Cannibal Metaphysics by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (review)

A rule of thumb that has served social anthropology in the century since Malinowksi’s vow to grasp things “from the native’s point of view” becomes, in this magisterial work, something altogether else—perhaps even an approximation to the “native’s point of view.” This translation (by Peter Skafish, who contributes a generous, illuminating, and not uncritical introduction) from the French of 2009 is the culmination of a decade of provocative publications by Viveiros de Castro that have challenged the anthropologist’s very imagination of what a point of view might be. Having been engaged for some time in clearing the intellectual ground himself, here he summons two oeuvres that in turn cleared the ground for him, as they did for intellectual life at large: that of Claude Lévi-Strauss “with” that of Gilles Deleuze. This book could have been titled Anti-Narcissus (after Anti-Oedipus) to catch the fascination of anthropology with the differences between things and (in its own reflection) its difference from everything else. Wanting to account for why the book had to be written, Viveiros de Castro in effect gives us a guide to his conceptual journey. Suppose, he asks, that concepts of the human were not fixed in self-reflection but were in continuous variation? Suppose, too, that the points of view that anthropologists study were not those of “natives” but those of other anthropologists? Such points of view could be known only by recourse to the theoretical imagination. Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindians deploy perspectivism as Western philosophers deploy concepts; if Western anthropologists perceive that relation itself perspectivally, they lay bare the motor force of Western anthropology in its openness to styles of indigenous knowledge practices. Yet to recognize these knowledge practices as anthropologies—to decolonize thought itself—requires more than to show the borrowings of terms or images from here and there. Rather, one must show the extent and reach of what it means, say, to have another concept of the concept. And all this clearing away, it must be added, does not make for virgin terrain where other anthropologies can flourish unhindered, for they are only alter-“anthropologies” in relation to our own (different relations would elicit different modalities of thought). Terrain thus cleared, however, does allow for multiple growth. This work greatly intensifies the theoretically transformative potential of Amerindian perspectivist anthropology for thinking about thought.