos offers a critical review of perspectivism and its consequences for Lowland South American ethnology, trying to point to possible
theoretical and empirical conceptual problems.
Turner, T. 2009. The crisis of late structuralism—perspectivism and animism: Rethinking culture, nature, spirit and bodiliness.
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South-America 7.1: 3–42.
The article proposes a critical revision of Lévi-Straussian structuralism and its continuations in the work of Descola and Viveiros de
Castro. It offers an empiricist ethnographic revision of generalizations such as animism and perspectivism. Turner argues that these
concepts are not entirely accurate for the description of some societies in Lowland South America.
Wagner, R. 2012. Facts force you to believe in them; perspectives encourage you to believe out of them: An introduction to
Viveiros de Castro’s magistral essay. HAU: Masterclass Series 1:11–44.
Roy Wagner writes the presentation of Viveiros de Castro’s publication in HAU, pointing to what he sees as the strengths of the latter’s
arguments.
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Sanders (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 552–565.

Previous Ethnographic References

Baer, G. 1994. Cosmología y Shamanismo de los Matsiguenga. Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala.

Weiss, G. 1972. Campa cosmology. Ethnology 9.2: 157–172.

Clastres, P. 1974. La société contre l’État. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Deleuze, G. 1988. Le pli—Leibniz et le baroque. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Latour, B. 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: La Découverte.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 2008. Oeuvres. Paris: Gallimard.

Wagner, R. 1981. The invention of culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Alterity and Alliance Theory

Corporality and Kinship

Shamanism and Language

Translation and Equivocation

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2002. O nativo relativo. Mana 8.1: 113–148.

Relative Native." Hau 3:469–502.

Descola, P. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.

Latour, B. 2009. Perspectivism: “Type” or “bomb”?. Anthropology Today 25.2: 21–22.

Stengers, I. 2012. Reclaiming animism. E-flux journal 36.

Critics and Debate

Maniglier, P. 2012. Un tournant métaphysique? Critique 11.786: 916–932.

Ramos, A. 2012. The politics of perspectivism. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:481–494.

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