Perspectivism and Animism in the Crisis of Late Structuralism: A Critical
Engagement
Terence Turner
Cornell University
April 2009
The revival of theoretical and ethnographic work on Animism by
Descola, Bird-David and others, and the development of Perspectivism, an
approach to indigenous Amazonian and more broadly Amerindian
cosmological notions by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, his students and
associates, represent significant departures from the orthodox Structuralist
canon from which most of these thinkers emerged, and have brought new
theoretical propositions and ethnographic issues into focus.
Perspectivism, in particular, has also sought to carry on the radical project
of Levi-Strauss’s “entropology”, the attempt to reduce Mind, culture,
anthropology and by implication the philosophical tradition of Western
Modernity to an epiphenomenon of nature, while simultaneously turning it
inside out as a reduction of nature to culture. Both sides have based their
arguments on interpretations of the myths and ritual practices of Amazonian
cultures, presented in rhetorically provocative articles clearly intended to
invite critical engagement. I offer the following remarks in this spirit.
The crisis of Late Structuralism and the rise of its Epigones, Animism and
Perspectivism
It was clear for several decades that Structuralism, in its pristine LeviStraussian form, had stopped being good to think with. Levi-Strauss’s
creativity itself continued undiminished, and he seemed to recognize the
exhaustion of his own paradigm, producing as his major new theoretical
construct of recent years his work on societies of the house, which seemed
relatively discontinuous with his previous structuralist works on totemism
and myth, and even his earlier work on kinship. The more creative younger
scholars working in the structuralist tradition cast about for ways to
reformulate structuralist ideas in ways that might animate new ethnographic
applications and open new theoretical perspectives. Animism and
perspectivism represent two responses from within the structuralist tradition
to what I have described as the theoretical crisis of structuralism.
1
It is important to bear in mind that since its beginnings shortly after
World War II Structuralism has always seen itself as an intellectual
movement as much engaged in a critique of Modern Western philosophical
and social thought, in particular existentialism, Marxism, hermeneutics, and
structural-functional anthropology, as an anthropological approach
concerned with the kinship systems and myths of indigenous Amerindian
cultures. The brilliant career of Levi-Strauss exemplifies this double focus of
the structuralist project, with its combination of anthropological interest in
the more remote and exotic cultures of aboriginal Australia and the Amazon
and currently modish scientific theories of structural linguistics and
semiology, Merleau-Ponty’s work on the psychology of perception, and new
mathematical approaches in group theory and information technology. The
success of structuralism as an intellectual movement owed much to the
seductive appeal of its working hypothesis that the natural forms of human
thought and mental operations, manifested in their purest and simplest forms
in the cultural productions of the most “primitive” (i.e., by implication, the
most “natural”) human cultures, were themselves being revealed by the new
scientific methods of structural analysis in linguistics and group theory that
were supposedly being applied to their analysis by Structuralism, to bear an
uncanny resemblance to those very forms of structural analysis.
The attraction of stucturalism for humanist intellectuals was only
intensified by the strangeness of the analyses it produced, owing partly to its
rejection of fundamental concepts and concerns of conventional textual and
anthropological analysis—such as the subject (including perspective,
intentionality, agency, Freudian psychodynamics and affect), consciousness,
meaning, production, history, form (as distinct from “structure”), and all
aspects of language falling within the Saussurrean category of “speech”,
from syntax, deixis, object reference, discourse forms such as narrative, to
the social pragmatics of speech in context, to select a few headings from a
longer list. The strangeness of structuralist analyses for many
anthropologists as well as other intellectuals also derived in large part from
its focus on the logical patterns of relations among the apparently arbitrary
and unmotivated details of indigenous myths, rituals and cosmologies
involving unfamiliar animals, plants and natural forms, which it was the
great achievement of Levi-Strauss to bring within the purview of a
theoretical vision able to recognize their significance.
Levi-Strauss’s concern with these particulars was integral to his
conception of the great theme of the Amerindian myths, as well as that of
2
structuralist anthropology: the relation of nature and culture, in its double
aspect as unconscious metaphor and reductionist project. On the one hand,
he interpreted the Amerindian myths recounting the differentiation of
humanity and culture from a state of nature once shared on more or less
equal terms with animals as expressions of the unconscious natural
processes through which cultural forms of consciousness such as myths are
constructed. On the other hand, as an anthropologist, he sought to
understand how the conscious forms of cultural representations such as
myths themselves embodied the traces of the natural mental processes of
perception and association that constructed them through the unconscious
appropriation of associative patterns presented by the sensuous properties of
natural entities such as flowers or animal species. Culture, or at least its
conscious subjective expressions, thus appeared as an ironic synechdoche1
of the precultural natural processes it understood itself as having
transcended.
The synthesis at which he arrived, set out in The Savage Mind (in
French, La Pensée Sauvage, a pun meaning both “natural thought” and “wild
pansy”) was concisely evoked by the visual layout of the book’s cover,
which shows a picture of a wild pansy below the French title on the front
and a wolverine, celebrated in the text for its intelligence, on the back cover.
The book as an object thus constitutes a “sensuous gestalt” (the term comes
from Merleau-Ponty, to whom the book is dedicated), encoding the message
of the book that the human mind, in its natural state, is constituted by the
relation between the sensuous forms of thee natural world (the pansy) and
the natural mental faculties of perception and association (the wolverine).
Culture, and the ideational content of subjective consciousness are
represented by the pages of text encompassed by the two covers. Structural
analysis as Levi-Strauss conceived it thus became a sort of ironic
reductionism, or in his term an “entropology”, revealing how human culture
in its very attempts to construct representations of its differentiation from
nature ironically succeeded only in producing synechdoches2 which reveal in
1
2
On synechdoche as a trope combining metaphor and metonymy as employed in the
rituals and myths of Amazonian peoples. See Turner 1991 "We Are Parrots, Twins
are Birds: Play of Tropes as Operational Structure", in J. Fernandez, ed.,
Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, Stanford.
Stanford University Press . 121-158, and Turner 2006b “Tropos, marcos de
3
their form and content its true character as an epiphenomenon of nature. The
outcome of the structuralist analysis of human cultural forms is therefore the
reduction of culture, as well as “the fundamental structures of the human
mind”, to nature. For Levi-Strauss, the important point was to emphasize the
natural basis of the constitutive faculties and substantive contents of human
mentation and culture, but in so doing he pointed to the implication that
these natural faculties now that they were recognized as not belonging to an
exclusively human nature, must be understood as qualities of mind and
intelligence shared with other natural beings, as the wolverine on the cover
of La Pensée Sauvage is there to remind us. In this way, Levi-Strauss’s
structuralism opened the possibility of a more radical theoretical extension
into the exploration of the sharing of mind or spirit by humans, animals and
other natural entities.
The major obstacle to this opening appeared to be the limitations of
structuralist theory itself, above all the strait-jacket of Saussurrean semiotics
with its fixation on langue to the exclusion of parole, signfication to the
exclusion of reference and meaning, and objectivity to the exclusion of
subjective consciousness, intention and agency.3 The ascetic grandeur of
Levi-Strauss’s structuralist vision could itself be understood in the light of
its own limitations as the product of an ironic synechdoche all its own,
specifically as the expression of the poverty and inadequacy of his
application of his own concept of structure to the analysis of cultural forms
and the mental operations of subjective consciousness—not only that of
humans but also of animals and other natural entities as conceived by the
Amerindian cultures of Amazonia. At the same time, Levi-Strauss’s entropic
perspective on the natural basis of mind and culture opened the possibility of
transcending the limitations of his structural vision by following the further
implications of the idea that mind and culture are not specifically human
possessions but broadly shared with natural beings, thus pointing toward the
referencia, y poderes”, in Antropologia Social 15: 305-315. Madrid.
Universidad Complutense
3
For a fuller discussion of the limitations of structuralism, including its failure to produce
viable structural analyses consistent with Levi-Strauss’s own definition of structure,
becoming in effect itself a form of post-structuralism avant l’heure, see Turner 1990
“Structure and Entropy: Theoretical Pastiche and the Contradictions of
‘Structuralism’", Current Anthropology, December 1990 31(5):563-568.
