Castro’s anti-swiss

Well known to anthropologists but so far never translated into French, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is a first -class specialist in Amerindian companies. His work on the company Arabété du Northern Brazil, then extended to a comparative reflection on shamanism, cannibalism, kinship and Amazonian ritual systems, has made him an essential reference in the renewal that Americanist ethnology has known since 1990s. It is in particular the concepts of perspectivism and multinaturalism that are most closely associated with its name, two concepts which are the subject of decisive re -elaboration here.

Viveiros de Castro immediately gives his work a complex status, presenting it as the small currency of a larger project, whose name would have been anti-swiss. Reflexive, aggressive, sometimes yielding to the temptation of the formula – as “ decolonize thought “, Or the idea of ​​a” altercognitivism – This animated manifesto for another anthropology breaks with the often very wise style which prevails in its discipline. But this precaution and this tone should not deceive us: by the real issues it raises, this work takes place in the great anthropological tradition, and it is undoubtedly a work like the Beyond nature and culture by Philippe Descola – omnipresent reference of Cannibal metaphysics – that it must be measured.

The West Indian parable

The first section of the work, certainly the most essential, immediately poses a crucial question: “ That anthropology is conceptually owed to the peoples it studies ? (P. 1). Through this question, Viveiros tries to gain speed all the studies generally gathered under the label of the “ reflexive anthropology By showing the insufficiency of the now traditional opposition between a naively objectivist anthropology – for which the mode of existence of the other is revealed in his pen – and the generous lucidity of the postmoderns, who would not be trapped from “ in-itself Cultural. Reduced back to back, naivety and despair must, according to him, give way to a position for which the object of anthropology is never what unfolds beyond itself as a horizon that could not be that available or clogged, but as an active and creative partner. So, “ All non -trivial anthropological theories are versions of native knowledge practices ; These theories are in this way in strict structural continuity with the intellectual pragmatics of the collectives which are historically in “ object position »With regard to the discipline (P. 6). By a kind of passage to the limit, Viveiros therefore invites us to move the theoretical dynamism of anthropology on the side of the observed, thus redefining the work of the observer as an art of translation, or acclimatization. Because native societies, before finding accommodation in this problematic space that is “ point of view », Or the gaze, of the ethnologist, themselves build in the exchange of points of view internal to their own movement, whose logic and construction obey radically foreign principles in ours.

This way of posing the anthropological problem owes a lot to an anecdote reported several times by Lévi-Strauss, especially in Race and history And Tristes tropicaland which undoubtedly constitutes the keystone of Cannibal metaphysics : While the European settlers were looking for whether the natives had a soul, the natives, them wondered about the nature of the Europeans’ body – that they suspected of being gods when we suspect them to be animals . In other words, and to resume this time his own terms, “ the other of the other was not exactly the same as the other of the same (P. 15). This relationship in chiasm between two epistemologies, two ways of building knowledge, is in his eyes the proof that all human collective has clean intellectual practices to objectify, that no society is waiting for ethnological gaze to determine what It is – and therefore that it is possible to ask them in return what we are. Beyond the anecdote, the reference to Lévi-Strauss also works as a way of continuing and refreshing the examination of consciousness of anthropology by itself, and which seems to pass more and more by what Strauss, once again, identified as the return of “ their philosophy In our thought.

Alliance, shamanism, sacrifice, etc.

But we must not see in these considerations on the nature of anthropological knowledge an autonomous philosophical operation, and in a way external to the very matter of the anthropological survey. Indeed, they are above all the fruit of a discussion of the classic conceptual benchmarks of the discipline, a discussion from which they emerge deeply transformed.

The idea of ​​perspectivism, on which is based most of his reflections, consists in accounting for the very particular form that the policy of minds takes in the Amazon. Insofar as any entity, human or not human, is deemed to have an interiority similar to that of man, it is also endowed with a point of view on its ecological and social partners. And the particularity of this point of view is given by the “ garment »Material that envelops this interiority: a body of Jaguar, monkey, man, etc. The identification of this cosmological context where multiple naturalities participate in the same sociality provided Viveiros de Castro a unified problematization space for questions hitherto too often considered independent-if only on an analytical level. The identification of the enemy to an ally, in this case a brother-in-law, who had already been noticed by Lévi-Strauss (p. 111), can then be reduced to a logic whose consistency exceeds the registers of the kinship and policy: the constitution of subjective identity by absorption of external points of view, which is itself a transformation of cannibalism, is thus a process around which institutions are argued a priori distinct, such as kinship, politics, or religion. Shamanism, in fact, is also integrated into this total system of sharing and appropriation of points of view, since the shaman is that which can experiment with different points of view – to be Jaguar, enemy, or deity (p .

