Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Brazilian anthropologist who developed perspectivism to understand indigenous views of humanity and animals.
Most quoted
"Perspectivism is the idea that the world is composed of multiple perspectives, each valid in its own terms."
— from From the Enemy's Point of View, 1998
"The problem is not how to understand the other, but how to understand ourselves through the other."
— from Métaphysiques cannibales: L'anthropologie post-structurale, 2009
"Perspectivism is not about seeing things from different angles, but about seeing different things."
— from Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism, 1998
All quotes by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (100)
The Amerindian cosmos is not a collection of things, but a collection of perspectives.
Perspectivism is not a theory of knowledge, but a theory of being.
The human is not a given, but a problem.
Anthropology is the theory of the practical relations between humanity and alterity.
The world is not composed of substances, but of relations.
To think like an Amazonian is to think relationally.
The task of anthropology is to make other worlds thinkable.
Difference is not an obstacle to understanding, but its very condition.
The 'human' is a category that is always in the making, always contested.
The Amazonian cosmos is a multi-naturalist one, not a multi-culturalist one.
The subject is not a universal category, but a relational effect.
Anthropology is not about explaining the exotic, but about exoticizing the familiar.
The world is not given, but made.
To decolonize thought is to de-naturalize the human.
The 'other' is not a mirror, but a prism.
The problem is not how to understand the other, but how to understand ourselves through the other.
Anthropology is a form of conceptual experimentation.
The world is not a collection of facts, but a collection of relations.
Perspectivism is a way of multiplying worlds, not reducing them.
The 'human' is a variable, not a constant.
Contemporaries of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Other Anthropologys born within 50 years of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1951).