4
need for a reformulation of the opposition of nature and culture that he had
placed at the center of cultural structures.
Levi-Strauss actually conceived the nature-culture division in
ambiguous terms as both an external and an internal relation: externally as a
boundary between human culture and the world of nature beyond the village;
and internally as the psychological divide between the mental processes of
perception and association and the consciousness cultural subject, across
which the former confonts the latter as an extension of the external object
world it mediates to the latter. This implies that nature, including the
psychological processes of perception and cognition, is objective in relation
to culture, considered as consisting of forms of subjective consciousness.
This, however, raises the difficult question of the possible subjectivity of
natural beings such as animals, plants, heavenly bodies and spirits.
Conversely, it poses the question of why humans should not form social (and
thus cultural) relations with the natural beings with whom they share a
common mentality or spirit. What becomes, in such a case, of the relation of
nature and culture once it loses its ostensible character as a privative
opposition? The former question points toward perspectivism; the latter
leads in the direction of animism. These, at any rate, are the two paths out of
the impasse of Levi-Straussian structuralism that have been followed by his
more restive intellectual followers: in the former case, by Viveiros de Castro
and his associates, and in the latter by Descola and others who have shared
his ideas. In neither case do we see a complete break with structuralism. The
framing of cultural analysis in terms of the nature-culture relationship
remains, but in each case the meaning of these terms has significantly
changed, and much of the Saussurrean and structural linguistic baggage has
been tacitly jettisoned.
Animism: from structuralist notions of nature as unconscious mental
faculties and perceptual patterns to shared forms of consciousness, spirit
and social relations among human and natural beings
Perspectivism: from human mind as natural object to nature as human
subject,
Taking its inspiration at least as much from Structuralism’s critical
dialogue with Modernist humanism as from shared anthropological concerns
with the interpretation of Amazonian cultures, perspectivism has shaped
5
itself through a radical polemic against central tenets of Modernist and even
post-modernist thought from Descartes to Levi_Strauss, as well as all
received schools of cultural anthropology. Viveiros de Castro presents the
main perspectivist ideas as features of Amazonian indigenous thought, but
he develops his propositions not so much through an orthodox
anthropological exercise in ethnographic description and analysis of
Amazonian cultures, as through a philosophical dialogue between idealtypical formulations of the principles of Western Modernism and
correspondingly abstract capsule representations of purportedly general
Amazonian cultural ideas. This rhetorical approach serves a methodological
purpose and has important theoretical effects. The level of abstraction and
generality of the ideal types of Modernist ideas employed in the cultural
comparison rhetorically serves to authorize the perspectivist representation
of a coherent and homogeneous Amazonian system of ideas comparable in
generality, structural form and thematic concerns, if differing in specific
points, with the categories of Western Modernity with which they are
compared: in short, a philosophical system not dissimilar from modern
Western speculative idealism. The result is the misrepresentation of essential
aspects of the form and content of Amazonian cultural systems, and in
important a failure to recognize fundamental features of the construction and
meaning of specific categories and propositions that differentiate the
Amazonian categories in question from the Modernist ideas with which they
are compared. I agree with Viveiros de Castro, Levi-Strauss and others that
there are important common ideas shared by most Amazonian systems, but I
also think that that there is equally good ethnographic evidence for
significant differences on some of the main features, such as perspectives on
shamanism and alien groups, that Viveiros de Castro discusses as between,
for example, those societies possessing large effectively endogamous
villages like the Ge and Bororo and those with dispersed hamlets that are
effectively exogamous, like many Tupian, Cariban, Shuar -Achuar and some
smaller Arawakan groups, with the Tukanoan and Arawakan societies of the
northwest Amazon appearing to combine features of both. These conceptual
differences among Amazonian societies, not to mention the differences
among different and conflicting Modernist philosophical and ideological
positions which receive equally short shrift, have important implications for
some of the theoretical points at issue. This is not merely a matter of
thematic content, but of the form and construction of what are presented as
corresponding or opposing categories in these comparisons. The supposed
Amazonian notions presented as counterparts of the Modern Western
notions of “nature” and “culture”, and the related categories of “humanity”,
6
“spirit”, “habitus” and “form” are prime examples of this problem. I shall
return to these points in a moment. This is not the place for a critique of the
representations of Modern Western thought that serve as contrastive frames
for perspectivist formulations of Amazonian concepts. It will be more
useful for anthropological purposes to pass directly to an examination of the
ethnographic and theoretical basis of perspectivist propositions about
Amazonian ideas.
Animals are human; so nature is culture?
The most most radical and distinctive perspectivist claim for the
uniqueness of Amazonian cosmologies and epistemological perspectives as
contrasted with Western ideas (including received Structuralist
anthropological ideas about Amazonian cultures) is that Amazonians do not,
after all, conceive nature, as represented by animals, and culture as mutually
distinct and contrastive categories, in the manner of Levi-Straussian
structuralism. Rather, animals, as the supposed embodiments of nature,
subjectively identify themselves as humans, and thus as cultural beings.
Culture, and humanity, are not limited to humanity and spirits, but extend to
encompass nature as well (at least animal nature: the extent to which plants
and inanimate entities, so prominent in Tylor’s concept of animism, are
included in Viveiros de Castro’s conception of cultural identity remains
unclear). Subjectively speaking, animals are really human, albeit with
different outward forms, which Viveiros de Castro dismisses as mere
“envelopes” without significant or necessary connections to the subjective
identity of the essential being within. Similarly, the material forms of
activities are dissociated from their essential mental content from the
perspective of the animals who perform them. Animals thus supposedly see
themselves as engaging in the same cultural activities as humans even as the
objective forms of their activities appear to humans as animalistic and
uncultured. For example, jaguars, as they guzzle the blood of their victims,
conceive themselves to be sipping fermented manioc beer, a typical cultural
activity of (some, though by no means all) Amazonian cultures.
Viveiros de Castro derives this challenging revision of received
structuralist and Modern Western ideas from his reinterpretation of a
widespread Amazonian myth. The myth (the singular term here denotes the
common content of a large number of stories many of which may be told as
separate tales in societies such as the Kayapo which posses numerous stories
7
of this general type)4 relates that before the development of human culture in
its contemporary form, humans and animals coexisted on relatively
undifferentiated terms, sharing language and, on the animals’ side, the
prototypes of cultural implements such as cooking fire, bows and arrows,
dwelling houses, ways of hunting, collecting and preparing food, and the
spinning of cotton string, Animals and humans could assume each other’s
forms, converse, and even in some cases marry. Each species nevertheless
had its own characteristic bodily form, essentially that which it has today,
and humans were marginally more clever (and meaner—they sometimes
lied to the animals or played tricks on them). Viveiros de Castro thinks that
the animals identified with humans and thus came to identify themselves as
cultural, but I do not think that this interpretation is supported by the actual
texts of variants of the myth. Humans in the mythical era when they and the
animals coexisted did not yet possess culture, and it was the animals who
possessed prototypes of key cultural products, which the humans had to steal
or otherwise acquire before they could learn to produce them and thus make
culture. These human acts and the conflicts that resulted led to the disruption
of the Edenic coexistence of the ancestral humans and animals, the
development of culture by the humans and the loss by the animals of the
proto-cultural possessions and skills they had had. Animals thus became
fully differentiated from humans as fully natural beings, and humans became
fully cultural, in effect contemporary humans.
Viveiros de Castro’s interpretation of this myth provides the
foundation upon which the theoretical edifice of perspectivism is largely
based. It proceeds from the assumption that the ancestral humans of the
myth, those who cohabited as equals with the animals, were identical for all
relevant purposes with contemporary humans: that is that they were already
cultural beings essentially identical, as such, with contemporary humans.
This assumption is essential to his thesis that the animals of the mythical era,
in identifying with humans, thereby identified themselves as beings with
culture in the contemporary sense. Viveiros de Castro further assumes that
the myth implies that this human/cultural identification has continued
essentially unchanged from the mythical period of convivial coexistence to
the present.
