The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds

363 Pages·2016·20.11 MB·English

by  Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

ANTHROPOLOGY
Mu- T usk i-> I Ik I ■ u v ^ .l I dti.mlu \ ■- . I
Castro. Published in a the pieces are brought
together here for the first time in one major volume, which includes his momentous
1998
Cambridge University Lectures, “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere.”
Rounded out with new English translations of previous 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 characteristic afterword by Roy
Wagner, elucidating Viveiros de Castro’s influence and engaging with his arguments, The
Relative Native further cements 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-first-
century 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 Ontologies for 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 Reairsive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
www.haubooks.com
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is Professor of Social
ISBN 978-0-9905050-3-7
Anthropology at the National Museum, Universidade Federal
do Rio de Janerio and the author of many books, including
From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an
9 "780990 7 >
Amazonian Society ( ) and Cannibal Metaphysics ( ).
1992 2 0 1 4
THE RELATIVE NATIVE
Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds
EDUARDO VIVEIROS DE CASTRO
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BOOKS
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Executive Editor
Giovanni da Col
Managing Editor
Sean M. Dowdy
Editorial Board
Anne-Christine Taylor
Carlos Fausto
Danilyn Rutherford
liana Gershon
Jason Throop
Joel Robbins
Jonathan Parry
Michael Lempert
Stephan Palmie
www.haubooks.com
THE RELATIVE NATIVE
ESSAYS ON INDIGENOUS
CONCEPTUAL WORLDS
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
H au Books
Chicago
© 2015 Hau Books and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Chapter Two is a reprint of Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “(Anthropology) AND
(science),” an after-dinner speech at “Anthropology and Science,” the 5th Decennial
Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Great Britain
and Commonwealth, 14 July 2003. Published in Manchester Papers in Social
Anthropology, 7, 2003. © 2003 University of Manchester Department of Social
Anthropology. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder.
Chapter Three is a reprint of Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. “Perspectival
anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation.” Tipiti: Journal of the
Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2 (1): 3-22. © 2003 Society for
the Anthropology of Lowland South America. All rights reserved. Republished by
permission of the copyright holder.
Chapter Four is a reprint of Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. “Zeno and the art
of anthropology: Of lies, beliefs, paradoxes, and other truths.” Common Knowledge
17 (1): 128-45. © 2011 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by
permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu
Chapter Five is a new translation of Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2002.“Atualiza5ao
e contra-efetua5ao do virtual: O processo do parentesco.” In A inconstdncia da alma
selvagem (eoutros ensaiosde antropologia), 401-56. Sao Paulo: Cosac SeNaify. © 2002
Cosac Sc Naify All rights reserved. Published and translated by permission of the
copyright holder, Editora Cosac &. Naify. http://editora.cosacnaify.com.br
Chapter Six is a reprint of Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. “The gift and the given:
Three nano-essays on kinship and magic.” In Kinship and beyond: The genealogical
model reconsidered\ edited by Sandra Bamford and James Leach, 237-68. Oxford:
Berghahn. © 2009 Berghahn Books. All rights reserved. Republished by permission
of the copyright holder, Berghahn Books, www.berghahnbooks.com
Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore
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Contents
PARTI: METHODS
CHAPTER ONE
The Relative Native 3
CHAPTER TWO
And 39
CHAPTER THREE
Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled
Equivocation 55
CHAPTER FOUR
Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Pardoxes,
and Other Truths 75
PART II: VIRTUAL KINSHIP
CHAPTER FIVE
Along the Spider Thread: Virtuality, Actualization,
and the Kinship process in Amazonia 97
chapter six
The Gift and the Given: Three Nano-Essays
on Kinship and Magic 139
THE RELATIVE NATIVE
CHAPTER SEVEN
Immanence and Fear: Stranger-Events and Subjects
in Amazonia 169
PART III: COSMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVISM
IN AMAZONIA AND ELSEWHERE
PREFACE TO THE LECTURES 191
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cosmologies: Perspectivism 195
CHAPTER NINE
Culture: Tie Universal Animal 229
CHAPTER TEN
