Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology (Métaphysiques cannibales, 2009; English translation by Peter Skafish, 2014) is a book by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro that synthesizes his program of using Amerindian thought as a tool for philosophy rather than an object of anthropological study. The “cannibal” of the title refers to the Amerindian practice of incorporating the enemy’s perspective — and Viveiros de Castro proposes that anthropology should do the same with Indigenous concepts, allowing them to transform Western categories.
The book develops perspectivism and multinaturalism into a broader philosophical program, engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of multiplicity, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, and Latour’s actor-network theory. Viveiros de Castro argues that Amerindian ontologies are not pre-philosophical but offer a different and in some respects more powerful metaphysics than the substance-based frameworks of Western philosophy — one in which relations are ontologically prior to terms, variation is prior to identity, and becoming is prior to being.