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)
Western thought assumes universality; indigenous thought assumes multiplicity.
To be human is to see oneself as prey in someone else's eyes.
Ethnography is a form of controlled schizophrenia.
The relativist trap is to think all perspectives are equal; perspectivism says they are different.
In the forest, spirits are not supernatural; they are the real inhabitants.
Anthropologists must become shamans to grasp the other.
Life's meaning lies in the exchange of bodies and names.
Politics in Amazonia is warfare by other means: predation and alliance.
Humor in anthropology? It's laughing at our own ethnocentrism.
Art is the visible form of perspectival multiplicity.
Wisdom comes from seeing the world through jaguar eyes.
The Indian is not primitive; our science is the primitive myth.
In interviews, I always say: forget objectivity, embrace subjectivity.
Personal reflection: anthropology saved me from the monoculture of the West.
Key passage: the universe is a theater of perspectives.
Witty remark: Europeans discovered America, but Amerindians discovered Europe as a myth.
Observation: kinship in Amazonia is not blood, but affinity through predation.
Excerpt from letter: dear colleague, let's devour each other's ideas.
Famous saying: perspectivism or barbarism.
On life: meaning is in the becoming-other.
Contemporaries of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Other Anthropologys born within 50 years of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1951).