Perspectivism therefore designates a cosmological system where the traditional anthropology considered as juxtaposed institutions. The work of the shaman, the relations of alliance and the warrior expeditions-that is to say religion, kinship and politics-are then redefined as so many ways of putting in motion more general schemes of apprehension of oneself and the world.

After structuralism

But Viveiros de Castro does not choose between anthropology and philosophy, and its ambition is precisely to seek to revolutionize the two disciplines at the same time. The tutelary figures of this double operation that are Deleuze and Lévi-Strauss, however, have a strictly symmetrical status in the work. The central part is indeed Deleuzienne in a very strong sense: it speaks of Deleuze in the language of Deleuze, and the bet which consists in seeking in Capitalism and schizophrenia A conceptual resource to remove certain obstacles inherent in anthropological way of thinking is sometimes threatened by the temptation of commentary. It is different from Lévi-Strauss since, as we have just seen, the rereading of structural anthropology that is proposed to us is done from a new ethnological work, which comes to affect from the inside the issues developed in Wild thought or the Mythological. If Viveiros uses Deleuze remarkably, it will be said that he still better transforms Lévi-Strauss, and that this second gesture is certainly the richest.

But the most important dialogues that this text is perhaps the most discreet. When he evokes his debt to Mr. Strathern and R. Wagner, Viveiros de Castro commits us to locate his work as part of a broader theoretical turning point in his discipline, which essentially consists in attracting inside the Anthropological survey of concepts previously considered to be introductory, of the order of its external conditions of possibility. If Mr. Strathern has made “ nature The issue of irritable social constructions irreducible to the epistemological use we make of this category, if R. Wagner has carried out a similar operation for the idea of ​​” culture “, Viveiros de Castro in turn tries to complete this revision process by redefining the anthropological approach as an investigation into” the conditions of ontological self -determination of the collectives studied (P. 7).

And this is good in this way that Cannibal metaphysics intend to endorse and develop the structuralist heritage. By being interested in aspects of social life less easily formalizable than myth or classifications were, but by tracing the transformation relationships they maintain with each other and with their modern parallels, Viveiros de Castro seems to confirm this that P. Maniglier meant by writing that “ The theory of practice is the horizon of structural anthropology ». And the discussion of Beyond nature and culture (p. 47-51) confirms this point. Besides this masterful building which distributes the ontologies in a pluralist typology where each co-objective the others, Viveiros de Castro prefers the direct endangerment of our multiculturalist naturalism by its Amazonian transformation. The problem is then whether anthropology invites us today to the pluralist observation of the ontological possibilities, or to the exploration of our counter -model.

How to orient yourself in thought

Finally, it is necessary to note what the incompleteness of this work has positive. Far from being a source of disappointment or intellectual frustration, the aesthetics of the sketch chosen by Viveiros de Castro opens the way to an innovative theoretical practice, it converts to an original thought tool, likely to react The philosophical institution. Indeed, far from the slightly vague calls to “ think otherwise », And who often hide the fascination for a foreign model, Viveiros de Castro provides a sufficiently solid characterization of this other so that we can really claim it. The comparison of a “ Cannibal Cogito »With our conception of subjectivity, the confrontation of the melanesian conceptions of the person with our possessive individualism, the comparison of forms of authority, modes of knowledge, or even the adequacy of a philosophical doctrine with a cosmological system, All this helps to redefine the space in which contemporary thought must be deployed. And this is precisely what is never exhausted: the possibility of philosophizing with people (p. 164), that is to say with those who have developed devices of understanding of the world and of oneself that are not foreigners in ours only as long as they transform them. If philosophy is indeed a matter of orientation of thought, then there is no doubt that Cannibal metaphysics Sketches the contours of a new conceptual map, more ample and more varied.