Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1951, is a Brazilian anthropologist at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, best known for describing ‘Amerindian perspectivism’. Perspectivism is the idea, which he found widespread among Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, that animals and spirits see themselves as people, living in houses and villages, whilst they see humans as animals or spirits. What differs from one kind of being to another is the body, and with it the point of view, so that all persons share one culture but live in different natures, which he calls ‘multinaturalism’.
Who is Eduardo Viveiros de Castro? #
He was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1951 and is a professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has also taught at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge.1
His books in English include From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (1992), The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul (2011), Cannibal Metaphysics (2014) and, with the philosopher Déborah Danowski, The Ends of the World (2017). His work is one of the main influences behind what anthropologists call the ‘ontological turn’, the move to take other peoples’ accounts of what exists as accounts of reality in their own right, rather than as beliefs about a reality the West already knows.1
Who are the Araweté? #
The people whose cosmology was the subject of his early work, including his doctoral thesis of 1984. They live on the Ipixuna, a tributary of the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon. They are forest hunters and gatherers who also grow maize, far more than manioc. Brazil’s government first officially noted them in 1969, and in 1976 its Indian agency found them camped near their fields, sick and starving after contact with outsiders on the banks of the Xingu.2
What is perspectivism? #
An account, drawn from many Amazonian peoples, of how different kinds of beings see one another. Viveiros de Castro set it out in his 1998 article “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”. In ordinary conditions, humans see humans as humans, animals as animals, and spirits, if they see them, as spirits. Predatory animals and spirits, though, see humans as prey, and animals and spirits see themselves as humans. In their own houses and villages they experience their habits as culture. Jaguars see the blood they drink as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish, and fur, feathers and claws are their clothes and ornaments. He stresses that this ‘seeing as’ refers literally to perception, not to a figure of speech.3
The idea did not come from him alone. It grew partly out of Tânia Stolze Lima’s work on hunting in Amazonia, and he turned it into what he presented as an Indigenous theory.4 Perspectivism has an answer of its own. See What is perspectivism?
What is multinaturalism? #
His name for the reversal of the usual Western picture. Western thought speaks easily of many cultures sharing one nature, a single physical world, interpreted differently by different peoples. Amazonian perspectivism, as he describes it, reverses this. There is one culture, shared by all persons, human and other-than-human alike, and many natures, because each kind of body opens onto its own world.5
The French anthropologist Philippe Descola makes a related point. In animist ways of seeing, beings share the same kind of inner life but have different bodies, often described locally as clothing that can be put on or taken off, and those bodies give each kind of being its own point of view.6 See Who is Philippe Descola, and what are his four ways of seeing the world?
What does perspectivism say about shamans? #
That they are needed because the difference between humans and other beings is a matter of perspective. In this Amazonian picture there is nowhere that has to be called ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’, and what surrounds humans is a host of societies of different kinds of persons, each living culturally.7
The shaman is the one who can move between them. Viveiros de Castro defines shamanism as the capacity of certain humans “deliberately to cross ontological boundaries and adopt the perspective of non-human subjectivities”, so as to look after the relations between humans and other beings. Being able to see other beings as they see themselves, as humans, shamans can speak with them as active go-betweens.7
What do critics say about perspectivism? #
Some specialists in the region have pushed back from inside it. The anthropologist Dimitri Karadimas argues that there is no way of getting direct access to the inner life of another being, so what anthropology can study is how cultures attribute an inner life to others; in his view Viveiros de Castro confuses “the object with the category”. Other contributors to the same collection found, among particular Amazonian peoples, not one shared humanity but a graded scale running from fully personal beings to ones not treated as persons at all.8
A wider challenge came from the anthropologist David Graeber. He argued that the ontological turn, by protecting ‘other worlds’ from doubt, silences the doubters within them. The farmers of the Betafo highlands of Madagascar whom he lived among argued constantly, and often sceptically, about whether their charms worked.9 Viveiros de Castro, for his part, had argued in his Strathern Lecture at Cambridge, “Who Is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf?”, that to say another people’s charm “cannot really” work is to judge their concepts by one’s own, which was the move he objected to in Graeber’s earlier writing; Graeber’s article was his answer.9
How does perspectivism sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
There are real meeting points, and a clear difference. The meeting point is shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer. In a journey, shapeshifting means experiencing becoming something else, and the deepest form of it lets go of the human self altogether, so that it is not a human experiencing what it is like to be Tree, but being Tree. What it brings is a knowing from the inside out, a felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer of that being and a bond with it.10 See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
There is also common ground in refusing to rank. For hunter-gatherers, the fact that humans hunted sheep did not make sheep inferior to humans, any more than tigers hunting humans made humans inferior to tigers; all beings belonged to one community.11
The difference is in the feel of the other worlds. Perspectivism describes a cosmos of predators and prey, in which meeting another being as a person may mean meeting a rival or an enemy. In Core and Therapeutic Shamanism the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is experienced as a place of love, safety and healing, whilst it is recognised that practitioners of some other traditions, including some indigenous ones, meet spirits there who are not human-friendly.12 See What is the Lower-World?