These assumptions, however, are contradicted by the main features of
the mythical narrative itself. In it, both the humans and the animals of the
4
For Kayapo examples see (Wilbert 19 )
8
mythical era are described as being more like each other than is the case for
contemporary humans and animals. The myth tells how the contemporary
forms of each became differentiated through a process in which the
ancestral humans transformed themselves into modern humans through their
invention of culture, while the ancestral forms of the animal became less
like humans, losing their proto-cultural possessions, and thereby became
totally natural beings, completely lacking cultural traits. The perspectivist
interpretation of the myth, in short, gets it exactly wrong. The whole point of
the myth is not how animals became identified with humans, thus subverting
the contrast between nature and culture, but how animals and humans
became differentiated from each other, as a corollary of the definitive
differentiation of nature and culture.
When the animals and humans coexisted on the same,
undifferentiated footing, in sum, humans were not what they are now, just as
modern animals are not what they were then. Culture, the key differentiating
factor, did not yet exist, although individual prototypes of some cultural
elements were possessed by certain animals. It follows that the perspectivist
claim that the animals at the time of their convivial coexistence with humans
identified their patterns of behavior (drinking blood) with cultural forms of
activity (drinking manioc beer), cannot be true, since human activities had
not yet attained the status of culture. Rather than recount how the mythical
community of humans and animals resulted in an identification of the latter
with the former, the myth tells the opposite story of how the mutual
differentiation of the species, and with it of their respective subjective
identities and perspectives, actually came about as a corollary result of the
one-sided possession of culture by the humans.
The perspectivist interpretation not only misconstrues the overt
message of the myth, but also rests upon inferences that find no support in
the mythical narrative. These inferences do not logically follow and appear
to proceed from an unexamined anthropocentrism. To begin with, the myth’s
account of the original state of relative undifferentiation between humans
and animals does not include any explicit assertion that the animals
subjectively identified themselves with humans. What the myth says is that
animal and human identities, and thus also, in perspectivist terms, their
perspectives, were relatively undifferentiated, and both possessed language
and some other proto-cultural traits, but this in itself does not imply that
these features were more identified with the proto-humans than with the
proto-animals, or that their use by the ancestral animals implied
9
abandonment of their own identities and perspectives to the extent of
reclassifying themselves as humans, thus adopting a differentiated human
perspective on the world as their own. The implicit anthropocentrism of the
perspectivist formulation appears more starkly in other propositions of
perspectivist theory, such as those dealing with the “spirituality” of animals
and participation in social relations with humans. Viveiros de Castro
assumes these aspects of animal character and behavior must be the result of
the animals’ identification with humans, on the grounds that “spirit” and the
capacity for social relations are intrinsically human attributes. This however,
is an instance of the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The myth
in question offers no support for this assumption. On the contrary,
indigenous Amazonian myth, cosmology and ritual practice provide ample
evidence for the opposite assumption, to wit that all entities, not only
animals but plants and even some inanimate objects are thought to possess
spirits in their own right, as an integral aspect of their construction as
synthetic compounds of species-form and material content. It follows that
they may have and the capacity, if not necessarily the propensity, to enter
into social relations with one another or with humans. In this respect they are
consistent with the animist thesis of Descola, but not the perspectivism of
Viveiros de Castro.
Structuralism, perspectivism, production and the relation of nature and
culture
These critical reservations about perspectivism’s self-presentation as a
revolutionary transformation of orthodox structuralist and Modernist
conceptions of the nature-culture contrast and its role as the basic frame of
Amazonian cosmologies serve to bring into sharper focus the continuities of
perspectivism and structuralism in other essential respects. Perspectivism
actually retains the orthodox structuralist conceptions of nature and culture
as internally homogeneous, mutually exclusive classificatory categories
defined through the contrastive presence or absence of distinctive features.
Thus cultureis defined by the possession of language, cooking fire, manioc
beer, etc., and nature, as the opposing category of the binary opposition, is
defined by the absence of these features. Closer attention to the ethnographic
detail of the myths on which both structuralist and perspectivist notions pf
these categories are based, however, reveals that this way of thinking
misunderstands indigenous conceptions of the nature of culture as well as
the supposed category of nature.
10
The myths represent the transition from the relatively undifferentiated
coexistence of humans and animals to fully developed human culture, not in
terms of the presence or absence of features or the mere possession of
cultural artefacts such as the proto-cultural possessions of the animals (the
cooking fire, bow and arrows, manioc beer etc.). The essence of culture is
rather described as the ability to produce these things, and most importantly,
what this ability further implies, the ability to produce the process of
producing them, as a generalized and infinitely replicable form of activity.
What is involved here is not merely classification, or even a simple
cognitive or perceptual process of objectification, but a reflexive process of
meta-objectification, in an abstracted and generalized form, of the process of
objectification itself. This clearly requires a different level of cognitive
operations from that involved in the possession and use of individual objects
even those that may constitute prototypes of cultural artifacts. This is the
difference, for example, between the one-piece cooking fire possessed by the
jaguars in the Ge myths of the origin of cooking fire, and the use of a
specimen piece of that fire to light other cooking fires at the climactic end of
the myth.(Turner 19xx: ) The ancestral animals in the myths possess
objects like cooking fire or beer or bows and arrows, but these are
represented only as singular possessions, as if they were, as far as their
animal owners are concerned, self-existing or self-objectifying things. The
animals are nowhere described as having the cultural ability or power to
produce them. When humans acquire them from the animals, by whatever
means, the animals simply lose them. They cannot make others to replace
them.
Culture comes fully into existence when the ancestral humans not
only come into possession of these objects but become able to objectify and
replicate the processes of objectification (in pragmatic terms, production) by
which they are produced: how to use fire to make fire, how to use
fermenting manioc to make fermented manioc beer, or how to transform the
surface forms of their bodies with painting or ornaments to produce or
regulate in socially standardized ways the internal bodily processes of
transformation that give rise to aspects of social personhood (e.g., growth,
development of the senses and the forms of knowledge they mediate,
puberty and other bodily transformations that accompany rites of passage,
the ability to kill enemies and internalize their subjective powers, recovery
from disease, etc.).
11
The products of such a process, whether material artifacts or
conceptual objects of knowledge, cannot be understood as simple, internally
homogeneous classes in a Saussurrean order of signification or an
ethnoscientific taxonomy, but as complex schemas composed of
heterogeneous elements and levels of features, for example “natural” entities
such as fire or game animals, the use of the fire to cook the flesh of the
animals, and the use of the fire to cook itself, that is, to make fire. The
cooked meat, as a representative cultural product, can be opposed in good
structuralist fashion to raw meat as an instance of the binary contrast of
culture to nature, but what has made it a cultural artefact is the
transformative operations condensed within it, not merely the cooking but
the lighting of the cooking fire. Culture is thus not opposed to nature as a
mutually exclusive binary contrast of semantic features, but rather consists
of a complex, reflexive relation to it, that both contains and overlies it as an
incremental level in a hierarchy of operations (schemas) of increasing
generative (productive) power. Cultural things, in other words, are
compounds of natural content (the meat, the physical body of the social
person) and the transformative activities through which they are turned into
cultural objects, activities which compounds of the first-order activities
involved in simple objectification, production and use, and the second-order
or meta-operations through the first-order activities are themselves
objectified and produced. Culture, understood in these terms, does not
dispense with natural forms or qualities, but rather retains and reproduces
them through the employment of more abstract and generalized meta-forms
of the processes and powers that produce them.
