Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro (born 1951) is a Brazilian anthropologist whose work on Amerindian ontologies has reshaped the terms of philosophical and anthropological debate about the nature/culture divide. A professor at the Museu Nacional in the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Viveiros de Castro conducted his foundational fieldwork among the Araweté people of Amazonia and developed from that work a set of philosophical propositions — perspectivism and multinaturalism — that challenge the metaphysical foundations of Western social science.
Core ideas
- Perspectivism: all beings see themselves as human (as subjects); the difference between beings is not one of culture (belief, representation) but of body (nature, world). A jaguar and a human share the same culture but inhabit different natures.
- Multinaturalism: the inversion of multiculturalism. Instead of one nature and many cultures, Amerindian ontologies posit one culture and many natures.
- Controlled equivocation: translation between ontologies is not the search for a common referent but the controlled navigation of equivocation — the productive failure of terms to mean the same thing across perspectives.
- Cannibal metaphysics: the project of using Amerindian thought not as an object of study but as a tool for doing philosophy — allowing Indigenous concepts to transform Western categories rather than the reverse.
Significance for this research
Viveiros de Castro’s work provides the anthropological and philosophical evidence for what relational ontology formalizes mathematically: that entities are constituted through relations rather than existing prior to them. Perspectivism is a relational ontology arrived at through ethnographic engagement rather than algebraic construction, and the convergence between the two — between Amerindian perspectivism and the formal relational framework developed in this research program — is one of the motivating facts of this work.
His concept of controlled equivocation also connects to the semiotic formalism: translation between sign systems is not identity but the navigation of systematic difference, which is precisely what the typed operators of the semiotic universe model.
Notable works
- From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (1992)
- Cannibal Metaphysics (2009, French; 2014, English translation)
- “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism” (1998, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)
Related
- Perspectivism — his central philosophical contribution
- Multinaturalism — the ontological framework he proposes
- Ontological turn — the movement his work helped catalyze
- Relational ontology — the philosophical position his work supports
- Animism — the related framework of relational personhood