The Metaphysics of Extra-Moderns: On the Decolonization of Thought. A Conversation

Abstract

In conversation with Peter Skafish Brazilian anthropologist, philosopher, and politi- cal activist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro offers an overview of his thinking, both past and present. After explaining why initially he argued that ontology should be a topic of anthropologists, he discusses his more recent conclusion that indigenous thought should be regarded instead as metaphysical. It is not that La pensée sauvage has an implicit ontology discoverable by the human sciences but, rather, that indigenous people themselves think about metaphysical issues as such. De Castro traces the origins of his position in the ethnographic fieldwork that he undertook in the 1980s with the Araweté of northwestern Brazil and in his and the anthropologist Philippe Descola’s parallel engagements with the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. De Castro points out the definitive post-structuralist period in Lévi-Strauss’ thought after the first volume of Mythologies when the notion of struc- ture lost its pertinence to give place to the concept of transformation. Although he is usually considered, especially in Anglo-American anthropological community, as a thinker of binary oppositions, Lévi-Strauss’ ultimate goal is to demonstrate the eth- nographic phenomena that cannot be placed in the dualist frames such as famous nature and culture distinction. Finally, Viveiros de Castro addresses the political stakes of ascribing metaphysics to non-modern peoples, clarifying what he means by the “permanent decolonization of thought.” Following the suggestion made by French philosopher Patrice Maniglier, he claims that anthropology as a comparative discipline by definition should play the role of model science that had been ascribed to physics from the outset of modernity until today.