This relatively sophisticated conception of the relation of nature and
culture is clearly formulated in the Amazonian myths, but has been rendered
invisible by structuralist analysis, with its conceptual filter of Saussurrean
semiotics that blocks recognition of the specifically cultural properties of
cultural objects and categories. These specifically cultural aspects comprise
the forms of the activities by which the objects and categories in question are
produced. Production, considered as a self-objectifying and selftransformative activity, is thus of the essence of culture and its
differentiation from nature. This is a fundamental point of disagreement
between the Amazonian myths, as interpreted here, and perspectivism, given
Viveiros de Castro’s assertion that production is not a transformational
process (!), leaving only exchange as truly transformational, and as such
alone involved in the transformation of perspectives. On this critical point
Viveiros de Castro shows himself an orthodox structuralist, following Levi12
Strauss’s lead in the Elementary Structures of Kinship and other early
writings on kinship in which he attempted to use exchange theory as the
whole basis of his analysis of kinship, begging the question of what process
gave rise to the groups of men who supposedly gave rise to human culture
by exchanging women, not to mention the men and women themselves. It is
certainly true that marriage and affinal exchange involve transformations of
the social perspectives and identities of the actors involved, although I
would argue that these transformations are precisely moments in the
production of social persons. So, however, are the processes of birth,
growth, puberty, accession to full adulthood, aging and death, all of which
involve transformations of identity and perspective and none of which
involve, at least in any primary sense, exchange. The same can be said for
the transformations of identity in communal rituals in which the celebrants
assume the identities and perspectives of animals and birds, or when
shamans do analogous things. All of these transformations, including death,
involve for indigenous Amazonian peoples the production of social (or in the
ritual and shamanic cases, natural) identities. In some of these cases
exchange may play a part as a moment in the more inclusive productive
process, but in many cases it plays no part at all.
In sum: The transformations of productive activity are, according to
the myths of indigenous Amazonian peoples and to the analysis presented
here, the principle mediator of the relation of nature to culture, and comprise
the higher levels of the pragmatic and conceptual structures of culture itself.
Perspectivism’s failure to theorize the role of productive transformations in
cultural structures is a major lacuna in its conception of perspectives,
because it leads to its failure to recognize the reflexive operations of
objectification and meta-objectification which the myths represent as the
distinctive properties of culture for what they are: the most powerful and
important perspectives of all.
Perspectivism’s account of subjectivity
This said, it is important to recognize that perspectivism’s focus on
the interdependence of Amazonian cosmologies and concepts of the self
(for perspectivism this essentially means the epistemological subject rather
than the agent of praxis) constitutes an important departure from
Structuralism’s one-sidedly objectivist theoretical perspective, which
underlies its dismissal of the role of subjective perspectives in the formation
13
of cultural and semiotic representations, including cosmologies.
Unfortunately, perspectivism does not escape structuralism’s propensity for
one sided reductionist formulations, promoted by its favored structural
concept, the privative binary contrast. Within this analytical frame, things
tend to be classified as either one thing or the other, each being defined as
the classificatory opposite of the other, to the exclusion of overlapping or
mediating elements. Applied to concepts of complementary relationships
between aspects of consciousness like subjectivity and objectivity, this can
lead to turning epistemology into a form of extreme sport, oscillating
between dizzying conceptual reversals from one theoretical pole to the other.
Perspectivism’s leap from the one-sided objectivism of Levi-Strauss’s
structuralism, in which objective classification is regarded as determining
subjective consciousness as its epiphenomenon, to the opposite extreme of
an equally one-sided subjectivism, in which perspectives, as constructions
based on subjective identity, appear to determine objective reality (that is,
facts about the world as recognized by subjects) but not vice versa.
The one-sided subjectivism of perspectivism would seem to qualify it
as a form of relativism: if different subjects see the world differently, it
must be because they have different subjective points of view, or different
ways of seeing the world. This would make it an extreme but relatively
familiar form of idealism, of the kind advocated by Bishop Berkeley.
Viveiros de Castro, however, rejects this view of perspectivism as
relativism, on the grounds that although Amazonians (and indeed, at several
points in his argument, all Amerindians), think that animals from their
identical perspectives as humans, see the world in the same way, they arrive
at different ideas of about it because they see different worlds (this is what
he calls “multinaturalism”). This is because although each animal looks at
the world from an identical (human) perspective, it does not see animals of
different species, including humans, as humans. Rather, the world that a
subject of a given species, human or animal, sees, he argues, is determined
not by its body as a physical form (since he dismisses bodily form as a mere
“envelope” irrelevant to the subjective identification of the various species
of animals as humans), but by the distinctive habitus of each species. This
he defines as the set of dispositions, affects and modes of activity constituted
by the conjunction of the “substantial materiality” (that is, the physical form,
powers, and needs) of its body and the “formal subjectivity” of its soul.
(which although Viveiros de Castro does not explicitly gloss it, we may take
to mean its “spirit”, which in every species is according to perspectivist
theory “formally” identified as human).
14
Habitus in this sense is what determines the objective aspects of
reality, or in other words the “different world”, it “sees”. The habitus of a
species, as a distinctive mode of affective orientation and behavioral
disposition toward the world, thus constitutes a pragmatic form of
perspective on it. As a specific mode of material activity, it must take into
account the physical shape, size and capacities of the species’ physical
bodily form. It thus implicitly constitutes the framework of an integral
subjective perspective and objective identity of each species, which then
would appear to stand in contradiction of the putative submergence of
distinct species identities in the common “formal subjectivity” of humanity.
Habitus thus conceived articulates these species properties with the
pragmatic activities of the members of the species in question in the
contemporary social and material world, rather than the mythical past when
both animals and humans were different in critical respects than what they
have since become. So the question is, given habitus, why does any species
need the supposed “formal subjectivity” grounded in myth (even if the
perspectivist interpretations of the myths in question were valid, which they
are not).
If true, however, this would seem to contradict claims that Viveiros
makes elsewhere that the “perspective” of different animal species based on
their shared human identity imposes a uniform (human, cultural)
interpretation on an objectively diverse reality (this is how he must account
for how the jaguar can “see” itself as drinking manioc beer when actually
drinking blood). This contradiction notwithstanding, he develops an
argument to support the claim that different species see different worlds—
worlds whose objective differences somehow exactly conform to the
differences among the species, which are supposedly the collective classes
of “human” subjects who see the world in different ways.
These contradictions at least have the merit of focusing attention on
the centrality of the relation of external bodily form to inner subjective
identity or content as a common concern of Amazonian cosmologies and
concepts of subjectivity alike. In dealing with the apparent contradiction
between foundational perspectivist proposition that all species of animals,
despite their distinctive bodily forms, subjectively identify themselves as
humans, EVC states that bodily forms are merely “envelopes” that bear no
15
relationship to the essential identity (i.e., humanity) of the species.
Attempting to explain how different species come to see different worlds
(including, as parts of these worlds, other species of animals) despite their
uniform subjective identities and perspectives which logically lead them to
see their distinctive species activities in uniformly human terms (as the
jaguar drinking blood supposedly sees itself as a human drinking manioc
beer), however, EVC claims that distinctive habituses (not bodily forms
themselves but the distinctive “affects”, activities, and intentions comprising
quotidian existence) of the different species that cause them to interact
differently with the world, thereby lead them to see a different world than
that seen by species of different habituses (their habituses and physical
bodies must also lead them to see themselves as animals every time they
scratch their fleas).
This, however, raises two problems for the perspectivist propositions
that physical bodily forms are mere superficial envelopes dissociated from
the inner content of identity, consistent with the perspectivist thesis that all
species have a common subjective identity independent of their physical
species forms. Firstly, “habitus” cannot be separated from the form and
“substantial materiality” of the body, which constitutes its functional
precondition and interface with the world. Here again EVC’s argument
about the way each species’ subjective identification of itself as human
makes it see the world with which it interacts in human terms (the jaguar
seeing the blood as manioc beer) contradicts his claim that animals see their
habituses, and a fortiori the life-worlds in which they must make their
existence, as different because of their specifically different forms.
As a general ethnographic point, the universal practice of Amazonian
cultures in altering the external form of the body through changes in
adornment, painting, coiffure, dress and scarification, to mark and help to
bring about transformations in the social identity and subjective perspective
of persons, contradicts the assertion that the Amerindian peoples of
Amazonia regard bodily form, whether human or animal, merely as an
“envelope” unrelated to the material and spiritual content of bodiliness
and/or personhood.
