Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Works

• 1998Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism

  Article in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute: in many Amerindian cosmologies humans, animals and spirits all see themselves as persons and share one culture, while their bodies differ; this “multinaturalism” reverses the Western pairing of one nature with many cultures.

• 2009Cannibal Metaphysics

  Presented as a review of an imaginary book, “Anti-Narcissus”: reading Lévi-Strauss’s “Mythologiques” with Deleuze and Guattari, it treats Amerindian perspectivism and multinaturalism as concepts in their own right and calls anthropology the permanent decolonisation of thought.

Position

Viveiros de Castro is on the map for “Amerindian perspectivism”, set out in Portuguese in 1996 and in English in “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism” (1998). In many Amazonian cosmologies, according to Viveiros de Castro, humans, animals and spirits all see themselves as persons and share one culture, while their bodies – bundles of affects and capacities – give each kind its own world: what humans see as blood, jaguars see as manioc beer. Against the Western scheme of one nature and many cultures Viveiros de Castro called this “multinaturalism”. “Métaphysiques cannibales” (2009) describes anthropology as a decolonisation of thought that never ends, reading Lévi-Strauss’s “Mythologiques” together with Deleuze and Guattari. The work became a reference point of the “ontological turn” in anthropology and of debates on the Anthropocene: “Há mundo por vir?” (2014; “The Ends of the World”), written with the philosopher Déborah Danowski, draws on Davi Kopenawa’s “The Falling Sky” and names Bruno Latour among its interlocutors; Viveiros de Castro also wrote the preface to the Brazilian edition of Kopenawa’s book (2015). In a public debate with Philippe Descola in Paris in 2009, Viveiros de Castro argued that perspectivism is not one type within a typology of ontologies but a challenge to the idea of such a typology. Critics of the ontological turn, among them David Graeber, objected that it reads people’s statements about spirits as descriptions of other worlds and overlooks their own doubts.

Life & context

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1951. Viveiros de Castro studied social sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and social anthropology at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, completing there a master’s thesis on the Yawalapiti of the Upper Xingu in 1977 and a doctorate in 1984; the study of the Araweté appeared in 1986 as “Araweté: os deuses canibais”. Viveiros de Castro has taught ethnology at the National Museum since 1978 and became full professor of social anthropology there in 2012. Other posts include the Simón Bolívar Professorship of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (1997–98), a position as directeur de recherche at the CNRS in Paris (1999–2001) and visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, among others. In 2019 Viveiros de Castro was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Further main works

• Araweté: os deuses canibais (1986; From the Enemy’s Point of View, 1992)
• A inconstância da alma selvagem (2002)
• Há mundo por vir? (2014, with Déborah Danowski; The Ends of the World, 2017)