Book review of Cannibal Metaphysics by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Book review of Cannibal Metaphysics by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Review in press for the Anthropology Review Database (http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/) Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 2014 Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal.Medium: Written Literature Subject: Philosophical Anthropology; Structural Anthropology; Poststructuralism Reviewed by Troy Belford Abstract: Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro presents an ambitious philosophical project to bridge the conceptual space between anthropology and philosophy. It is a project that seeks to use ethnographic data to inform and challenge modernist dualisms in Western metaphysics. Originally published in French as Metaphysiques Cannibales in 2009, this text was edited and translated by Peter Skafish and is a timely engagement with the ontological turn in anthropology. This re-examination of the ontological process in the construction of knowledge has been the matter of important books by Bruno Latour (2005) and Philippe Descola (2013). Both were part of an interesting session at the 2013 American Anthropological Association special meetings in Chicago (Kelly 2014). This session produced an inspired colloquium in the Summer 2014 issue of the Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Descola's work has been the subject of a rather insightful book symposium that appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of the Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The author sees the problems of classical anthropology's claims to authority as being a reflection of the anthropologist's culture. In the later critical turn anthropology came to grips with its colonial origins. This effort to challenge the colonizing past of anthropology in many ways made the subject of inquiry a reflection of the anthropologist's culture from a different position of academic genealogy, namely an engaged political critique of colonialism. Instead of using the "savage" view to better understand psychological questions of enculturation and social organization that originated in problems of modern society, the politically engaged anthropologists of the post-modern critique were looking at the problems that modern capitalist society was making for the anthropological subjects on the periphery. With this book Viveiros de Castro presents a return to the process of thinking about metaphysical questions of human experience through the puzzles of ethnographic data. As a Brazilian anthropologist, the author has extensive knowledge of Amazonia and this is central to his argument for a multinaturalism that encompasses the non-human world of plants, animals, spirits, and landscapes (p. 65-75). "Amerindian shamanism is guided by the inverse ideal: to know is to 'personify,' to take the point of view of what should be known or, rather, the one whom should be known" (p. 60). This way of expanding the shamanic understanding of the world is likened by de Viveiros to our own notions of multiculturalism. His anthropological project promotes the philosophical concept of perspectivism (the idea

that all ideations are taken from perspectives that are themselves cultural constructions). For the Amerindian shaman this is a cosmological reality (p. 68-73). It is not cultural relativism, which maintains a self while allowing for the acceptance of an Other, but the holding of two viewpoints simultaneously. "Amerindian perspectivism is a doctrine of equivocation, of referential alterity between homonymous concepts" (p. 87). It is this ability of the shaman to think through conceptual complexities of the natural and supernatural world that is their mode of knowledge. This idea of Amazonian Perspectivism forms the first third of the book. A middle section engages these ideas with the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari presented in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Collectively these books are known as Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Anti-Oedipus discusses the psychological conformity (and psychosocial failures to conform) to capitalist modernity. A Thousand Plateaus is a more sprawling work. One it's main contributions to philosophy and social theory is the concept of the rhizome, a term borrowed from botany that describes a burrowing mass of roots. Their expansion of this analogy is offered as an alternative to the dualist binaries of thought (p.116-117). Rhizomatic epistemologies allow for a non-hierarchical multiplicity of interpretations. The ideas developed by Viveiros de Castro in his discussion of the work of Deleuze and Guattari are used to further the concepts of Amerindian Perspectivism developed in the first part of Cannibal Metaphysics. In the final third of the book Viveiros de Castro re-examines the prolific texts of LeviStrauss in order to show how the bridge between Levi-Strauss's nascent poststructuralism led to the Deleuze and Guattari critique of the social sciences. The goal of the anthropological sciences becomes less descriptive ethnography for the structuralist than the “question of whether and how such thought might illustrate human cognitive universals, [and] explain modes of transmission of socially determined knowledge” (p. 194). “For we cannot think like Indians; at most, we can think with them” (p. 196). Levi-Strauss expresses Amerindian mythology and kinship as variable, and Viveiros de Castro sees that recognition of variability as prefiguring later theories of heteroglossia. The cannibal concept that figures into the books title is questioned through this prism of rhizomatic epistemology. Viveiros de Castro argues that the act of cannibalism in Arawete ethnographic data is an effort to absorb the enemy's point of view (p. 142-144). This is an alternative to structuralist notions of cannibalism as a form of balancing disharmony in the cosmos through ritual actions. Viveiros de Castro uses this ethnographic data to recast Levi-Strauss's inquiries into sacrifice and totemism to consider how these processes are more about becoming than balancing the cosmos (p.147-149). This book is a dense philosophical work that builds on ideas that are rather intricate. It is most relevant to the specialist in anthropological and social theory. I would say without hesitation that it might even be beyond the utility of a graduate seminar. It is not that this book is unimportant, nor is it needlessly esoteric. The ideas presented in the book are deeply philosophical, highly influenced by both structuralism and the ontological turn,

and coordinated in a thick context of heady referential language. References cited: Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 1972 [1983] Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1980 [1987] A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Descola, Philippe 2013 Beyond Nature and Culture. Janet Lloyd trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kelly, John D. 2013 Introduction: The ontological turn in French philosophical anthropology. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 259-269. Latour, Bruno 2005 Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.