We began our discussion of perspectivism by reviewing its
interpretation of the myth of the original identity of humans and animals,
and finding it erroneous in critical respects. We have now examined some of
the theoretical propositions derived from its misinterpretation of this myth
and found them to be contradictory on several points. Among the questions
16
we have raised are, how can the “formal subjectivity” or spiritual
identification of all species as humans yield a common “perspective” or
“way of seeing the world and themselves”, despite the non-human animal
bodies which constitute the basis of each species’ distinctive habitus and in
this role not only producing different worlds but also subjective identities as
animals, since the differences between each species’ habitus and those of all
other species amount to distinctive species-identities? How can the
production of a different world as a result of distinctive “affects” and ways
of acting not involve the production of a distinctive pragmatic orientation to,
and thus a distinctive conceptual perspective on that world, and therefore a
distinctive pragmatic identity for the species itself that would stand in
contradiction to its supposed human identity? In sum, Viveiros’ attempt to
conceive habitus and the body as disconnected from conceptual (“spiritual”)
identity on the basis of a distnction between “affect” (habitus) and cognition
(self-identity) seems unworkable.
—but =ly one-sided objectivism, and subject ==only as
identity/epistemological perspec, not as agent, actor; embodiment, but only
as vantage point for perspective, not as activity, development)
1. cosmology conceived as classification, classes as
mutually exclusive, fixed species-identities, their
perspectives determined by the contrasts of their
semantic features in the classificatory structure.
Transformations of perspectives, classificatory
identities and relations between species happen only
in myth--otherwise they occur only as aspects of
certain prescribed relations of exchange between
identity-classes such as affinal exchange or
cannibalism/predation beween killer and victim
b. Contrasting view of cosmology: basic constituents = activities of
producing and reproducing the world (reality): space-time, agencycausality, objects (kinds/forms) and subjects (agents). These
productive processes are continuously transformative. Their forms
are forms of transformative activity that consists in becoming the
specific kind of object or being immanent in their material content.
The constituents of the cosmos are thus schemas, forms of activity
17
which produce the species-forms immanent in the material content
of things. All levels and units of the cosmos replicate the basic
character of the highest-level cosmic forms of space-time and
transformative activity. This activity, and the internal relation
between form and content that generates it, determines the
epistemological perspective of the being in question as well as its
substantial, ontological nature.
c. STRUCTURE: As a transformational process, this has a dynamic
structure which passes through phases of progressive development
of formation (consisting of correlated forms of objectification and
subjectification (or the construction of epistemological and
intentional perspective), which in due course leads to its own
reversal in the dissolution of the bond between form and content,
and the ultimate deobjectification/-desubjectification of death,
bringing the separate disintegration of both form and content.
PRODUCTION as fundamental transformative process, degrees of
integration of spirit/body = OBJECTIFICATION, PRODUCTION
of self acc to cosmic schema. This process = STRUCTURED
(reversible transformations of objectification and deobjectification)
d. PERSPECTIVES: Each of these successive developmental phases,
including the last, bring transformations of perspective:
perspectives are thus not fixed semantic contrasts in a langue-like
classificatory structure but continually changing aspects of an
integral process of material, social, cognitive and affective
activity.
“Perspectives” are thus not subsumed by, identified with, the
classificatory order of identities, but are products of the activity of
producing and transforming classificatory identities, ie the state
and specific degree of integration of the union of spirit +
matter/body. Perspective changes with changes in this degree of
integration, eg mepr˜ire = animal like, then me abatày =human
like, then dead separated spirits again =animal-like
e. A structuralist challenge to structuralism: challenges the
objectivist, reductionist perspective of structuralism which reduces
culture to nature and subjectivity to automatic associations in the
18
process of sensuous perception, proposing to replace it with a
subjectivist reduction of nature to culture. So perspectivism gives
us, not an escape from structuralism, but an internal transformation
of structuralism that preserves its basic structure while substituting
some of its opposing categories for each other—call it
estruturalismo tardio.
1. puts subjective identification and
epistemological perspective, rather than
cognitive associations of sensory properties of
objects mediated by semiotic representation
without conscious intervention of subject, as
the essential content of this system if ideas.
But still a one sided reduction of one member
of the axiomatic binary opposition (nature-culture) to
the other: EVC’s interp reduces everything (“nature”
and humans) to culture, contra structuralism’s
reduction of culture to nature.
III. Attempt at an internal, theoretical transformation of structuralism
converges with fundamental ethnographic errors and misinterpretations of
substantive themes of Amazonian cosmologies, (1) nature/culture and (2)
animal = human (common spirit); (3)form/content// (4) body/spirit
A. wrong interp of myth wh = starting point misinterprets initial
relation of humans and animals and again misinterprets their
differentiation and transformation thru devel of culture
B. A derivative, also erroneous, claim is that all facts are socially
produced, there are no natural (ie non-socially produced) facts
C. Misunderstanding of nature-culture contrast. This distorted
interpretation is required by the structuralist conception of the natureculture relation as a privative binary opposition of internally
homogeneous categories, rather than the indigenous conception of
culture as a composite of natural features partially transformed by the
human appropriation of the power to replicate the process of
objectifying/producing them.
Not a privative classificatory opposition at same level as semantic
contrast between significata of signs—rather a quantitative increment
of power of human activity to control, reproduce the transformative
19
process of producing them—ie, objectifying and replicating the
process of objectification itself:. This involves, on human side,
(1) abstraction/separation of key qualities from specific
thing/prototype; (2) active employment of these abstracted qualities
to construc general type/object distinct from prototype and tokens,
resulting in replicability of tokens/generalization of type (3) while
animals remain able only to relate to objects as single, possessions
which they have no way of reproducing once humans steal them.
But EVC’s interp of the myth is both ethnographically and logically
flawed:
1. myth of original undifferentiation, based on spirit as essentially
human trait: (anthropocentric error that spirit =human, logically
does not follow that mutual identifica of spirit should mean
only one side identifies w the other [why not vice versa?])
2. Assumes humans then =humans now, with culture; Fails to
understand difference between developed human culture and
pre-cultural (mythical), transitional human and animal traits
and possessions, and how this is different from both postmythical differentiated animal and human cultural identities and
perspectives. This leaves his account of contemporary animalhuman relationship logically and ethnographically unmotivated
in two (+) respects:
A. Assumes animals inwardly subjectively preserve their
mythical human identity, seen by EVC as cultural, and
see themselves as having human culture, despite their
unexplained adoption of non-human “habitus.” And
fact that humans do not see them as such. (again failure
to grasp xter of culture, not just gross functional
activities like eating, drinking, reproducing, possession
of items or traits)
B. Perspective: Animals now think of actual humans as
animals (ie predators). Fails to explain why animals
should persist in subjective perspective on themselves
as humans in spite of contradictory recognition that
humans objectively =animals (predators) toward them
B. Misunderstand form—content rela, claim form is just
“envelope” unrelated to content, and habitus (pattern of affect and
20
activity, unrelated to form, is the direct bodily expression of inner
subjective identity. Form conceived by EVC as mere visual
pattern, rather than an activity of directing, channeling powers and
action.
1. EVC needs to assert this because forms of animals do not
conform to their essence/contents of human/culture
2. EVC then forced to assert habitus is separate from form,
because he needs some counterpart of form as basis of
recognition by humans that animals are not humans
3. Logically contradictory claim that for animals form (as
animals) is dissociated from content, perspective, selfidentification (form is mere “envelope” unrelated to content) or
perspective, but then claims “habitus” (modes of acting and
affective attitude) =correlated with perspective, identifica BUT
habitus=indissociable from form. ETHNOG EVIDENCE
FORM ><CONTENT=”HABITUS”
4. SCHEMA = form+ content, spirit + matter where matter not
inert but matrix, latent vessel of immanent form.
5.SPIRIT =INTENTIONAL ORIENTATION, GOALSEEKING ACTIVITY, DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS,
TRANSFORMING CONTENT ACC TO GOAL
ORIENTATION IMMANENT IN CONTENT, SPIRIT IS THE
EXPRESSION OF THIS IMMANENT PATTERN AS
ACTIVE PRODUCTIVE FORCE
VI. ANIMISM: all forms, schemas= compound of both.
matter=objective aspect, material aspect of activity, subject
=spirit, orientation and motivation of activity. All schemas, forms,
including Human self= spirit+body, form = manifestation of their union.
Animals, plants the same. THIS IS THE COMMON BASIS OF BEING,
NOT “HUMANITY”. “SPIRIT” IS NOT “HUMAN” BUT INHERENT
IN ALL FORM. (Contra anthropocentrism of perspectivism). Basis of
ANIMISM
21
II.