Nature: Tie World as Affect and Perspective 249
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Supernature: Under the Gaze of the Other 273
AFTERWORD
Facts force you to believe in them; perspectives encourage
you to believe out of them
By Roy Wagner 295
Bibliography 325
Index
349
PART I
Methods
CHAPTER ONE
The Relative Native
Translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sauma and Martin Holbraad
The human being, such as we imagine him, does not exist.
—Nelson Rodrigues
GROUND RULES
The “anthropologist” is a person whose discourse concerns the discourse of a
“native.”1 The native need not be overly savage, traditionalist nor, indeed, na­
tive to the place where the anthropologist finds him. The anthropologist, on his
part, need not be excessively civilized, modernist, or even foreign to the people
his discourse concerns.1 2 The discourses in question (and particularly that of the
native) are not necessarily texts, but rather may include all types of meaning
1. The original article was prefaced by the author with the following preamble: “The
pages that follow have been adapted from the introductory remarks of a book,
currently in preparation, in which I develop ethnographic analyses that have
been sketched out in earlier work. The main one is an article published in Mana,
‘Cosmological debas and Amerindian perspectivism’ (Viveiros de Castro 1996 [this
appeared in English in JRAI in 1998]), whose metatheoretical premises, as it were,
are rendered explicit in the present work. While the text presented here requires no
previous familiarity with that earlier work, the reader may bear in mind that such
notions as ‘perspective* and ‘point of view/as well as the idea of‘indigenous thought/
are elaborated there also.”—-Trans.
2. The use of the masculine is arbitrary.
4 THE RELATIVE NATIVE
practice.3 What is essential, however, is that the discourse of the anthropolo­
gist (or the “observer”) establishes a certain relation with that of the native (or
the “observed”). This relation is one of meaning or, when the anthropologist’s
discourse aspires to be Scientific, a relation of knowledge. By this token, an­
thropological knowledge is also a social relation, since it is the effect of the
relationships that reciprocally constitute the knowing subject, on the one hand,
and the subject he comes to know, on the other. As with all relations, this form
of knowledge brings about a transformation in the relational constitution of
anthropologist and native alike.4
The (meta)relation between anthropologist and native is not one of identity:
the anthropologist always says and, therefore, does something different than
what the native says or does, even when he intends to do nothing more than
repeat the native’s discourse in a “textual” form, or when he tries to establish a
dialogue—a dubious notion—with the native. This difference is nothing other
than the knowledge effect created by the anthropologist’s discourse, which is
produced by the relation between the meaning of this discourse and the mean­
ing of that of the native.5
Clearly, this kind of discursive alterity is grounded in an assumption of simi­
larity. The anthropologist and the native are of the same species and share in its
3. The fact that, canonically as well as literally speaking, anthropological discourse
takes the form of texts has a host of implications, which cannot be explored here,
though the topic has received exhaustive attention in recent currents of auto-
anthropological reflection. The same can be said of the fact that native discourse is,
generally, not a text, as well as of the fact that it is often treated as if it were.
4. “Knowledge is not a connection between a subject-substance and an object-
substance, but rather a relation between two relations, one located in the domain
of the object and the other in the domain of the subject; . . . the relation between
two relations is a relation itself” (Simondon [1964] 1995: 81; translation, emphases
removed). I translated the word rapport, which Gilbert Simondon distinguishes
from relation, as “connection”: “we can call a relation the disposition of the elements
in a system, which is beyond the spirit’s simple and arbitrary target, and reserve the
term connection for an arbitrary and fortuitous relation ... the relation would be
a connection that is as real and important as the terms themselves; consequently,
we could say that the true relation between two terms is actually equivalent to the
connection between three terms” (Simondon [1964] 1995:66; translation).
5. For an analysis of the relational assumptions of this knowledge effect, see Strathern
(1987). The author argues that the native’s relation with his discourse is not, in
principle, the same as the anthropologist s relation with his own discourse, and
that this difference at once conditions the relation between the two discourses and
imposes limits to the whole auto-anthropological enterprise.