Encountering being, identity, and otherness: Reconsidering Guimarães’s ‘‘Amerindian anthropology and cultural psychology’’ and Amerindian perspectivism, with insights from anthropology of religion, African humanities, and collaborative ethnography

Abstract

Images of self and other are best understood not as static categories, but as fluid and dynamic negotiations in cultural encounters and transformations. In numerous cultural expressive contexts, such as animism, totemism, cosmology/philosophy, myth, and symbol, motifs represent what it means to exist, of ‘‘being’’ in this world, in likeness and difference, and encounters with other worlds: for example, human/animal relationships, time and space travel, and shape-shifting. How do anthropologists and local residents find epistemological and ontological common ground for mutual understanding? The challenge is to elicit local intellectual perspectives without imposing the researcher’s own categories. This commentary introduces comparative ethnographic findings in humanistic anthropology, with a special focus on African humanities, to open up perspectives on Amerindian perspectivism, the topic of Guimarães’s (2011) essay.