Main ideas
1. Animals =humans
A. Objects=conceived by EVC as inert objects of
knowledge, related only by semantic contrasts of their
features to other objects; subjects related to them only
by identification or exclusion.
G. Contrasting view: objects as constructs of activity both
cognitive/epistemological activity of subject and theirown material
activities of self-formation. Objectification as term for these
active processes of construction: perspec does not create object
(EVC’s misstatement of Kant). Rather, Objectifica/subjectifica as
co-products of process of produc of form as immanent manifesta
of content. This process of determina of form involves fixation of
qualities in definite pattern (prototype), abstraction and
generalization of features of this pattern to produce type-form;
This process also produces perspective (epist categs of spacetime,
causality-agency, identity, classification) and habitus as
expression of formal qualities of prototype/type in material
activity
B.
1. Strong points
a. Attempt to analyze the general cultural ideas of Amaz societies
as embodied in their ritual practices, cosmologies, myths,
shamanism, etc., as forming a single coherent system common
to all the societies of the region
b. Starts from ethnographic findings that many Amaz peoples
consider that humans, animals and many other natural entities
are able to communicate and understand one another, and either
now share or in the past shared social relations, subjective
identity and epistemological “perspectives” on the world
c. Recognition that categories of subjective perspective on the
world, “self”, must be analyzed as integral aspects of
“cosmology”.[but no independent theoretical or ethnographic
treatment of “cosmology” other than as an unordered collection
of cultural ideas]
d. Animism, shamanism
22
2. Rela to Structuralism: Vices shared and rejected
a. Challenge structuralist version of nature-culture contrast,
relation of humans and animals; reverse direc of reductionist
arrow, from Structuralism’s “culture=>nature”, invert it to
“nature=>culture”.
b. Therefore substitute subjectivity, perspective as basis of
cultural systems, prior to objective , anti-subjectivism of
Structuralism. [but =ly one-sided in opp direc, all subjectivity
and no objectivity/ontology]
c. “slash & burn” ethnography: smash ethnographic object to
minimal bits, then seek potential associations among fragments,
ignoring the more complex forms in which indig cultural
meanings and concepts are coded (eg narrative, bodily
presentation, ritual). Thus lose all the dimensions and levels of
meaning coded in the higher levels of the cultural constructs in
question (such as “cosmology”…).
d. Idealist notion of Amaz culture as ideal system of classification
[Saussurrean notion of classificatory categories as significations
abstracted from their signifiers, referents, syntagmatic relations
and pragmatic contexts of use in social interaction]; abstraction
from material activity including processes of production of, and
interaction with, the categories and their referents themselves,
All these aspects =ethnographically given together as schemas
(ideal and material forms of activity, including construction of,
interaction with objects)
e. Danger=modern Wn conceptual forms may be imposed on
fragments of the native forms. Perspectivism exemplifies this
even as it clearly recognizes the danger. eg “nature/culture”,
assumes Wn forms of privative contrast, contrasts of unitary
significations as only structurally and conceptually relevant
relations.
f. Idealist notion of subject: active only in epistemological sense
of conceptual construction of objects, not as actor or agent in
material sense
23
g. “Perspective” as subjectivity replaces objectivity of perceptual
associations in Structuralism, but preserves one-sidedness of
formulation: in perspec, subjective perspec creates object and
subject (Idealism), in other, objective form creates subject and
object;
h. Anti-production (exchange as the only transformative activity)
i. anti-structure: Related to refusal to consider any transforma rela
except exchange. Can’t define cosmology as consisting
entirely of exchange transforma’s. It is about production of
world. So rejec of production > rejec of structure but espec
cosmological structure
j. Identify “perspective” at the level of nature-culture, humananimal relations as external rela between fixed points--total
species categories, which are conceived as directly constituting
the cognitive perspectives of individual subjects. Perspectives
are thus conceived as homogeneous for all members of
category. Subjects, like the categories to which they belong,
thus become defined as fixed “subject positions” as features of
the synchronic order of which they form part. This reduces
subjectivity to “synchronic” contrasts between significata in the
field of signification constituting the “cosmology”—an
objective “structural” pattern of classification abstracted from
activity, process and change, thus allowing no active role for
“subjectivity”, which becomes limited to a passive recognition
of fixed positions in the synchronic classificatory order. There
are no perspectival contrasts among plural subjects within a
category (group or species), no recognition that perspectives
change as subject assumes or occupies different positions in
relation to others.
k. At the lower level of relations between humans as members of
the same species category, there is some allowance for
consequential differences in subject position or role that result
in ego and alter taking differing perspectives towards one
another. An example is the relation of enemies, as
consummated in the relation of killer and victim.
24
l. Corollary notion 1: “field of signification” model suggests
categories/significata are of same level, related in binary terms
as either identical or mutually exclusive. No inclusion, full or
partial overlap, variations of relative degrees of difference,
elaboration or development
m. Corollary notion 2: perspectives, and therefore subjects, don’t
change, transform or develop, nor vary within categories or
groups
n. Anti-structure: no totality, higher-level structures, eg of
“cosmological” systems
o. Features of indig cosmological structures excluded: syntactic
forms of combination (such as hierarchical inclusion,
differences of degree in processes of progressive
transformation, relations of functional interdependence and the
correlation of material and representational forms of the same
relations (replication and generalization, separation and
abstraction)
3. Contrast with “Modernity”:
a. serves to project “modern” epistemological and
theoretical notions of category, perspective onto Amaz
b. Distortions of “Modern” theory—e.g., “production”
c. Spurious homogeneity of “Modern” category projected as
spurious homogeneity of “Amazonian” category
d. Spurious heterogeneity of “natures” as the Others of the
common subjective identities of all beings as human (once the
spuriousness of this universal human identity is rejected, the
multiplicity of natures disappears)
e. Spurious claim that all entities = seen as social products, there
are no natural, self-existing entities or processes. This also
depends on the spurious principle of humanity as universal
basis of all (living) things.
“Perspectives” are classifications by a subject of itself or others as identical
or different in relation to a pair of categories comprising a privative binary
contrast, with one of which subject identifies itself. This pair of categories is
in turn conceived as a constituent of a classification composed of parallel
25
binary contrasts between mutually exclusive but internally homogeneous
categories conceived in structuralist terms as elements of a Saussurrean
order or field of signification. This classificatory order of categories of basic
social and natural identity constitutes the perspectivist concept of a
“cosmology”, which serves as the context for the definition of
“perspectives.”
BASIC PROBLEM: perspectivist notion of “perspective” is really just
classification, considered as the basis of identification of a subject in relation
to an Other, but it does not analyze the notion of the subject or the object as
agents or products of specific constructive principles, in the manner of Kant.
Perspectivist perspectives, in other words, are perspectives in the sense of
Kantian categories of judgment (classification as a mode of cognitive
organization, causality) or form of sensibility (space, time). Kayapo
epistemological categories/forms of sensibility are: space-time in its double
aspect as interdependent vertical/linear and concentric/cyclical modes; form
as the product of a schema immanent in content resulting in a mutual but
ultimately unstable fusion of form and content, as both formal and causal
principle; the intentionality or orientation of this schematic process as the
common property of all things and basis of communication between them;
the variation in the specific end-orientations of these immanent schemas as
the basic classificatory principle; and the property of reversibility as a limit
to the process of objectification or the production of form. These are
epistemological principles common to all entities and forms, not
classificatory features of substantive identities.
Perspectivism is essentially an attempt to explore the implications of
transformations in the subjective identification, and hence point of view, of
one class of actors (animals) from one of the opposing categories of the
master structuralist binary contrast of nature -- culture to the other. It takes
as its point of departure the proposition that animals identify themselves as
humans (and therefore as cultural beings) in relation to humans and other
animals. It also analyses certain other transformations of viewpoint by
human actors in cases of warfare and cannibalism (from self to enemy and
enemy to self) and shamanism (from human to animal or plant). There are
some ethnographic grounds for these propositions, and Viveiros de Castro
and other perspectivist theorists deserve recognition for attempting to make
theoretical sense of them. Starting from these propositions about the
fundamental role of transformations of subjective perspective in Amazonian
cosmologies, Perspectivists have attempted to construct a synthetic model of
26
the cultural ideas of Amazonian societies as a coherent system common to
all the cultures of the region. One may disagree but nevertheless salute the
heuristic value of the attempt, and recognize the value of the search for
common general ideas underlying the great richness and variety of the
ethnographic record of Amazonian cultures.
