The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds

Description

This volume is the first to collect the most influential essays and lectures of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Published in a wide variety of venues, and often difficult to find, the pieces are brought together here for the first time in a one major volume, which includes his momentous 1998 Cambridge University Lectures, “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere.” Rounded out with new English translations of a number of previously unpublished works, the resulting book is a wide-ranging portrait of one of the towering figures of contemporary thought—philosopher, anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnologist, and more. With a new afterword by Roy Wagner elucidating Viveiros de Castro’s work, influence, and legacy, The Relative Native will be required reading, further cementing Viveiros de Castro’s position at the center of contemporary anthropological inquiry. The strength of Viveiros de Castro’s essays is that we no longer have to worry about apathy at all; we are engaged.... To me, these magisterial essays are the benchmark of twenty-firstcentury anthropology, not so much a new beginning as a figure-ground reversal of the old one... [an] arbiter of human perception. - Roy Wagner, author of The Invention of Culture and Coyote Anthropology Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s seminal lectures and essays on cosmological perspectivism provide a careful and highly innovative introduction to many themes that have become central to the ontological turn in anthropology, including multinaturalism against multiculturalism, transformation/exchange versus creation/production, and performativity replacing representation. They offer invaluable insight into an anthropology operating in a space where we have been neither modern nor primitive. - Casper Bruun Jensen, author of Ontologiesfor Developing Things: Making Health Care Futures Through Technology By way of a kind of guided reverse engineering, the brilliance of Viveiros de Castro’s arguments in his lectures and essays is made visible as a function of the intensities of Amazonian and (or ‘as’) other ways of living. In the process, anthropology itself is made visible as a form of living dedicated to just that: making other forms of living visible; which is to say imaginable, conceivable. - Martin Holbraad, author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination PART I: METHODS 1. The Relative Native 2. And 3. Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation 4. Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Pardoxes, and Other Truths PART II: VIRTUAL KINSHIP 5. Along the Spider Thread: Virtuality, Actualization, and the Kinship Process in Amazonia 6. The Gift and the Given: Three Nano-Essays on Kinship and Magic 7. Immanence and Fear: Stranger-Events and Subjects in Amazonia PART III: COSMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVISM IN AMAZONIA AND ELSEWHERE Preface to the Lectures 8. Cosmologies: Perspectivism 9. Culture: The Universal Animal 10. Nature: The World as Affect and Perspective 11. Supernature: Under the Gaze of the Other Afterword: Facts Force You to Believe in Them; Perspectives Encourage You to Believe Out of Them by Roy Wagner