Perspectivism—points
HUMAN/ANIMAL, FORM/CONTENT, CULTURE/ANIMAL
464 (8) “perspectival multinaturalism” (
465 (8) original identity of animals=humans: actual differentiation of nature/culture
contrasts w original undifferentiation of animals/humans, interpreted as humanity being
the universal common denominator (animals and humans were like contemporary
humans)
FORM/CONTENT “our” idea that humans have animal component that must be
socialized/enculturated as opposite of Indian idea that animals have human component
“albeit in unapparent way”—ie despite apparent differences in form. BUT FAILURE TO
EXPLAIN THIS “UNAPPARENT” FEATURE. DISAPPEAR
465 (8)Manifest bodily form of each species is an “envelope” (a “clothing”) that
conceals an internal humanoid form…this internal form is the soul or spirit of the
animal: an intentionality or subjectivity formally identical to human consciousness”.
465 (8,9,10)“spiritual component” of animals as their “human” aspect (“spirituality
=humanity)
“social relations” between humans and rest of nature result from latter’s underlying
human nature, (“social”=humanity)
465 (8) “Perspectival multilateralism” == Each species sees itself as “human”
(“cultural”) and all others as “natural” (“animals”). So each species does not see
itself as “natural”, “nature” is therefore different for each species: this is
“perspectival multinaturalism”
MISUNDERSTANDS MEANING OF “CULTURE”, DIFF FROM ANIMAL
“HABITUS” (15)
27
NO “CREATION EX NIHILO”/ DIFFERENTIATION/GRADUAL, QUANTITATIVE
PROCESSES (5,6, 15,16)
4. Production vs. exchange (10,15,16) Marx.
5. Idealist subject creates perspective vs perspective creates subject. Kant, Saussure
(? Perspective presupposes subject so how can it create subject?)
SHAMANISM (11)
ANIMISM (12) Perspectivism=multinaturalism/cultural universalism (14 top)
SUBJECTIFICATION OF OBJECTS, NO “BRUTE FACTS”, ONLY
“INSTITUTIONAL FACTS” (13)
BODY (14-15)
6. “body” as “habitus” (14): But “habitus” is indistinguishable from physical form
which is in turn inseparable from spirit form—all are parallel and interdependent
in normal living being
7. bodies (presumably in sense of habitus, not mere external “envelope”)
differentiate species whereas spirit/souls integrate them-ie soul as ‘reflexive form,
not an immaterial inner substance’ = common ground [hard to understand soul as
“reflexive form” here—V.C. thinks soul is the universal “human” spirit/identity of
all animals and as such their common ground of “integration”—but how can this
be a common ground if the soul is the reflexive form of the body, which is the
differentiating factor? And how can this common soul have a form if bodily form
is unconnected with inner essence or perspective?
8. “intrinsic transformability of bodies”, “interspecific metamorphosis” as a “fact of
nature” (15) Error—this is related to his clam that shamans transform their bodies
into other bodies, rather than separate their spirits from their bodies and as spirits
separated from their own bodies enter or assume other bodies
CANNIBAL COGITO (17) [“I eat people, therefore I am”?]
9. VC says Shaman=warrior as “conductors or commutators of perspectives”
because -> “embodiment of the enemy’s point of view/perspective”. I
DISAGREE: neither shaman nor killer “exchanges” subjective perspectives with
victim==rather both cause separa either of their own spirit/body in order to
assume the body and habitus of the Other, as a source of temporary empowerment
(shaman), or (warrior) cause separa of spirit-form from body of victim, thus
creating “path” for spirit-form of victim to enter and disrupt warrior’s own spiritbody rela so need to get rid of physical substance of victim to prevent such a path,
or amansar,integrar internalized spirit of victim. These = productive
transformations or their negation, but not exchanges
.
28
29
CRITICISMS OF “PERSPECTIVIST” THEORY
(0) wrong about human identification of animals
(1) fails to account for differentiation of animal from human form;
(2) misconceives the nature and significance of form and its relation to content
(a) displaces an intuition of this significance—i.e., the identity of form with
intentionality and subjectivity-- on to a formless “spirituality”/”human” nature conceived
as an essential content concealed in an “envelope” of apparent form).
(b) although contradictorily, also claims that form of body, as “habitus” composed
of “affects” defined as specific activities—determine perspective (i.e., recognition of
difference) of other forms
c)In sum, when conceiving essence, content of all living beings as subjects as
homogeneous, the different forms of those beings and their concrete activities are treated
as mere “envelopes), the specific differences among which have no significance—but
then in explaining how different species recognize each other as different, says they do so
on basis of apparent differences in their habitus/affects/activities—but these =inseparable
from bodily forms (envelopes)
(3) Therefore also misses critical point that form is a product of, and has the form of, a
process of assuming, creating, or producing form, consisting of the activity of a living
entity in interaction with other entities that thereby objectifies itself in a specific way.
This activity, not the acting entity defined in conceptual abstraction from its activity, is
the content of the form. As activity, this process is intentionally directed toward the
formal objectification of its intention to satisfy its needs, the chief of which is to realize
its species being/ reproduce its being, as its goal: this intentionality is the subjective
aspect of the process. Objectification and subjectification (the production of subjectivity)
are thus related aspects of form-giving activity.
(4) As this activity is relational, consisting of interaction with other entities/agents, both
the subjective and objective aspects of the identity and habitus or dispositions and
schemas of action are intrinsically plural/multiple, not individual in the sense of an
individual abstracted from or considered prior to the interaction in which h/she
participates and through which h/she is formed.
(5) The processes of production of form (objectification/subjectification) are implicitly,
or in some cases explicitly, correlated with processes of transformation and dissolution of
form, as in death, disease, shamanic transformations into animal forms, etc.: i.e.,
processes of de-objectification and the dissolution or transformation of subjectivity
(6) Bodily nexus/locus of these processes (but “social body” is not the biological
individual)
30
(7)This process of form-giving, objectifying, intentionality is the “spiritual” aspect of the
resulting entity.
This way of understanding the relation of form, subjectivity and “spirituality” with formgiving activity has as its essential corollary the conception of this identity as contingent
and liable to dissociation (as in disease through “soul loss), dissolution (as in the ultimate
de-objectification of death), transformation or transcendence (as in rituals in which the
participants assume animal attributes, or when shamans assume other animal or plant
forms, in both cases evoking the ability to either separate own spirit from own body
and/or assume Other’s spirit by entering or internalizing Other’s body of body parts or
susbstance, thus transcending human form as a metaphorical and metonymic basis for
assuming a meta-level of the fundamental power of objectification, i.e., form-making).
(1) Misconception of initial state of undifferentiation of humans/animals:
(a) humans in this state were not identical with contemporary humans—they too were
less differentiated from animals, just as animals were less differentiated from
them. The primal humans lacked key items and aspects of culture (eg fire,
cooking, some items and styles of bodily adornment), social institutions (eg men’s
house, aspects of kinship and marriage relations, exclusively intra-species sexual
relations). Ability of different species to speak with one another (animals could
understand and speak human language) =possible because humans were less
differentiated from animals as well as vice versa.
(b) So this undifferentiation does not imply that animals were identical with fully
differentiated (contemporary) humans, but on the contrary, that humans were
relatively identical with animals, and thus different from contemporary (fully
“cultural) humans
(c) The basis of this common identity = all were/still are beings that actively produce
their forms through a process of realizing their active power for selfobjectification in a determinate form. This is a power common to all beings—
animals, plants, spirits and even, in the myths of some Amazonian peoples, some
inanimate objects such as celestial bodies, This power to assume a definite form,
and under certain circumstances to transform that form, is the essential meaning
of what EVC calls “spirituality”. It is therefore not a uniquely human property, as
he suggests, but a common property of all living things, and even, as noted, a few
inanimate ones as well.
CONSTRUCTIVE ALTERNATIVE
Extreme (Late, Tardio) Structuralism: perspectives, objects, forms, schemata, structures,
units, humans, animals, culture, nature
“cosmology” as frame of “theory of self”:
cosmology as totality, replicated in units
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cosmology as structure (1) 2 dimensions =schemas, (2) the 2 together as
schematic structure (coordinated transformations, reversibility); (3) form of
activity/development
social structure: recursive hierarchy, men’s house level as meta-productive, transforming
lower/natural level into culture
person/body as unit of schematic structure , transform natural core into social exterior;
bodily form through decoration, painting: so FORMcontent (objectification,
subjectification, PERSPECTIVE)
animal/human: form/schema as universal ground of identity, ANIMISM
cf: Perspectivist SHAMANISM, uniformity of Amaz cultures
GENERAL POINTS
Perspectivism is itself a perspective which, despite its idiosyncratic features, is
recognizable as a variant of the group of reductionist transformations of the relation of
nature to culture generally known as “structuralism”. As the most recent variant of the
group, it could appropriately be designated “Late Structuralism”.
It shares such common features of the group as the tendency to conceive analysis as a
process of breaking down the relatively complex forms of discourse and social relations
that constitute the immediate content of ethnographic data into minimal semiotic values
or ideal categories that can be analytically treated in Sausurrean fashion as elements of
langue-like fields of signification or classifications consisting of binary contrasts of
identity or opposition between unitary semantic values.
It likewise starts from the apparent opposition (privative distinction) between nature and
culture, animal or plant and human, and proceeds to reduce this distinction to a product of
only one of its elements—nature, in the case of structuralism, and culture, in the case of
perspectivism. The agent or causal principle of this reduction is conceived as the essence
of the element considered to be the monistic common basis of the pair, the psychological
process of perception and association of perceptual qualities in the case of LS and the
mythical identification with the source or agent of cultural forms of activity in the case
of VC.
The conception of the nature-culture relation both start from is that it consists of semiotic
classification of contrastive features, conceived along Saussurrean lines as langue
(structuralism) or parole (perspectivism). Culture and nature consist in both views as
mutually exclusive, qualitatively distinct classificatory domains. Culture is defined as the
domain of semiotically mediated structures, while nature is the domain of objective
appearances and associations based on semiotically unmediated similarity and difference.
For structuralism, the semiotically structures of the cultural domain consist of coded
associative patterns of objective features of the natural domain, independently of human
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subjectivity; culture thus objectively reduces itself to nature. For perspectivism, all
cultural and natural beings subjectively classified themselves as humans by virtue of their
shared use of the semiotic forms of the cultural domain, principally language, but
including the whole gamut of other forms of cultural activity such as the preparation and
consumption of food and drink. This identification is originally said in myths to have
been open but now continues to be covertly shared by animals, so there is no qualitatively
distinct domain of nature defiend by the absence of semiotic (cultural) forms. ‘Nature”
thus subjectively reduces itself to culture.
with humanity is asserted to be the basis of the identification of animals as humans and
thus as cultural beings, even though from the human perspective, and the perspective of
other animals, an animal that considers itself human is seen as an animal (a natural
being). For structuralism, the semiotic classification of natural entities (plants, animals,
birds and fish) is based on an appropriation of their sensuous properties in the (natural)
process of perception, which transmits associative patterns of these features to the brain,
which become the fundamental epistemological categories and classificatory patterns of
the mind.
It also assumes classification itself is universally the product of an identical process (in
its case, one of mythical identification with the source or agent of cultural forms of
activity), which paradoxically thus assumes the character of a reductionist cultural
principle of reducing nature to culture, analogous to LS’s natural neuropsychological
process of identification on the basis of perceptual features that reduces culture to nature).
This methodological procedure thus produces an idealist vision of culture abstracted not
only from social interaction but also from the cultural forms and patterns (e.g., syntactic
combinations such as discourse forms, narrative, patterns of visual representation,
complex spatial forms of cosmology, house- or village layout, or bodily adornment) in
which the abstracted categories or semiotic values are ethnographically given. The
methodology produced by structuralist idealism, understood in these terms, in short,
distorts beyond recognition the cultural and social realities it takes as its analytical
objects, and in its place generates a false perspective that serves to prevent a more
adequate conceptual approach from ever arising.
One of the original features of this structuralist false consciousness was its
attempt, following Saussure and Levi-Strauss, to abstract from subjectivity by locating
the analysis at the level of simple associations of sensuous properties of sense data
picked up by the sensory apparatus prior to processing by the brain. This meant ignoring
the role of epistemological perspective as well as intentionality, and thus meaning, in the
cultural representations of indigenous cultural systems. To his credit, EVC has attempted
to transform the structuralist approach to take account of the central importance of
subjective perspective in the cultural forms of Amazonian, and by implication other
indigenous peoples. “Perspectivism” is the product of this attempt. As in many attempts
at revolutionary transformations of exhausted paradigms, however, perspectivism failed
in its attempt to escape from the limitations of the structuralist system because it retained
the most limiting features of structuralism in its reformulation, so that what it achieved
was yet another transformation of the structuralist paradigm. A parallel that suggests
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itself is Copernicus’ attempt to escape from Ptolemy’s terracentric model of the solar
system by positing a heliocentric model, all the while retaining Ptolemy’s apparatus of
epicycles to preserve the key principle that planetary motion must comprise percectly
circular movement. The analogy, alem de ser esforçado em outros respetos, porem,
collapses for another, more fundamental reason: the concept of perspective that EVC puts
in place of ls’s one-sidely objectivist hypothesis is fundamentally wrong.
the limitation of the content of its analyses to Associations among semantic values of
ideal categories abstracted from the ethnographic contexts of social organization and
cultural structure (e.g., syntactic combinations such as discourse forms, narrative,
patterns of visual representation, complex spatial forms of cosmology, house- or village
layout, or bodily adornment). Analyses thus tend to consist of binary relations of
identification or opposition between categories treated as unitary semiotic values, like
signs in Saussurrean fields of signification. Differences of degree or combinations of
distinct semantic values in the same representations or symbolic construct tend to be
treated as sources to be mined for simpler semantic values or binary contrasts rather than
.as cultural forms to be analyzed in their own right.
Structuralism is no longer good to think with
To begin by using a simplified model of our own culture’s ideas and perspectives about a
set of issues as a template for selecting, interpreting and relating another culture’s
categories in such a way that they can be made to appear as propositions about the same
issues, is to beg the main anthropological question, and moreover to ensure that we will
have little chance of discovering our error.
VC asserts that the body is the source of all perspectives. He further assumes that this
body, like the subject with which it is identified, is a unitary entity, which in forming
perspectives looks outside itself at other bodies or selves, but not inside itself at different
aspects of its own constitution. He also appears to assume that in acting as the basis of
perspectives that the body acts alone, not in any relevant sense as part of more inclusive
units or groupings that stand in collective perspectival relations to other such groupings
or categories. Finally, he seems to think of perspectives as relatively fixed, in effect as
properties of the way the members of one entire species (eg, humans) regard those of
others (eg, animals or jaguars). With the exception of certain special cases (shamans and
warrior-killers) he does not discuss the transformation of perspectives as a normal part of
human social life, nor indeed of the lives of animals or other natural beings. A related
issue is that he does not discuss the development of perspectives as an aspect of the
development of social (or adult animal) identity, nor the relation of conceptual
perspectives to perspectival aspects of social interaction such as the life cycles of social
persons or the developmental cycles of families and domestic groups, processes in which
both the conceptual and pragmatic or material perspectives of a subject towards others
who form part of her social system undergo fundamental transformations.
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. Here, however, I want to emphasize my basic disagreement with
“perspectivism”, which is that it conceives perspectives as singular and
fixed, located only at the level of external relations between species or
systems (such as human society in general and animals in general) rather
than as integral parts of the internal processes of systems, shifting and
transforming with changes in the context of subject positions. The whole
point of Kayapo ceremonial activity as I have described it is precisely the
dramatization of a shift in perspectives, from one of relative identity
between proto-humans and proto-animals to differentiation between their
respective contemporary descendants, fully socialized humans in contrast to
dehumanized animals.
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